Taking care of bizness

Well today has been quite productive. I got rid of several to-dos over the phone today, which is always nice.

I was reading an interview with the author of the GTD (Getting Things Done) book, David Allen, and it reminded me of a time when I was regularly crossing to-dos off a list and feeling good about it. It inspired me to take action today, which, in turn, is a great sign that healing is happening. Yay!

I had been reading a lot about the GTD approach and maximizing productivity over the past year. Efficiency is a big deal to me, and I am constantly striving to be more organized and efficient in my daily life. This seems like a great time to practice this quality in myself and my family.

How important is efficiency and organization to you in your daily activities? Is it something that you strive toward, or does it just come naturally? Or do you just do your thing, and worry about re-organizing later as part of future reiterations?

I used to fall into the last category, but I'm trying to change that. As a person that has always had trouble managing the stuff around me, I think that this will go years toward making my life happier. I can't wait to see these effects, as they have started showing up everywhere around me.

I'm specifically focussing right now on clutter in my physical and virtual environments. I'm currently working on cleaning out my email inbox for the last several years. Amazingly enough (and surprise surprise) I've saved all of the jokes and cute emails that I've received since 2004. OK, that's embarrassing to admit. But admitting errors is the first step toward change, and I am all about change right now. So I've started the process with the deletion of 1K emails so far, and will continue to do this until it is down to a manageable level. The next step will probably be removing my name from mailing lists that I no longer have the time or need to keep up with so that it takes less effort to maintain my inbox. I have a tendency to go through phases with mailing lists, and of course, once the phase is over, I continue to be bombarded with mail that now needs to be deleted. I'm resolving to revisit my inbox periodically to weed out these time wasters before they become issues. Daily Candy in LA regular updates during this phase of moving from LA back to TX - not so useful!

At close to 6k emails in my personal inbox, the whole thing is still a daunting and tedious task to be undertaken. Oh well, that's just more incentive to perform iterations more often and prevent this from becoming such a bear again in the future.

OK, sorry for the tedious post, but I'm sure thatthere is at least one other person out there that can get something out of this. And it helps me to write about my efforts and to commit to the process verbally. So that's two people that are helped in the process.

That's all for now!
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