The Calm Amidst the Storm
September 17th, 2008 Maurice.GavinCategories | Cognitive Science | Getting Things Done | Psychology of GTD | inspiration
David Allen says
“You’d probably find yourself with a much larger list of things you had taken on to get done as a result of feeling so great from getting the existing stuff done” (paraphrased)
You author concurs, but has an additional thought:
You might learn something about ‘completion’: “the calm amidst storm”
You see when I ask people in a seminar what they would feel like were I to wave a wand over their heads and complete everything that needs to get-to-done in their worlds, they seem to have a visceral experience from the inside out right before my eyes.
They seem to experience the joy, the peace, the rest of completion without actually having completed anything (unless some of them can travel at Star Trek or Star Wars speeds at an individual level and like the comic book hero the Flash, can move faster than my eyes can see).
Thus I conclude that this feeling of completion could be experienced at will from the inside out on demand.
One of the subtleties of framing desired outcomes as completion statements is that the statement itself moves one’s focus into pre-experiencing completion. In fact for those who truly articulate the completion they are intent on achieving, they literally experience the benefits of completion every time they look at the list of projects needing completion.
Is this how your to-do list makes you feel?
It could…
Simply script your projects and even your next action statements in the completed past tense with any necessary descriptive bells and whistles embedded.
Then watch how they begin to allow you to experience completion before completion has been realized.
Further, if your next actions are crafted in an attractive enough manner, they actually begin to entice you to engage with the incomplete items as soon as time presents itself. Often this emerges out of a desire to actually experience the reality of completion on the physical versus just the psychological plane (which beats the fear of deadline approach any day in my book).
The feeling this produces is my definition of the “calm amidst the storm”.
Maurice shared this concept in a seminar he did for my organization. It was one of several that he came up with that made the seminar well worth the time to attend (I have been practicing GTD for a while).
I have been using this practice for some time in my calendar and have found it to be quite useful, especially in cases where the action appears to be mundane. In some cases it has meant the difference between completing the action or not.
However, I have found that there is no need to write the action in the past tense for every item, and I reserve this technique for items that are difficult to finish for one reason or another(in the psychological sense.)
Francis