Day 4: GTD Implementation

I had a real meltdown yesterday. I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbrer of boxes and piles of paper sitting in the middle of my living room. My husband helped me as I began to sort through the piles. I could not stick with it for more than a few hours at a stretch. I spoke to a coach from Davidco (that's the name of David Allen's company). She said that I had "over-collected" meaning I should have left some of those piles of paper wherever they were, as I should only be processing current data. But that would miss the point. First, I don't know what is current and what is not without going through everything; there's a mix in every box. The way I came to have all these banker boxes full of stuff is what I have called the "Thanksgiving Syndrome." We always have a large and wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, with all of our dearest and oldest of friends coming, as well as family and even some more distant friends. Preparing for Thanksgiving we start noticing the piles and piles of "stuff" everywhere, cluttering up every surface. What we do then is to put all the stuff into banker boxes and stash them away in a back room or closet. And that is where they have remained, until we began the major collection on Thursday. There must be at least 15 of them, in addition to the many piles of papers that were everywhere; sideways on book shelves, on top of every cabinet, every desk, and in my home office, in a variety of corners on the floor. This then is the issue at hand; how to whiz through these boxes without getting distracted, without the melt down I had yesterday. Furthermore, I slept in today which is upsetting. It was the first time since I began the program of changing this sleeping in habit and turned myself into an early morning writer. I am disgruntled, and heading off to more sorting out of the boxes.