GTD Implementation: Day 39

Just one small decision yields a giant step forward
Here it is day 39 after beginning my GTD full implementation. Its Easter Sunday, late afternoon, and I'm still reading and writing in bed. I think I've figured out a big problem that has been hanging me up for weeks now. As I wrote well over a week ago, figuring out my filing system and where files were supposed to go, in which of the 38 (or is it 48?) file drawers I either already had in place --or which I had delivered to the house in preparation for this undertaking-- helped and permitted a week or so of progress on various fronts. However I found myself slowing down again, and frankly stuck, paralyzed in the middle of the implementation. After the last three or four days of walking around the house, finding more and more banker boxes hidden in every corner, every "back room" and every closet, it hit me, I "got it." I couldn't possibly go through all of the boxes to see what to keep and what to throw out, papers were coming into the house while the clock was ticking away, waiting for me to make trivial decisions about trivial pieces of paper, and more pieces of paper. I had no other possible conclusion but what was in front of me. I have to THROW IT ALL OUT. Duhh. This should have been patently obvious by week three, instead of waiting until week five and six. I had to clear out the "inbox" of my living room, and see that there were literally ROOMS more of boxes. I got sick of wasting time worrying about how to deal with all of it, its perfectly clear. I feel a huge sense of relief on this easy Easter Sunday, the dumpster is ordered and should be in front of the house by Tuesday. My grandson who is 22 and strong is lined up, and a few of his friends are invited to join him, for the job of lifting and hauling the boxes right into the dumpster. Goodbye problem. I can say with absolute certainty that I welcome a mind like water, and this will escape me until every last box is tossed, until all the clothes unworn for two years or longer are delivered to the Goodwill sure can't claim a "mind like water." The clutter in the house had finally become clutter in my mind, and it has all been a product of GTD and GTD implementation.

This last significant insight only occurred after I had decided to tackle the downstairs closet, shared by me and my husband. The vast quantity of stuff that came rolling out of that sizable walk in closet-room was mind jumbling and mind numbing. The stuff has been a weight on my mind, on my productivity, probably for years now, only I didn't even see it until I began GTD implementation. I had known that this was going to happen, without exactly knowing it; this is no doubt, why I had been into GTD for almost two years before I made the decision to really do GTD, and not just some small piece of it. I knew when I embraced GTD and showed up at an Allen seminar that my whole life, the life of my home, my office, my lab, my colleagues, co-workers, was about to go through a huge change. The proportions of that change are just sweeping over me, filling me with a mood of excitation and freedom. Its hard to explain the effect of perhaps 80 boxes of files, papers, and more papers. Suffice it to say that it has been a break upon my creativity, a haze preventing clarity and a wall erected between me and a sense of well-being.

Last night, having made the decision to throw everything out, I went to the drawing board to plan out my life for the next year. I have been convinced for months that I was incapable of planning, and I have been. My energy and inherent sense of organization has all been directed to a monumental amount of paper that didn't belong in my life any longer. I have all the files I need for the current research I'm doing, for the articles and presentations I'm currently working on, and I don't need all the rest of it now, or ever. I am so relieved. A small two minute decision, expressed in an even smaller phrase "Just throw it all out" and everything becomes do-able, comfortable, almost easy. The dumpster will be here tomorrow night, or Tuesday. The young post adolescent energy is lined up, and I think I am regaining my capacity to plan, organize and do.