Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

I get dis­tracted when I get home from work.  I’m eas­ily amused and have the “Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh Shiny” men­tal­ity type of dis­trac­tion.  I don’t deny it.   I don’t exactly revel in it either.   By the time I actu­ally get around to doing some of the things I need to get done, it’s late, I’m tired and cranky.   If I put things off until the week­end we end up doing stuff and get­ting involved (“Is that a shiny over there?”) and so things once again get over­looked.   I’m not sure I would actu­ally sleep if I didn’t know for cer­tainty that it helps save my job and my mar­riage.   So what can I do about it?

Pic­ture from here

Things I have tried with lit­tle or no success:

• Wall Cal­en­ders
• Sticky Notes
• Todo Tasks in Outlook
• Todo Tasks on Google
• GTD sites
• Web Cal­en­ders

Noth­ing so far seems to work for me — I’m mun­dane blind.  When there is a shiny I don’t even notice the mundane.

Like many geeks, cor­po­rate types, etc.   I live and die by e-mail.   This is some­thing I greatly increased in focus when I was a con­sul­tant.   Now I can han­dle lit­er­ally hun­dreds of e-mails a day, and I can’t stand a clut­tered mail box.  I nor­mally use Gmail’s inter­face just through a browser, but I’ve been known to dab­ble in POP3 and IMAP access (the insan­ity!!).  Mostly though I just use the web browser.  It’s the same at work, home, and on the go.   The one thing I hate most about my mail box, is when it get’s full.   I hate a clut­tered inbox, I hate com­ing back and see­ing more then one page of e-mail wait­ing for me (which does hap­pen if there is some strange rea­son I don’t check my email for two days).

Pic­ture from here

So I stum­ble on the idea of com­bin­ing these two things, hatred of e-mail clut­ter and a need to get moti­vated and GTD, so now I’m email my tasks to myself (and now Xie has joined into the game).  The first thing when I went down this road is to send myself a daily list of tasks to do, well I tried that once in the past and that doesn’t seem to help.  Nei­ther do reminder ser­vices, since I eas­ily dis­miss them.

The for­mat I use when I mail myself is TODO (task) — this forces me to stare at it every time I look at my e-mail.   I’m hop­ing it will suc­ces­fully burn the task into my brain.   When I actu­ally com­plete the task it get’s archived, thereby sav­ing me space in my inbox.   Too many tasks and it will roll over to a sec­ond page, I would be highly annoyed if that hap­pened.   So essen­tially I’m going to be GTD by annoy­ing myself.

Meh.

But it may work.