Sprinting actions

I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done organisational method, but I’m probably not the best practitioner of it. I used to have a problem with capturing things to track, and it took some time to get into the habit of capturing everything – absolutely everything.

I process my action lists just fine, but acting them is my current bane. I have so much work on at the moment at PayPerPost I’ve been finding it far too easy to look at my next actions and just dismiss them. Some of them perhaps would take too much time. Other’s seem less important than my current workload. At the end of the day though, they do all need to get done. As time goes by I find my small piles of things to do turning into daunting mountains, and stress building in me that they aren’t getting done.

I work from home on Wednesdays in order to be free of office distractions, to get stuff done, and to actually have time to see my daughter. This morning I decided to really hit my action lists hard and I used a technique I remember reading some time ago at 43Folders to hit them.

I can’t find the URL to the exact entry, but it spoke about short time boxed sprints through the actions. You basically set yourself a time period to do each action, do what you can, then move on. I gave myself 10 minutes per action, and to my amazement found I cleared more than half my action list in about 2 hours. A lot of things that I had built up in my mind to be big deals turned out to be completely trivial. Other items turned into projects and got delegated to people more appropriate than me to deal with them.

I’m going to start doing this every week, probably twice a week. Just set aside 2 or 3 hours and go ten minutes at a time through the action list. I’m feeling a lot less stressed now. Thank you 43 Folders.

EDIT: The piece I originally read that inspired me to try this was most likely not at 43Folders, but over at WebWorker Daily. Thanks to Mike Gunderloy for the heads up on this.