I have too much to do. It started back when I got the flu and bronchitis back in January. I was sick until mid-March. But even if you're sick, the work doesn't go away. Even working at full speed from March until now (end of June), I'm still behind. Here's my plan for getting out from under:
- Brain-dump everything I have to do onto one (well, could be several!) pieces of paper. This is from David Allen's Getting Things Done.
- If I have due dates, make another pass and put due dates next to things, so I can sort by relative importance.
- Organize the list by importance if necessary.
- Use Mark Forster's autofocus system to do what I can and what I have energy for, until I either reach a timebox or a wait state.
I know what I have to achieve, if there are dates that I have to meet, and I have my entire todo list in front of me. Now all I have to do is finish things :-)
Absolutely right... you will make much better decisions about what to do next if you can see all of your commitments in one place.
But with respect to #2... Don't confuse "importance" with "urgency". Many, many, many things with due dates are not really important at all.
I share your pain: I too have a 6 month+ "backlog" of stuff caused by my other half spending some time in hospital Jan-Jun.
I doubt that there is a panacea for getting things done, certainly not one that works for everybody. However, there are a variety of approaches that seem to offer something for a lot of folks, GTD being one of them...and one that you've noticed. Having a single "in" box, albeit a rather large one, has helped - for physical "in" items (mail, etc.) I use a large red storage box clearly and largely marked "in". I use a separate box for "reading" and purge it frequently - not through reading a lot, but through re-evaluation "is this important to me now?"
Combining approaches has some mileage as it allows us to customise techniques at an individual level, i.e. we can make something that works for us. Again, you've noticed this already!
So to add to your bag of tricks, I would like to suggest the Pomodoro Technique: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ - in combination with GTD, it is proving useful in helping me get through the huge list of H1/2009 things that I need to get done. It won't help you do things in the correct order, but it will, even at its simplistic implementation, help us focus for 50 minutes out of 60 minutes.
Whilst I was sceptical at first, after a few trials, I'm happy to recommend it. I use a digital timer from http://robcthegeek.com/TomatoTimer/ A manual timer does have the benefit that it can be placed in such a position that other office users can see you are "in a pomodoro" without actually walking up to you...which can be handy. Personally I find the walk up interruptions cause the greatest loss of focs/concentration, etc.
HTH, your mileage may vary!
Rgs
--Craig
http://www.twitter.com/camurphy
I am a firm believer in the list - if it's not on the list it doesn't get done.