Common GTD Pitfalls applied to Life Ala FlyLady

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Originally published on 4 April 2007.

I was reading the article Getting Things Done » Blog Archive » Common GTD pitfalls (part 1 of 2), and I thought of some ways to extend these pitfalls into other areas of life using Flylady sayings and techniques.

Collecting and Processing but Not Doing.. This seems to me to be the behavior exhibited by the people who read many diet books but never lose weight, or who talk endlessly about the things they are planning on doing, and then complain it never happens. The common thread here is there is no DOING. As Flylady would say, we need to get off our Frannies and DO something!

Reviewing Infrequently. We all change. Without reviewing our items, we cannot make sure they still fit our lifestyle. For instance, I was reviewing my control journal recently and realized there was an entry for my child’s room: Clean diaper genie. Unfortunately, my child is years past the diaper stage. So in order to keep these routines up and do-able, they have to fit what we are doing now.

Playing With the System. It really is so much more fun to optimize things than to actually work. Playing with the system is always a good excuse…”I couldn’t start because….” In Flylady’s book, this is perfectionism. We need to learn to work with the tools we have on hand, and actually DO something.

Keeping Stuff Out of Your System. To me, this is analogous to people creating routines, but not writing everything down. And then during stress times, those items get forgotten. How many of us have forgotten to do some necessary task in the morning because we were thinking of other things? Sure, I might not have to write down “Check what’s for dinner” and do it before I leave the house, but having that reminder has saved me more than once when I needed to prepare before I left for work.