David Allen on Getting Things out of Your Head
Inspired by Merlin, Cory, and others – and determined to stop procrastinating – I’m reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done.
One thing that’s been an epiphany for me, only sixty-or-so pages into the book, is the idea that you need to get things out of your head – or they’ll, consciously or unconsciously, be pulling at your attention. “Your mind will keep working on anything that’s still in [an] undecided state,” Allen writes. So you need to capture anything unresolved in an external container, in order to reduce mental stress.
I think this is very true, and I realize I do this a lot. I come to think of something that I ought to do, then make a “mental note” about it, and then forget it.
Mental notes are often dismissed, but not because of their contributing to mental stress, but because you’ll easily forget things unless you externalize them.
If I think about times when I’ve been under much stress, I can see now that I could have been relieved by getting things off my mind and onto paper or into a text file somewhere – for later review.
Allen’s is a very inspiring book, and I can already recommend it.