This week’s Blogger Friend School assignment:

Intro: Sometime “being all you can be” is a challenge.  We are trying to balance being a godly wife, mother, teacher, keeper of the home,  and much more.  None of us are perfect and we all struggle in our own ways with being able to achieve what we feel needs to get done.

Assignment: This week I thought we could share what great ways we have found to help with all we have to do.  Besides the obvious getting face down in front of God, what have you found that works?  Have you done a great bible study that deals with this area?  Do you have a certain “thing” that  really helps you like a planner or gadget?  Do you have a certain bible verse that just speaks to you and you have it posted so you see it all the time?  Is there a website that is really valuable to you in this area?   What do you do that if someone else found out about it, they could benefit from it?

I am one who has tried scheduling (like Managers of Their Homes) without success.  These systems are great, but they don’t work well with my personality.  I prefer a (much!) more fluid form of to-do’s.  And yet I still need to plan — everyone needs to plan!  So what works for me?  I discovered Getting Things Done some time ago, and it revolutionized my thinking, from a productivity perspective.  I’m not exaggerating; it was a huge eye-opener.

The two most significant things I got out of his system are Next Actions and Contexts.

Next Actions

The key to Next Actions is that they’re just that — the next action.  How many times have you written a necessary phone call down on your to-do list, only to repeatedly put it off because you never get around to looking up the telephone number?  That phone call wasn’t the next action — looking up the number was!  This is only one example, but this was a huge “light bulb moment” for me.  Much of my procrastination was a result of keeping an inaccurate picture of what I needed to do next.  When I began writing down what was truly the next action, I immediately began getting more done — even with a bran-new baby!

Contexts

Contexts are the other significant thing I picked up.  These are what makes Allen’s system very different (in my opinion) from most productivity/time management systems.  With most systems, you have a to-do list.  Maybe you have two — a longer, ongoing to-do list and a list for today.  And if you’re like most of us who don’t do well on this sort of system, you usually have to rewrite most of today’s tasks onto tomorrow because you didn’t get them done.  And then you have to rewrite them onto the next day, and so forth.  And you begin to feel like a failure because you “didn’t accomplish anything.”  But maybe you did accomplish something.  Maybe you accomplished very many somethings; they just weren’t the somethings you originally had on your list.  Doing away with the daily to-do list also does away with this problem.  But I don’t go entirely without a list — then I’d never remember what I need to do!  That’s where contexts come in.

Contexts are, essentially, the longer, ongoing to-do list.  Everything you need to do goes onto your list.  What makes it really different is that the list is broken up.  Many people use this concept to some degree when they make a list of phone calls they need to make, but this system classifies everything according to context.  Generally speaking, a context is a set of resources you need at your disposal to complete the tasks in that group.  For example, telephone calls, computer stuff, anywhere, etc.

Contexts for the Household

Where I have modified this system a bit is with my household tasks.  Getting Things Done was designed with the corporate world in mind; it wasn’t really designed for those who have an entire lifestyle composed of household tasks!  Consequently, my “at home” context could potentially be enormously long and overwhelming, and I would lose the advantage of having contexts in the first place, which is to be able to quickly look over the entire list of things you have to do which you currently can do, and pick one.

So I have a context for each day of my “work week,” which is set up with the probably-now-familiar one-kind-of-task-for-one-day system.  Mondays are for laundry (and cleaning in the laundry room), Tuesdays are for errands, Wednesdays are for kitchen work, Thursdays are for office/desk work, and Fridays are for general cleaning.  I have a context for each of these days (with several different ones for office work — telephone, paperwork, and computer).  That way, as a task occurs to me, I can write it down on the appropriate context list and then proceed to ignore it entirely until the appropriate day.  On Wednesdays, for instance, I can just flip to the “Kitchen” list and work through kitchen tasks without having to muddle through the paperwork list.  And so on.

The system is not perfect.  And I am certainly not perfect, so even a perfect system couldn’t work perfectly. 🙂  But, overall, this works for me. 🙂