thinkfetti

The numbers are terrifying.

I just finished my first real weekly review of my Getting Things Done setup, which I’m running on OmniOutliner Pro with the kGTD scripts. I’ve been doing GTD since December, but I’ve had a lot of time out of town, so up to this point, I had only done one moderately real weekly review.

The weekly review is, in large part, a survey of what projects I have going, and what things I have listed under “I’d maybe like to get to these someday.”

A project is pretty much anything that will take more than one step to accomplish, and anything I have listed here anywhere is something I couldn’t have taken care of, once and for all, in a couple minutes.

OK, then, the numbers…

• I have 23 next-items that are just single tasks, not part of any larger project.
• I have 27 projects on my someday/maybe list.
• And I have 144 projects going now (!!!), each with a next-action I’ve figured out to be the very next thing I need to do to make progress on the respective project. Remember, none of these next-actions is just a “few minutes” thing.

Geez! And some qualitative observations:

• Almost all of the 144 projects are things I’m doing for my job.
• Many, if not most, of the 27 projects being put off for now, on my someday/maybe list, are much more interesting to me than the lion’s share of the 144 projects on the live list.

Hence the title of this post. This is, however, very useful information for me - it’s quite impressive to be able to see this so blatantly available. Clearly, some changes are in order here!

In the the book I’m reading now by Lin Yutang, I see that a sense of humor is a necessary counterbalance to a sense of idealism.

In my working environment - and those of many other people, I’d imagine - it’s all too easy for the wrong kind of humor to develop, though: a cynical, black-ish kind of humor, maybe even graveyard humor. I find Dilbert funny, but I’m sad that I do. In practice, this cynical humor goes beyond counterbalancing idealism, producing demoralized apathy.

Throwing up my hands doesn’t make it easier, for me personally, to go to work. But in the face of problems, I look for a way to navigate between taking them “too seriously” on the one side and cynically giving up trying on the other. An ability to change my focal length can help, and a sense of humor - a forgiving, compassionate-without-being-too-serious-about-being-compassionate sense of humor - is quite possibly an important piece of the internal compass I’ll need to draw on more often.