In my push to exert more willpower in my life and tackle lingering todo items, I’m drawn back to an ever-present problem: how to keep track of everything on my plate.  In thinking about this, and cleaning out old blog ideas, I came across another old (October, 2010) article in my bookmarks: Is there such a thing as a sustainable todo system?

The author talks about Getting Things Done by David Allen, a workflow system based on getting all your tasks documented in a system, having a methodology for choosing the next task, and performing regular reviews of the state of your tasks.  All this is supposed to free your subconscience mind from having to try and track all these things and worry aout them.  In theory, it de-stresses you and makes you more productive by allowing you to just focus on the task at hand, because there’s nothing else to fight to remember to do (it’s all written down and reviewed regularly, right?).

Like the author above, I’ve been using GTD for a few years and I’m not always great at reviewing my tasks and getting everything written down.  I, too, need to reset things a bit.  So, tomorrow morning, I’ll be firing up my favorite GTD system (org-mode for Emacs), cleaning it up, documenting the todos littering my notepads and setting a time for my weekly review.  The more I used org-mode/GTD to drive my day in the past, the less time I spent rearranging tasks in my head (and on paper) and the more time I spent doing them…  Willpower, baby.