I have had a very productive weekend – Next Action after Next Action has been dispatched, and progress has been made on many fronts. But through all this, have I managed to actually enjoy the time and have some fun? Maybe, but not to my satisfaction. It appears you can sometimes get too much done.
Parkinson’s Law states that the amount of work expands to fill the time available to completion. I would follow this with that statement that GTD will do the same, and if your focus is purely ‘getting things done’ then you are giving Next Actions an infinite timeframe. The result? You spend every waking hours doing things that your to do list tells you to, rather than enjoying the things that we build a productivity system to allow us to do. For example, I enjoy writing this blog and wanted to write a couple of posts this weekend, including one around a vacation calender planner I am going to put on here for download. However, I am writing this last thing at night at the end of the weekend – because I have mowed the lawn, tidied the kitchen cupboards, re-waterproofed our outdoor clothes, cooked vast quantities of baby purees, taken recycling to the tip etc etc. I’m knackered and haven’t done the few things I was looking forward too – fail.
So a very productive weekend is not necessarily a good weekend. And I thought productive = good (I checked Wikipedia, but without a dodgy edit I am indeed wrong). The question then becomes ‘how do I stop this happening again?’.
The key thing I need to remember is that there are only 24 hours in a day (well, 4 seconds short of 24 hours if we are going to pedantic… I’m missing my own point here…). This may seem a rather inadequate conclusion, but sometimes it is the blindingly obvious that you are missing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I concluded that by spending an extra hour being productive then I’ll gain time to do ‘good stuff’ later. In fact, all I have done is loose and hour to chores.
Our days are like musical chairs – we have 24 hour long chunks, or 1,440 minute long chunks to move between one activity or another until we curl up in our bed. I have always rejected a daily planner as my work is often very reactive in nature – I put out whatever fire is the most intense – but I may have to investigate this once again. The two I have looked at in the past are David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner and James Mallinson’s Weekly Planner. I shall print and re-constitute myself first thing tomorrow, and have unpacked the Wii by Friday night…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post and very true! I actually posted a similar in nature blog last week about how you really can’t be productive 24 hours a day – you need those breaks in there to stay energized to work your system. Here is a link to it:
http://bobstanke.com/blog/2009/8/31/you-cant-be-productive-24-hours-a-day.html
BTW – I subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to reading future posts!
Thanks Bob, glad you liked the post. Thanks for the link to your site – a good read!
Rich