Whoa

I got off my butt today and forced myself to sit down and do some 'collecting' in GTD parlance. Basically, it's capturing anything you have in your vicinity and in your mind that's taking up mental RAM.

Being that I have way too many bulky objects in my vicinity, I quite fail at that section, wherein you're supposed to collect anything physical that doesn't belong in an inbox for later processing. Nuh uh, it just doesn't work for me. Too much shtuff. I fail at filing.

The closest I've ever come to managing that is to buy myself a supersized Inbox about 1.5 feet cubed. Which admittedly is useful. Except that I didn't bring it to the office today, so that made it a moot point.

So the next thing you're supposed to do, if you have stuff way too bulky to fit physically into your inbox, is to at least make a note of it and file that note away into the inbox as a placeholder. That was doable. So my list filled up with stuff like "clear the mess under my desk eventually" "my computer desk needs cleaning, top and bottom" and "the drawers under my desk need help."

But at least it was more or less tracked.

Then I sat down to do a "mind sweep."

Something that helped me unstick my arse this time around was finding out the proper time estimates for each stage. I guess we all tend to underestimate how long it takes to do anything. The instructions had always said "set aside a block of 2 hours to start with" and if you want to do the whole process from start to finish, it'll take 2 days, back to back, no interruptions...

(Yeah, no interruptions. Right. Ever since I got this managerial role, it's been one interruption after another. *sighs* Apparently, according to this Managing book by Henry Mintzberg, that's exactly what managers manage anyhow, so get used to it...)

Somehow, in my fogged up mind, I had supposed that it'll take 2 hours to finish collecting and processing everything... Well, I had way too much stuff to finish in 2 hours, so I must be terribly abnormal and recalcitrant and GTD wasn't going to work, etc.

Turns out, no, just COLLECTING everything would take 1-2 hours (assuming you were starting from scratch or haven't been keeping current - which I haven't been, at all.)

So I somehow tore out some time at 11am and told myself I was going to just keep going (in between the interruptions) until lunchtime at 1pm to put everything down onto the figurative ThinkingRock page.

I ended about 15 minutes before 1pm, with about 90 items on my collection list.

Whoa.

Yeesh.

This is, apparently, par for the count, with most people accumulating 100 or so of these. So yay, I'm normal. Ish.

Back to my proper time estimate. Now for the Processing stage, the real meat and potatoes of GTD, which forces you to take one item out of your inbox and really LOOK at it until you decide the next physical concrete action that can be taken on it. Not do it (unless it takes less than 2 minutes), and yes you can delegate it, but just figure out wtf it is and what has to be done with it so that you can file that decision away and look at it later to act on it.

This is something far too many people fail at. I fail at it way too often, even though I should know better in theory. My boss fails at it, unless I keep pushing her to figure it out. Many people just never decide what should be done about it and leave stuff to rot until there's a fire that breaks out - then they panic.

Anyhow, another blinding revelation. The processing stage takes upwards of anywhere between 1-8 hours. Aieeeee.

So there was no way I was cranking out decisions on those 90 items today, especially since the braindump had already revealed that I had two things on deadline and I had to get working on the most urgent one, pronto.

Rest of the afternoon spent doing that. Still one more rather urgent item to go, and tomorrow (or today, now) has things that have to get done both in the morning and afternoon, so I don't know if I'll get around to that urgent item tomorrow either. *wry chuckle* I can try.

I guess if I feel up to it, I can try some processing in these wee morning hours...

(Sidetrek: I was reading this public service magazine that commented about Generation Y - we are apparently quite incapable of working early morning hours but very willing to stay up late, so telecommuting is something this generation welcomed - amen to that, brutha. My company needs to hurry up and figure this out.)

...After all, I don't have anything else to do. I should be sleeping, but I'm nursing a cold of some sort which produces serious nose clogging. The moment I lie down, all the mucus plugs up the constricted nasal passages and I'm in the throes of serious gasping sleep apnea and wheezing somewhat asthmatically. This is highly unconducive to restful sleep.

On brighter news, I'm finally into Dawn of War 2: the Chaos Rising campaign, having completed the original campaign -again- with three happy achievements marking my awesomeness for finishing at the 3rd level of difficulty. God, I'm such an achievement whore now. Bloody shiny badges.

There is no end in sight in ATITD except many beetles and lots of straw processing, but having used money for additional alts, I put one of them to work offlining onions and it seems to be keeping up decently well with the sheep so that I don't have to grow so many of the awful things with low yields near my home. I'd like to find more time to offload beetles and actually work on something more constructive, but well, maybe another week.

Steam shineys are tempting me again. The Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers look quite interesting. The current 'buy the game, get the first expansion pack free' deal makes each component USD $5, which isn't too awful for what looks to be a more sophisticated take on those free Flash card game rip-offs of the original Magic. There is apparently limited deckbuilding and customisation possible, which detracts from the true Magic experience, but there is decent computer AI and well-balanced pre-set decks for folks like me who prefer a good singleplayer challenge versus running online and finding real people to get annoyed by.

Except if I buy this, I'm committing to more time playing that instead of something else.

Hmm. Decisions decisions.