GTD Principle: Re-claiming Your Ability to Focus

I was just re-reading a section of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a book that was the catalyst behind the whole GTD movement, and came across a passage that I thought seemed particularly relevant to youth workers.

The main idea was that we can only hold so many items in our short-term memory at once. I’ve heard 2 or 3, and I’ve heard 8, but either way, there’s a ceiling on how many things we can hold in our attention at once. David Allen compares it to RAM in a computer.

As that RAM part of our brain gets full, we start to triage, only dealing with what we deem the most “urgent” at the moment. The result is that we don’t get around to doing some of the things are really important to us, especially those that don’t feel urgent (visiting students, praying, spending time with family, writing personal notes, self-improvement, etc.)

I think youth workers are especially prone to falling prey to this, as many of you have to be office managers, event planners, counselors, musicians, academics, spiritual gurus, writers, media experts and more, often in the same day. By focusing on everything we focus on nothing. This has the potential to set us up for real disaster in our personal and professional lives.

So how do you take back control and re-claim your ability to focus? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Develop a trusted system. A key principal of GTD is that if you can take those things demanding your attention, record them and put them into a trusted system (a place that you know you’ll come back to regularly), then you don’t have to keep worrying about it. I recommend the GTD system. You don’t even have to read the book to get started. Just check out the Wikipedia article, learn the basics and get started!

2. Write everything down! And I do mean everything. The first step to starting any productivity system is recording all the “stuff” that’s bouncing around in your head. Anything that you need to do, anything that demands your attention in any way needs to be gotten out of your head and on to paper.

If you aren’t keen on doing full-flegged GTD, try to do a “brain dump”. Sit down with a pen and paper and write down everything that’s tugging on your attention, everything that you need to get done. Often just seeing all of your obligations on paper can be really encouraging.

3. Say “no” on the front-end. If you’re like me, you often say “yes” to too many things. I’m currently working a full-time job, taking online classes, teaching multiple guitar lessons, starting a small business, planning a wedding, running a worship band, managing multiple websites, playing in side-bande, etc. If you’re like me, you also end up bailing on some of those obligations at the last minute and looking like a jerk.

Many of us need to learn to say “no” earlier rather than later. It’s good for us, and it’s a more respectful way for us to treat people.

4. Do a “spring cleaning” of your obligations. If you’ve already said “yes” to too many things and you’re feeling overwhelmed, take inventory of all of your obligations and cut some of them out of your life.

One of the adults in my youth group recently told me that she sat down and wrote out every obligation she had and then ranked them in two categories: how obligated she felt to doing it (on a scale of 1-10) and how much fulfillment she got out of it ( on a scale of 1-10). If you’re anything like her, you may be shocked at your results.

No matter what action you take, we all need to cull some of the noise in our lives. If you can take control and re-focus yourself on the things that really matter, you’ll see the results echo throughout every area of your life.