So I picked up this book, Getting Things Done, by David Allen. I’ve read a lot of other time management books (I’m a big fan of Covey’s 7 Habits Series) and a plethora of other books on leadership (a few John Maxwell books), and various others which I can’t even begin to remember.
Anyway, there are a few insights which this book has offered which I haven’t seen elsewhere, and I must admit, has been quite lifechanging:
- The Mind Purge – Write down everything, and I mean everything that you have to get done, no matter how tiny a task it is. Get it out of your head and onto something which you’ll carry with you everywhere (so that if anything happens to pop into your head, you just write it down).
- Projects – Anything that requires more than a few steps is considered a project. Cleaning out my closet is a project. Taking my family out to the park is a project (pick a date, time, location, activities).
- The Next Step – Often, we have all these goals we want to accomplish in 1, 5, 10 years, and so forth. Often, we don’t move on our projects because we say, “that’s long term, I’ll do it later,” when really, we don’t even know what the next small step is to driving that project to completion.
For me, these three are really big – I’ve been able to get everything out of my mind, plan out what I’d like to do with my life, AND figure out the next step to advance my goals. Figuring out the next step to advance a goal can be something as simple as a phone call. I recently have had trouble with my reimbursement for my Master’s degree with my company, so I went through this process, and as obvious as some of this stuff is, we sometimes need the obvious pointed out to get things done. For example, in my To Do list, I might write something like “Appeal for tuition reimbursement”, but then, it’s like, well, what else? I’d never get around to it because it seemed like it would take time, and I would have to do everything at once. Not true at all. So I figured out the next action (call HR guy), and this moved to another action to take (call Ed Assist Hotline) which led to another action (call HR Manager) which turned into another action (meet HR Manager) and poof! All done! I had been sitting for a year and a half on that task, and within one week, it was done, alhamdullillaah!
This is one thing – the other is that I’ve been observing how my day can get short-circuited by distractions and sometimes really wasteful (read: probably haraam) activities. For example, showers is a huge shortcircuit in my time. Sure, I have a clock in the bathroom, but I always forget to check it. I stand in the shower and zone out, usually for a half hour, occasionally longer. That’s a lot of water wasted. Solution? Egg timer. Small and easy to wind, I set it for 10 minutes. Once the timer goes out, it’s time to finish everything up quickly and turn off the shower. It works really well, alhamdullillaah!
Another shortcircuit? Witr salaah. I always have the intention to pray qiyaam, but how practical is that if I go to bed by 12am and wake up for Qiyaam when fajr is at 3am? It’s not, but I always tell myself, “Er, yeah, I’ll get up, insha’Allah.” It doesn’t happen, and I miss witr in the process as well. Solution? No praying qiyaam if I’m not in bed by 10:30pm, which means I must pray witr before sleeping.
I’m still putting together my projects, fleshing them out, and putting next actions behind them. I’m also writing out all activities I have to do everyday (salaah, studying, spending time w/family, etc), and I’ve bought a PDA phone to record anything that comes to mind that needs to be done. I have to admit, adding the David Allen dimension of Getting Things Done has been a huge step forward and is perhaps the vital ingredient I’ve been missing in my time management curriculum for a long time now.
