GTD for Emotions

<cliche>The mind is a powerful thing.</cliche>  Everything that happens in this world - with the exception of natural influence - is directly related to the mind and its processes. Wars, peace, technology, cultures are all effects of the mind's processes. While a thought can be influential in these big situations, another thought can be even more effective in a smaller one: whether we choose to tell the truth or lie, how we choose our friends, how we choose to vote, when and how we get things done. The latter is something I want to talk about today.

By nature, I'm a procrastinator. I've spent many a sleepless night finishing up school projects that I've had months to work on. Most of the time, this system actually works out for me - I get a pretty good grade! However, the stress and general anguish that it creates in me is not worth the price of admission. If only someone could help me...

But then, I found a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. I'm sure you've heard of it, as procrastinating hipsters everywhere swear by it.

The main point of the book, in my humble opinion, is that while the mind is a powerful thing, it's also very limited in what it can do! We fill our minds with endless piles of "stuff" that we can't really keep track of. The mind no longer remains a well-oiled machine. So how do we fix this?

Write things down. Any detail, big or small, that you must or would someday like to do must be written down. No longer do you have to depend on your mind for organization - you have note cards! After you write these ideas down, you must process them and decide what needs to be done and what's the best next action. After you've trained yourself to do this, stress is supposed to decline and productivity is supposed to soar. Well, in theory.

After trying GTD for a good two months, I've fallen off of the bandwagon. Although my stress levels decreased, I found it hard remembering or even becoming organized enough to maintain the system. However, I firmly believe that this system is affective, and I resolve to get back on the trolley this week. Although, this time I'm going to add a twist!

Why are we to assume that work is the only thing that plagues our minds? That's the biggest joke I've ever heard. What about anger? depression? fear? panic? All of these things will affect the way we work regardless of the processes and projects that we've mapped out for ourselves. The same goes for happiness and excitement (I rarely work when excited about something!). Apparently, there is a hole in the GTD system.

That's why I propose what I call  "emotional processing" in addition to the processing of tasks. In GTD, you're supposed to write down any task you must or would like to do. However, I think the same thing should go for emotions.

My proposed steps for the Emotional Getting Things Done system:
1. When you begin the system for the first time, write down every emotion that still plagues you from your past (e.g. the death of a loved one), problems that are on your mind about current events or events in the very near future (e.g. worrying about failing that test this week), and problems in the forseeable future (e.g. dilemmas over how to spend your life). The examples that I listed are all bad feelings, but the same should go for happy ones: you are included in a promising opportunity, you just lost 30 lbs, etc.

2. During your day, whenever a meaningful emotion hits you, right it down immediately! "Gee, I sure am pissed that my best friend Billy would say something about <insert person>. I'm going to write down my anger so as to not let it fester and ruin my happiness/productivity." The Hipster PDA would be perfect for this.

3. Process: Look through all of your emotions and decide which are good and which are bad. The good emotions need no next step - throw them away or file them (haha, yeah right). The bad ones need one more step:

4. Resolution or next action: Write down how these emotions could be resolved. For example, if I were processing "I'm incredibly pissed at myself for failing that test," I'd write down, "It's ok. It's only one test. I'll just study harder next time, and I'll be on top of the world again."

5. If a bad emotion takes physical tasks to resolve, then add those steps to your GTD inbox and process them as a normal task. For example, maybe a feeling of guilt could be resolved by calling someone and apologizing - or just talking to a person about your problem in general. Or, maybe you're feeling lonely; schedule some time to spend time with friends!

I have no idea if this will work, but it seems very logical to me. The same idea applied to GTD also applies to this: get things out of your head. Productivity and happiness? That's something I'd love to maintain on a regular basis. It's the GTD equivalent of a journal.