Productivity - Pushing Away "Urgency Disease"

I used to spend a lot of energy worrying that I wasn't productive enough and thinking about how to get just a little more done. I thought if I could just get a little more done, if I could just get a handle on it, then my life would be better. And I was over-caffeinated and over-stressed, trying to do just that.

From what I hear from my friends and in my work as a therapist, we all feel like we have too much to do, that there are too many commitments, and that things are pressing in on us. That's why we spend time thinking about our our productivity. I didn’t coin this term, but I often call it “urgency disease” or “urgency sickness” when the mass of unimportant “stuff” presses in, all of a sudden making everything else feel more urgent. Maybe you think that if you don't do it RIGHT NOW, it won't get done at all. Maybe you lie awake wondering how that person is going to respond to your snarky email that you didn't mean to be snarky, feeling stressed out about the 8 gazillion things you have to do. Also, and this is one edge of it I find that we don’t always talk about – we constantly are feeling guilty. When we have too much to do, and we don’t do it, we are constantly breaking commitments, to others and to ourselves.

The point of A Space Within is to suggest that maybe productivity tools aren’t about us getting more done.... so that we can get more done. Maybe we can use them to create some inner space for ourselves, so that we can concentrate on what’s really most important for us. I think sometimes we use being too busy as a way to not examine our lives, inner-needs, and our commitments. If we’re always running along the hamster wheel, we don’t have to think about why we’re doing this dead end job instead of writing a novel. Or we don't have to think about if this job actually reflects our values when we're immersed in the stress of the everyday reality of it. When we’re always at work, we don’t have to work on our painful relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.

I personally use David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, very strictly. There's like a whole productivity cult that's sprung up around it on the internet. There are a lot of great GTD 101 articles on the internet (my favorite is 43 Folders' "Getting started with "Getting Things Done," but what I really recommend is going to the library or a bookstore or Amazon, and picking it up. I think if you can’t find the time to read a book that can help you keep your commitments and push away the sense of guilt and hurry that pervades your life, that’s exactly why you need to read that book.

I read the book my first year of graduate school, then again my second year, trying to bring my implementation of GTD to the next level. (If you'd like to read more about my implementation of GTD, here's an article on that) Here’s what made the most difference on day one to my urgency sickness and guilt - ubiquitous capture. Every time I thought “Oh, I should ____(email my advisor, write an article, get that published, call my mom)” I wrote it down in one place. And then reviewed those things at regular intervals. Just that simple tool – getting it off your mind and into a trusted system. I really think of this as an incredible mindfulness practice – it helps me notice what I’m thinking about – if it’s something I need to do, it gets put in my inbox.

David Allen uses a height metaphor to describe the focus by which you look at your life - different distances above the ground. And where you are having trouble is where to focus. My experience (and David's) is that people first need to have a system for the granular aspect of what they actually need to do before they can soar to "what's my life's purpose." We need just a bit of space with stuff not pressing in on us, so we can examine what our life has been about, and what we want it to be about.

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