“A lot of the productivity advice is bullshit, just to make you hate the endless hours of useless work a little less,” said Oliver Burkeman, columnist for The Guardian. And he offers the only sure way to do everything and not go crazy.
“If anyone is to blame for the emergence of the modern cult of “personal productivity” – endless advice on how to get everything done in our era of overwork, it is David Allen (David Allen). It has been 14 years since the first publication of his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Being Productive Without Stress. Since then, his philosophy, even religion, has gained popularity not only among office workers, but also among a completely different audience – from hipsters to Silicon Valley computer scientists.
Many of the productivity tips are bad, but Allen’s ideas are not in this series. Looking through the recently published new edition of his book, I was convinced that so far no one has come up with a better way to cope with the pile of worries that overwhelm us. From his point of view, the key problem of working in the modern “knowledge economy” is that we never feel that it is complete. For example, if you lived in the XNUMXth century and made candles, you could always ask yourself: “Have I completed today’s plan for candles? That’s all for today.” In principle, there are an infinite number of things we could do, and a lot more “unfinished” – emails that need to be answered, books that can be read, meetings, as a result of which we make very vague commitments to something. to do – all this creates unconscious stress.
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Our brain is desperately trying to keep track of all this, but it constantly fails – no wonder, because some scientists claim that only 7 “objects” can be stored in our short-term memory at a time. Paradoxically, a brain that doesn’t remember everything can’t forget anything either, and so at XNUMX:XNUMX a.m. you suddenly begin to gnaw at yourself for all the things that are constantly being put off.
According to this theory, most of the stress comes not from a lot of things, but from trying to keep track of them all. This helps explain why when we pick up a pen and paper and write down everything we need to do, we feel immediate relief—even though none of the things have been done yet. You have simply handed over the task of tracking and remembering them to the “outer brain”, allowing your real brain to rest for a while.
If you want to achieve what Allen calls “mind like water”—relaxed and stress-free, and at the same time alert and focused, it’s not enough to make lists for yourself every once in a while. You will need a “trusted system”: one notebook, or a Word file, or a smartphone application, where you will write down all the plans and tasks – every promise made, every vague project idea, every unfinished business that gnaws at you (you You can also carry a small notepad or set of cards with you so you can jot down tasks as you go and transfer them to your main list later.) I know it all seems like a lot of unnecessary worries. But when you do, you’ll wonder how you could have been such a masochist before that you didn’t have a list like this.
By the way, the tasks on the list should be written in the form of “physically feasible actions that can be done immediately.” This is another of the most important commandments of the high priest of the religion of productivity: often we don’t do some work because we haven’t defined a list of specific actions that need to be done. You can’t “do something about a toothache” but you can go to the dentist. You can not “restore relations with the estranged Uncle Lester”, but you can write him a letter.
The Allen system is far from limited to this – it probably makes no sense for most people to try to follow it completely. (The preface to the new edition emphasizes that it is not at all necessary to fanatically follow all the recommendations and try to immediately turn your life around, you can choose any methods that are effective for you.) If you try to choose one of the most valuable tips in it, then I will probably stop on the “two-minute rule”: if you have a task that can be done in less than two minutes, do it right now. It would seem obvious, but if you try to strictly follow this in practice, you will be surprised how much less unnecessary stress will become in your life.