WHY NOT SAVE THE WORLD?

Does this experience sound familiar?

Ideas and more ideas abound in your mind. You have so many inspirations, you don’t know where to put them. Couple that with the inspirations you find on the internet, you simply cannot keep track of them all.

And then there’s ….

Paper, paper, paper. They mound up on your desk, get stuffed into files, and overflow into boxes.

and …

Email, email and more email. You have tried having separate accounts. One for listservs, groups and other interests, one for friends and family and one for work. But entropy takes its course as the borders get fuzzy and they start to merge into an undefined and unmanageable blob.

We live in exciting times. We do more and more in less time than every before. Yet with all this stuff, things get lost & tasks can go uncompleted.

So how does one keep track of all this stuff?

Inspired by David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology, here’s how I started:

1. I decluttered over 1000 items in four different email accounts by:
   • Unsubscribing to any mass mailing that I no longer needed.
   • Providing rational storage using the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) methodology
     • Creating 5 status buckets
       • Action (Take action - items that can be completed in less than 2 minutes)
       • Next Action (Important items that will take more than 2 minutes)
       • Waiting On (Items that can be completed once something else arrives)
       • Someday (Ideas that may be useful someday)
       • Finished (To be filed into folders)
   • Using the email search engine or filter to sort through my items and:
     • deleting more than one item at at time
     • or grouping them into completed project file folders
     • or sorting them into their appropriate status buckets

Using this method I reduced all my inboxes to zero! The energy this releases is phenomenal.

Now I can routinely empty my mailbox daily. I sort them into the five status buckets. I then review the action bucket and act immediately on those items and move them to another status, usually waiting or finished. At the end of the day, I review the next action bucket to see what I need to process or schedule.

Wow! What a difference GTD has made in my life. The loose ends are closed up. Minute details are handled quickly. Long-term items formerly lost are now in process. I feel like I’m humming.