Getting Ready For 2010 — Preparation

Once up on a time, I used to write New Year’s res­ol­u­tions and try to dream up new and excit­ing plans for coming year. But, like most exer­cises in fantasy and “blue-sky” ima­gin­a­tion, these dreams seldom amoun­ted to much. Work and cre­ativ­ity are more about momentum and turn­ing up every day than big mountain-top wishes and “visions.”

That’s not to say that reflec­tion and plan­ning are not import­ant. But, unless you have a system for organ­ising your ideas into pro­jects, or a sense of where your work is already taking you, all the dreams and res­ol­u­tions you come up will be washed away the moment the tide of life comes rolling in.

That’s why in so many years, once the high of Christ­mas and New Year is past, Feb­ru­ary ends up look­ing a lot like Novem­ber and, if we are not care­ful, each year just starts to feel like and older and slower ver­sion of the last.

The Day

So, on Friday I blocked out the whole day to go through my pro­jects, plans and oblig­a­tions. These past six months have seen an explo­sion of new com­mit­ments, rela­tion­ships and oppor­tun­it­ies. That has been for­cing me to reas­sess some long stand­ing ways of working.

As I’ve writ­ten before, I’m com­mit­ted to the GTD, or Get­ting Things Done. This involves weekly reviews of out­stand­ing com­mit­ments. Some­times, how­ever you need a more sub­stan­tial review.

Col­lect

A crit­ical part of the GTD approach is to have a single col­lec­tion point for all the stuff that comes into your life. For me, that means a big phys­ical box (from G.O.D. in Hong Kong) and Omni­fo­cus, as an elec­tronic notepad.

Col­lec­tion means all the stuff in your life that is unpro­cessed. That could be emails, or camera memory cards, or broken clocks, or news­pa­per clip­pings, or bills, or unin­stalled soft­ware. It all gets col­lec­ted and made ready for review and processing.

To be honest, this is a tough pro­cess. I habitu­ally leave stuff all around the house, create piles of unread magazines or, worse still, mix up stuff I need to pro­cess with stuff that is ready to be filed (or just thrown out).

In fact, the last point — mixing up things that are at dif­fer­ent stages of being pro­cessing — is one of the major causes of home and work clut­ter. For me, it has been a common cause of stress.

For this review day, I took extra care to gather every loose and new thing up and inbox it, either phys­ic­ally or on the com­puter. In fact, that was a few hours work before the day itself.

With all that stuff col­lec­ted the night before, I booked a meet­ing room in the build­ing I live in, for a 7am start. Tomor­row I’ll out­line that review day in more detail.