Choosing What To Do

Welcome to Simple Productivity Blog! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This will allow you to receive updates in your RSS reader every time new content is posted here. If you want to receive updates in your email, click on the envelope in the upper right corner, or use the "Subscribe" link below the blog title.

Please take some time to check out the content on the site. You may comment on any article by scrolling down and using the form at the bottom of all articles. Thanks for visiting!

One of the big problems I have had with modern time management systems is that by the time I follow the structure, there is always more things on my list than I can possibly get done. My lists become overwhelming, with the same stuff on them day after day, and I start to ignore them out because I get discouraged looking at all the things I still haven’t done.

It is hard to be realistic about what I can accomplish, either in a generic sense, or in a right now, this hour sense. I always take on more than I can do.

Also, it’s hard to decide what to do; the easy stuff is quickly dispatched with and often times I will do that just because I need to feel like I am getting things done, and also because I don’t have a sense of what I should be doing. I never got into the high-falutin’ talk about mission statements, and my lifetime goals are not very concrete. But in the article If you could just do one thing…, Mark Forster give an easy-to-follow method to help us past that hump.

The method is simply this: ask yourself if you could do just one thing in the next X (insert time period here: year, week, day, hour), what would it be? And then ask for another one, until you have a list of about five.

I’m not saying this is easy, because it requires thinking. But I suspect that the more we get in the habit of doing it, the easier it will become.

For me, it’s worth a try. I would rather be moving toward something instead of standing still and cranking widgets.