When we last left our intrepid hero. He was overwhelmed, stressed out and looking for a way to check out while making nice precise lines in the yard.

I wasn’t looking for a life change, I was looking to be able to stuff more into my day, to do more things effectively, and ultimately achieve by stealing hours from my evenings and weekends.

Instead, what I found was a promise. David Allen encourages his readers to seek out a “mind like water.” You see, when a stone hits water it causes ripples. But… those ripples quickly fade away and you are left with a calm peaceful exterior once again.

David Allen told me, in his book, that if I followed his system, I could also achieve this state. I could be calm, have a good idea of what I had to do and when I had to do it, and as a result, stop stressing about all the stuff I had to do that that I was forgetting, overlooking etc etc.

I hope that reading this blog post doesn’t give you enough of a summary that you skip reading his book. Besides the Bible, getting things done has had a greater impact on my life than any other book.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other productivity books out there that are helpful… But it is to say that if you haven’t read “Getting Things Done,” you are missing out.

Ok, enough of a lead in, how do you get the mind like water? Well, first of all you realize that your mind isn’t the place to store your lists!!

I remember hearing this part of the book, and thinking to myself (as I was mowing the lawn) hold on here, I can’t adequately process this book as an audiobook. I need to be able to take notes, to think about it, because if he’s right, and the mind is not the correct bin in which to store our lists (if mental notes are in fact not notes at all but a vain attempt to keep information in our mind only to be reminded of them at inopportune times) then I needed to completely rethink my system.

And completely rethink it I did.

So if our mind is not the place to keep our thoughts what is? Allen asserts that we need a capture system. A place where we put everything from figuring out what is wrong with the dryer, to replacing the batteries on the smart lock that is blinking red, to completing the refinance paperwork on my house, to planning my next sales meeting.

He goes on to make the case that we shouldn’t just record the tasks, but should do some thinking about the tasks and as we write them down answer two questions about them. 1) what is the ultimate outcome I want with this task? And 2) what are the next few things I need to do in order to achieve this outcome?

If we take, for example, the four tasks outlined above we can see this in action- please note all of these are actual tasks I need to complete or am in the process of working on.

So the first one. My dryer has recently begun to take three cycles to dry clothes. So I record a task which is figure out how to fix the dryer by googling what could be wrong and or calling the handyman who has done work for me. I put a date on this for the next Saturday I’m free, and then go about the rest of my life.

Then for the second task… the smart lock that is blinking red… It’s telling me it needs new batteries… So I slip off the cover, take note of the batteries it takes and but them on my shopping list for the next time I go to the grocery store.

Then the refinance paperwork. I need to open the email, login, and both my wife and myself need to e-sign the raft of paperwork we received before the 24th.

Finally for the sales meeting. I need to make sure that all the promotional material is completed, build an agenda, research whether or not the state will allow us to meet outside (or if I should do this meeting virtually) and finally I need to look into supplying masks for my sales folks if we end up meeting in person.

I know that you might be thinking that this sort of process is overwhelming and potentially even unnecessary but consider this for a moment. How many blinking red lights do you have in your house, office or hobbies? How many undone or completely ignored tasks do you have? Stuff that nags at you, that wakes you up in the middle of the night?

For me… I had a ton of them. And these tasks were making it impossible for me to have a mind like water. Instead I had a logjam. Filled with the mental notes and scraps of paper where I was writing down what I couldn’t forget.

The problem was that I didn’t have a system that I trusted to hold all those notes. And my subconscious knew that. So, instead of a being able to write something down, and trust that I’d look at it again, I would write something down and then stress out because I knew that I wouldn’t remember to look at it.

When I first read this book, electronic “todo” lists were not yet widely available. I spent several more year trying to find a system like what David Allen outlined that would fit the brave new world of email, text messages, and every other sort of input.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the system I decided to use, and the way that this system helps me effectively triage my todos so I can get the right things done.

For now, I’d like you to think about whether or not you have a system that you trust. Do you have lots and lots of undone tasks that are mounting around you, calling out to you when you open the proverbial junk drawer or look at your physical or electronic inbox?

Does that stress you out?

Realizing that I was completely jammed with tasks that I would never remember to complete was a huge eye opener for me.

I hope this has been helpful for you, and am grateful that you have read this far with me.

Until next time.