Back to blogging

It's been a long time since I last posted on my blog and I hope that I will be able to get back to posting regularly from now on. 

It has been a very busy and exciting 22 months for me.  I gave birth to a little girl at the end of 2013 and my world was turned upsidedown in the nicest possible way! 

After returning to work toward the end of last year, I have been trying to get the best balance between work and home. GTD has been an integral part of ensuring that I can work as productively as possible, and then allowing me to forget about work while at home and be fully present when I spend time with my family.  Our little girl is growing and changing so fast that I treasure every moment with her and am so grateful for my system that gives me the freedom to leave all my work behind.

Changing up contexts

While completing my weekly review last week I made a fairly radical change (for me) to the way my lists are managed.  As I reviewed my @office list, which had extended to over four pages and was not pleasant to work from, I made the decision to change things up and split the contexts.  It's not something I would normally do.  The @office has been working well for me for a couple of years so this was a pretty big step, but it was worth it.  My workload has been steadily increasing over the past 6 months and one office list just isn't quite cutting it anymore.  So I now have 3:

- @office

- @websites

- @minutes

These are the contexts that make the most sense given what I have on my plate right now, but I am giving myself the freedom to change them up as things shift around, and return to just one list if things calm down.  I already feel much more comfortable and more engaged with my lists and managed to get an action done yesterday afternoon that had been on the list for rather too long!

 

It took my review to get me thinking at that higher level for long enough to realise that I needed to make the change. The review is such an important part of my GTD journey; it gives me the chance to hold back the world for an hour every week and check that everything is on track.  I often find I am my most productive in the hours after the review, secure in the knowledge that what I am doing is what I should be doing, and what I am not doing can wait.

Organising my personal life

I just read a really great article by Augusto Pinaud on GTD Times, entitled "When you feel like you are losing control & lacking perspective."

It resonated with me particularly as I have really struggled with implementing my GTD system at home. At work I have found implementation has fitted well into my professional life and made an enormous difference to the way I organise myself and keep track of my commitments. However, I have found rather a barrier in my home implementation. I have tried to bring my ideas home and in some areas it has worked (for example, I no longer have an large pile of paperwork cascading across the dining table), but the sense of ease that I have with my professional work (most of the time) has been hard to come by at home.

The fact that Augusto also found it difficult to bring GTD into his personal life has allowed me to be less hard on myself and given me a spur to work at it more. Let the journey continue!