Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Last night I was sitting at Stone Cup talking with my mother-in-law about Getting Things Done (and other assorted topics directly or tangentially related to GTD) and suddenly I had an amazing revelation.

I’m not really absent-minded.

Yes, for those of you who know me, that probably is shocking, and you’re probably thinking that I’ve been smoking whatever Mike Nifong smokes during the day while he’s working as D.A. in Durham County, NC. I’m also well aware of the fact that I’ve sold myself as absent-minded for years now. But, hear me out …

The fact of the matter is that I’m remembering things I need to do now better than I ever have before. That’s saying a lot, because I had thought I was getting more and more absent minded as the years went by … last year I had a terrible time remembering everything I needed to do.

But … the problem wasn’t that my memory was faulty. The problem was that I was floating way too many tasks around in my head, and trying to keep up with all of them. The reason I thought things were getting worse is that my life has been getting ever more complex over the last three years or so. For instance:

1. On November 27, 2004, I got married (see Rachel, I remember our anniversary!). Suddenly, I had to not only remember the tasks I wanted to do, but the tasks that Rachel wanted me to do as well. That probably increased the amount of things floating around in my head by at least 25%.
2. On May 1, 2005, I entered the ranks of the self-employed … initially as an independent contractor, and of course now I’m a small business owner. Suddenly, I had to think of all sorts of mundane things I didn’t have to think about previously. At first, it wasn’t too bad … I didn’t have a lot of concurrent projects, so keeping up with things was easy. However … starting last year, my workload started to increase, and the number of projects I was juggling at any one time increased as well. So, I would say by the end of the year last year, being self-employed increased the number of tasks floating in my head by at least 75% of what it had been prior to May 2005.
3. In mid-July 2006 (sorry, I don’t remember the date … but it could have been the 13th, because it was a bad day), I moved to Chattanooga. We are doing a lease-purchase on our house, and we are contractually responsible for any maintenance on the house. Things that I used to call my landlord to have fixed … I now have to worry about. Not a large jump in tasks, but a jump nonetheless.
4. On October 1, 2006, our first child was born. I doubt any estimate of how much that increased my task load would even remotely be accurate. Factor in the fact that sleep is not always a given now … and things become even more complex.

So, what did I think of that prompted me to decide that I wasn’t really absent-minded? Well, two things.

First, as I was talking about how I was getting more things done around the house, I thought of a moment from earlier in the day, when I had been talking to Rachel. She had reminded me about some task she had asked me to take care of a few days before (something that was a regular event previously), and I replied that I already had it on my project list (without having to look), and then proceeded to list off about 2/3 of the other incomplete projects on the list she’d asked me to do in the last few days (something that would have never happened before … I’d never have remembered more than one or two of them). It actually amazed me (and Rachel too, I think) … because it wasn’t something I’d experienced in recent memory.

Then, I connected that event to a quote from David Allen in Getting Things Done:

The short-term memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized "stuff"—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term memory space. And as with RAM, there’s a limited capacity; there’s only so much "stuff" you can store there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

And then … I had one of those moments of complete clarity. I never was absent-minded. I was just carrying too much ’stuff’ around in my brain, and there never was any hope of me remembering it all.

The reason why I was able to instantly recall a good number of tasks on my ‘Home’ task list for Rachel yesterday was that I had reviewed my list entire list of projects and action items that morning, and the ones I recalled were the ones that I had made priority items.

In fact, the only times that Rachel has reminded me of something I wasn’t in some way consciously aware of in the last two weeks has been when I failed to follow the GTD method and write something down in one of my inboxes as soon as she asked me to do it.

Wow.

Thanks, David Allen!

p.s. My wife thanks you too!

Tags: GTD, getting things done