GTD: Still implementing and procrastination

Answering a comment:

Cindy wrote to me "It sounds like you live my dream, and are functioning about the same way I do. I am a Psych student in clnical Psyc ... I have so much to do I can't get moving. I browse so much about GTD, but can't seem to implement it. I would like to hear about your online class."

I started to answer this as a comment, then thought its been so long since I've written here, I might get started by writing my response as a new entry. I remember my days as a graduate student with fondness, I could actually read then, in fact I was supposed to be reading. Now I feel as if I steal time from work in order to read, although reading is presumably a part of my work as a professor and a researcher. But I remember when as a student, I thought I had too much to do and often felt stuck and had trouble deciding what of the numerous things I had to do, would I actually do. My advice is to use a "time-blocking" method to get started. What this means is deciding to do some piece of assigned work for ten or fifteen minutes, and tell yourself you can stop after the alloted time you've assigned. Usually after the ten or fifteen minutes, I'm ready to go on. Another way to do this which I read about on 43 folders, is to plan to work for ten minutes, then break and do something else for two minutes, then back to the job at hand for ten minutes, and so it goes. Before you know it you will have the job done. Merlin Mann has some variations on time-blocking, the Procratination Dask:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/08/kick-procrastinations-ass-run-a-dash/ Steve Pavlina writes about overcoming procrastination http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm
and time boxing http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/

David Seah's productivity forms, the Printable CEO, are great additions to a time-blocking, time-boxing methods because every time you complete a fifteen minute session doing something you've had trouble getting started with, you fil in the "bubble" he's created for these briefs spells of productivity. http://davidseah.com/archives/2007/01/01/concrete-goals-tracker-2007-updates/

I have been on overload ever since this trimester began, with my huge class on "Cognition, Emotion and Personality" taking a lot of my time and energy --to say nothing of the second dumpster sitting outside of my house, as we slowly go through one room after the other, throwing things out. On top of this, I have been preparing for a poster presentation at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Vancouver, which is where I am right now. This morning, hiding away in a hotel room, I actually slept in until 11AM, ate breakfast with my husband, had an hour appointment with a patient (on the phone) and finally registered for the meetings at 2PM. I stopped in to a few meetings and since none of the presentations during the afternoon grabbed my attention, I returned to our room where I've been ever since, screwing around with my computer and doing more or less nothing ever since.

I wasted at least an hour trying out some new GTD list keeper, something I regard as my major "vege out" activity these days. I'm waiting for one of my students to show up with an older computer that can run SPSS (my main statistical package) since my Mac Intel won't run it. Now SPSS is a huge statistical software company, most psychologists use it. So I can't understand why they arn't planning to release a new Mac program that works on the Intel until the fall, 2007. Meanwhile I heard from a graduated student of mine who is here presenting her research and I'm meeting up with her in less than an hour. This may end up a day in which I do nothing, i.e. make no progress on my next action lists. When I have the SPSS running computer this evening I have to prepare for another presentation, the social neuroscience meetings in Austin next weekend. The moral of this story is don't do what I do, waste a whole lot of time trying to make technology work instead of working.

I finally did a review this past week, really it was my first review and I didn't get through all of it. At least it forced me to do the work definition piece of things in that I had to get my inbox to empty. I did the same (almost) for my email inbox in the S.F. airport, and I read through emails I had saved on the airplane. I think I have to go back to Dave Seah's time tracking form in order to revisit where my time is going. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/12/29/emergent-task-timer-2007-form-updates/ Wednesday I spent three hours at Apple, trying to figure out why I was being disconnected from the Internet constantly. The net result of all of this is to make clear I spend most of my time dealing with technical problems around things that aren't working. After I meet with my student, and have my hands on the computer that will work with SPSS, I'm returning to my hotel room to analyze data and prepare for next weekend. None of this is focusing on what I should be doing, to move my bigger projects forward although all of it relates to my projects. Are my projects the right projects for me to be doing? Is it time for a complete review of everything, from the higher levels that Allen describes. Maybe I need to reread parts of "Getting things done" to be clear on what the higher levels are in the first place. On the plane here, along with going through saved email, I also began a thorough brain dump which I haven't done since I went to Allen's seminar in February.

Writing the brain-dump felt like my mind had moved to empty, somewhere between the seminar, the initiation of the full implementation, the arrival of the dumpsters, and now. I got distracted by dirt on molding in the house, dust on the top of the cabinets, housewife kinds of things that I never pay attention to. I think, in full honesty, that all of it is running away from the big project I have in my mind, writing a book about survivor guilt, the kind of guilt we feel when we are successful but our friend is failing at work, or when we see a beggar on the street and think "There but the grace of God go I." I've been planning this as a "Someday/Maybe" for months, for over a year even, and I suspect my full GTD implementation has been part of preparing for serious, structured writing. I have on the backburner --also ready to spring to the front-- two articles as well. I have two articles based on data that's been sitting around for 4 years, ready to be written.

The presentations I'm doing right now and next weekend, were set up to force me to get everything ready to go on the articles. The emptying our house of many years of piles of papers was designed to create a wonderful work space instead of a crowded scene of disorganized books and papers weighing more and more on me as the years went by. I needed a new canvas on which to develop ideas, on which to draw out the picture described by the data I've been collecting for years. And by data I mean data in the classic sense of the word, numbers representing people's responses to questions, first collected in huge Psych 1 classes, and later from the Internet although that too depends on people, one at a time, being willing to take 20 to 40 minutes, filling out questionnaires or responding to narratives and questions. All these people and all these studies end up a zillion numbers that fall into fabulous patterns. The buck stops with me, and I have been slow moving, weighted down by a mess of my own making.

Writing this here, making public what has been probably two, three, or even four years of procrastination, may reflect me coming out from under. I want to make this process public, maybe psych students can benefit from watching someone quite like themselves, trying to implement GTD to the academic/researcher/clinician life style. What is most useful, what doesn't apply, what is absolutely crucial to fire that inner combustible fuel needed for scientific creativity, turning the numbers of long ago designed studies into publishable text? What is the source of procrastination in the first place?

I study survivor guilt so of course I think it lies at the heart of everything. Or is it that survivor guilt is in fact the source of so many problems that made me want to study it in the first place? But I think it really has been a contributor to my procrastination. My mentor who was with me as a coach and supporter for 37 years, died in November, 2004 after a long and horrible illness. Despite being aware of survivor guilt, since I had been studying it for a decade, before his illness, it hit me and as usual with survivor guilt, it was silent, hidden, not quite outside of conscious awareness, but not obvious either. Watching a parent or mentor get old, fragile, is awful. I knew I felt guilty but I still didn't exactly know it. Suffice it to say, it was very difficult and painful to flex my muscles as his were withering. It is still difficult to think about, let alone write about. The only reason to mention it is that I am trying to deal with forces that is any way block my productivity. If I didn't love my work I wouldn't worry about it, but whenever I am working hard at "creating" I feel truely happy and therefore its necessary to talk about it. Tomorrw I'm heading out early to meetings that should be interesting, knowing that whenever I have a "break" in the interesting sessions, I know what to do with my time and this should be helpful.

Cindy, the courses are on BackPack, and I made some of them "public." You can find the first one at: http://lynnoc.backpackit.com/pub/927514