Keeping Your Head When Everyone Else Is…

This week is busy. We have two new interns in the office at Aaron+Gould, and Women In Touch (my client and church initiative) big yearly conference this week.

It’s weeks like this, where you have to manage multiple things at a high stress and time pressure, that easily break your daily routine and to-do system. Normally at this point I’d have scrapped my system in favour of trusting no one with any delegated tasks and therefore working 48 hour days to get everything done. The house becomes messy, the office a tip, and I obsessively cut out everything else in order to check off every last task.

Not this year. Thanks do an integrated GTD system, and more specifically, Remember The Milk.

The Beauty of Remember The Milk

A big part of GTD is context. The idea is to create lists based on context – office, home, phone calls. Now because I list every project with a hastag and then the task, i.e. ‘#Touch – Print off posters’, I have set up a smart list that searches every task with ‘#Touch’. The result is I have a list dedicated to every task for this project, rather than sifting through my ‘Next’ or ‘Waiting For’ lists. I can see everything I have tagged as ‘delegated’, who I’ve delegated it to, as well as ‘video’, ‘dtp’, etc, so I get a great 20,000 to 30,000 foot view on the project.

Along with Evernote as my external mind, I have found my system (I’ll share more details with you later) has stayed solid and helped me delegate and manage far better. Did I tell you I’m also writing a viral campaign proposal this week?

How GTD Rescued Me

I´ve Joined the CultJesus saved my soul. GTD saved my future. Really, it did.

When started working at church at 19 I had no office experience. And although in my melancholic, creative nature there is an obsessive and meticulous organiser within me, unfortunately I have historically had a nasty habit of never implementing a system because I could never get it ‘perfect’ enough.

From 19 through to 25, despite the public successes I had, the lack of organisation, mental clarity, and ability to lead and to delegate was killing me.

Let me paint the picture for you. I could start a massive youth initiative, but I couldn’t keep it organised. I could start a great TV programme, but I couldn’t continue running it after the start-up energy drained. I could sit and share great ideas, but couldn’t implement them. I could start many, many things, but I could never finish them.

It is a curse and a form of mental torment to have potential, be a thinking person, see beyond the normal things, but be hindered from getting what is in the nebulous of your potential within you, out of you. Continue reading