Things I’ve tried:
- Reading McKeown’s Essentialism. It had some interesting ideas but it was also a very frustrating read.
- Reading The ONE Thing. It also had interesting ideas, but it didn’t solve my problem.
- Understanding that I’m ‘simply noticing the commitments I have’. This would be one of the GTD responses.
Things that could work if I did them differently:
- Values writing, WOOP, or the higher Horizons of Focus.
Things I’ll try:
- Using Tiny Habits with GTD. In fact, this post itself is an attempt to get potential Tiny Habits!
I’m posting this for anyone who could benefit from it.
I now manage my Someday/Maybe list by coalescing similar items. That way, the list is more manageable, but I am not getting rid of stuff.
I got that idea from Jeff Payton’s User Story Maps. He has this idea that stories are like moving asteroids from the game Asteroids. Specifically, big asteroids are easy to keep track of and easy to manage. However, if you destroy an asteroid into smaller pieces, they are more numerous and harder to manage.
So what does that mean for GTD? If you have many small items in your Someday/Maybe list, see if you can combine them into a larger, more manageable item. On the other hand, if you want to take action on a large item, you’ve got to break it down into smaller pieces.