GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, "No, not now." Here's the problem: it's impossible to renegotiate agreements with yourself that you can't remember you made!

It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all.

- Father

The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at the same time.

If you're like most people, you've probably got some storage area at home—maybe a garage that you told yourself a while back (maybe even six years ago!) you ought to clean and organize. If so, there's a part of you that likely thinks you should've been cleaning your garage twenty-four hours a day for the past six years! No wonder people are so tired! And have you heard that little voice inside your own mental committee every time you walk by your garage? "Why are we walking by the garage?! Aren't we supposed to be cleaning it!?" Because you can't stand that whining, nagging part of yourself, you never even go in the garage anymore if you can help it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself:

1 | Lower your standards about your garage (you may have done that already). "So I have a crappy garage ... who cares?"

2 | Keep the agreement—clean the garage.

3 | At least put "Clean garage" on a "Someday/Maybe" list. Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, "Not this week." The next time you walk by your garage, you won't hear a thing internally, other than "Ha! Not this week."

I'm quite sincere about this. It seems that there's a part of our psyche that doesn't know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company. In there, they're both just agreements—kept or broken. If you're holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you're not moving on it in the moment.

The Radical Departure from Traditional Time Management

This method is significantly different from traditional time-management training. Most of those models leave you with the impression that if something you tell yourself to do isn't that important, then it's not that important—to track, manage, or deal with. But in my experience that's inaccurate, at least in terms of how a less-than-conscious part of us operates. It is how our conscious mind operates, however, so every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn't happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves.

In my experience, anything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

How Much Collection Is Required?

You'll feel better collecting anything that you haven't collected yet. When you say to yourself, "Oh, that's right, I need to get butter next time I'm at the store," and you write it on your grocery list, you'll feel better. When you remember, "I've got to call my banker about the trust fund," and you write that down someplace where you know you'll see it when you're at a phone, you'll feel better. But there will be a light-year's difference when you know you have it all.

When will you know how much you have left in your head to collect? Only when there's nothing left. If some part of you is even vaguely aware that you don't have it all, you can't really know what percentage you have collected. How will you know when there's nothing left? When nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind.