DEALING EFFECTIVELY WITH INTERNAL COMMITMENTS

A basic truism faced by all is that most of the stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments one makes or accepts. Even those who are not consciously “stressed out” will invariably experience greater relaxation, better focus and increased productive energy when they learn more effectively to control “open loops” of their lives. Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop” pulling on your attention.

We’ve probably made many more agreements with ourselves than we realize, and every single one of them – big or little – is being tracked by a less=than-conscious part of us. These are the “incompletes” or “open loops” which is defined as anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it I, the way it is. Open loops can include everything from really big to-do items to the tiniest tasks. It is likely that we also have more internal commitments currently in play than we’re aware of. Consider how many things we feel even the smallest amount of responsibility to change, finish, handle or do something about. We have a commitment, for instance, to deal in some way with every new communication landing in our e-mail, on voice-mail, or in our in-basket. And surely there are numerous projects and tasks that we sense need to be defined in our areas of responsibilities, as well as goals and directions to be clarified, a career to manage, and life in general to be kept in balance.

We have accepted some level of internal responsibility for everything in our life and work that represents an open loop of any sort. In order to deal effectively with all of that, we must first identify and collect all those things that are “ringing our bells” in some way, and then plan how to handle them. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but in practice most of us don’t know how to do it in a consistent way.

Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviours, such as the following :-

# First of all, if it’s on our mind, our mind aren’t clear. Anything we consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside our mind, or what is called a collection bucket, that we know we’ll come back to regularly and sort through.

# Secondly, we must clarify what our commitments are and decide what we have to do, if anything, to make progress towards fulfilling it.

# Least but not less, one we’ve decided on all actions we need to take, we must keep reminders of them organized in a system we review regularly.

It all boils down to THINKING. Not a lot, just enough to solidify our commitment and the resources required to fulfill it. So, THINK BEFORE WE LEAP !!!

Extract Article : GETTING THINGS DONE – How To Achieve Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen 2001 Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd, UK.