It's 5 AM and I awoke half an hour ago. This is the first time I woke up spontaneously, in what is now over two weeks of my new "habit formation," with the new habit of getting up early. I finally went to sleep early enough last night to get up this early, with no feeling of fatigue. I read e-mail and blogs for half an hour before feeling ready to write. I mentioned on Seah's blog a few days ago that I am very poor on planning and I'm trying to imitate Seah's new habit of taking an hour devoted to planning at the beginning of the day. I actually wrote this into my Google calendar a few months ago, but before I began getting up early I couldn't do it. Waking up at 11AM filled me with too much panic to engage in what seems to me a luxury of planning the day. I am a horrendous failure at planning. I have never been able to plan effectively; any plan I have made is likely to be broken almost immediately, as if I am defying an authority who is trying to tell me how to live my life and what to do, instead of running with it, knowing it is my best estimate for how to structure my day. Having done over two weeks of getting up early, I think today is the day to create a structure and follow it. I put it in the absolute so as not to give me room to alter it. Ordinarily I would say: "Today is the day to create a structure and try follow it."
I did little yesterday on GTD implementation, having completed the collection process the day before. Finding myself procrastinating, I pulled out the Task Progress Tracker or PCEO-TPT01-Standard. (http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/09/23/the-printable-ceo/) and at 6:30 PM I promised myself I would use the time-boxing system as I had planned. I committed to 15 minutes (measured on Minuteur, a free timer made for the Mac (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19356) of processing, i.e., clarification of each item from my 3' x 4' x 5' in-box collection, resulting from the Day 1 GTD implementation, the collection process that happened on Thursday. After the first 15 minutes I filled in a 15-minute bubble on my graphic representation of my progress. Then I went ahead and powered through another 2 hours, after which I was starving for dinner. After dinner I spent some time with a friend who was visiting us for dinner, and soon thereafter I drifted into a wonderful sleep.
Despite my history of failure in planning, I challenge myself to plan successfully, after awakening spontaneously at 5:00 AM, fully rested. Now (as in in the next ten minutes) I am going to pull out an Emergent Task Planner Form and plan my day. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/09/16/the-printable-ceo-vi1-emergent-task-planning/
I have a few clinical appointments forming the fixed structure of the day, exercise (Kundalini Yoga) to be structured in, listening to my voice mail, reading any important emails, returning necessary phone calls, a few academic tasks, and the rest will be continuing to "clarify" and organizing the collected items, down to every single piece of paper. I am also going to do a mindsweep but that won't be exactly scheduled, just an ongoing effort every time I need a break from clarifying and organizing. I'm committing myself to tracking my progress here as well as on Seah's forms, in an effort to keep me honest, and to spend most of my time clarifying and organizing the collection dumpster in our living room. (See picture, I decided to make that public). Today's motivation will also rest on time-blocking as the task is too formidable to do it any other way, from my perspective and knowing my strengths and weaknesses. To be continued...
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2 comments:
Somewhere in the al-anon "liturgy" there is a statement to the effect that "just for day I will have a plan, I may not fully follow the plan but I will let the plan guide me as far as possible." That is really incorrectly quoted (as in "I just mangled the quote"). Maybe you know the wording?
I know that for all the plans I do make, I also find myself makingup my day as I go along, sometimes to my detriment. Sometimes I find really inconsequential things to do just to feel I have accomplished something. For example, I decide to walk an envelope to the post office even though there is no rush getting it mailed. Sometimes I really enjoy an inconsequential task, sort of the feeling that this all doesn't matter that much and my life has some time for things that aren't entirely earth shaking. I suppose a reasonable mix of "this is really important to accomplish" and "this could happen or not" is ideal. Not that anything is "ideal," but you know what I mean.
Thank you for your response to the non-comment I made earlier. Pam
Pam: I just reviewed with the davidco coach the "three fold nature of work." Meaning there are three types of work. First is the "defining" phase, where I figure out what I'm supposed to be doing, organize it so to speak. I think all of this I've been into, making my lists, going through these boxes etc., all of that is "defining" or part of defining. Then there is actually "doing" work; Sitting down and doing some of the things on my list, that's the doing work. Finally there is "doing work as it occurs" meaning whatever is dropped in my lap, doing it right then and there. A lot of what I do each days falls into that last category. A phone call comes in with a request from a student, or I get an email from some one who wants permission to use the IGQ (Interperonal Guilt Questionnaire) the measure I developed, and I have to tend to that as soon as possible so I do it right away. That is work as it occurs. I do a lot of that, and therefore I am rarely doing work as I planned it. I am working on planning, unfortunatly I slept in today, so my plan for Sunday is frankly shot. I will forgive myself, as long as I go right now back to those boxes.
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