Don't Back Down

With apologies to Nike, of late I've decided that the ever-popular Getting Things Done system just isn't for me. Yes, I know that several illustrious individuals who happen to blog swear by the system. To me, it's a waste of money. I've come up with my own system: Just Doing It.

While I know most people may not have the tools at their disposal, I do. I have Outlook on my computers. I have a phone that provides all the PDA features I might need. The problem is that I don't use them! So with the realization that spending money on another system, when I don't use the tools I currently have, I've decided to just use what I've got.

I think the largest problem is that I ignore things. All those Outlook reminders in the taskbar? Most days I don't even open the window. So the first step is to pay attention to that window of reminders. And the first step towards that is to make the window useful. With that in mind, I've gone through my calendar and tasks this week and cleaned them up, to provide more useful reminders. And at the moment, I have only one - that our tithe is coming up this weekend. It will be gone on Sunday.

After updating the reminders so that they were useful, I went through my inbox and cleared it out. No fancy rules, no pretty buttons, no add-ons whatsoever. I just deleted things I didn't need. Things I did need, but that I won't be using immediately, were moved to a folder for later perusal. Items that need relatively quick attention are now the only thing in my inbox. It went from nearly 100 items to just over 10, and even that will shrink this weekend, as I take care of some of those.

Thus far, my new system is working well. While I have no idea if it will last, at least I know that I won't be feeling like a moron for spending money on an entirely new system and then choosing to completely ignore it as well.