Getting Things Done

Banish the word struggle from your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

Hopi Elder



Shelley doesn’t believe me, but I used to be a procrastinator par excellence. That’s before I learned how to break things down. I was taking a two-day workshop on Getting Things Done by David Allen. (I have known David for over 30 years and he has written a bestselling book by the same name). Despite David’s clear and enormously entertaining presentation my head was spinning at all the things I now had to do to get my head clear. I was getting a little spaced out on his lecturette on project management. Somehow my ears tuned to his last words of the lecture, and the workshop, “Even a project for a journey to Mars begins with, ‘Call Fred.’”

The light came on. I wasn’t a great manager or a whiz with technology but knew how to “call Fred.” It then seemed that every few weeks I would read a great article explaining how to break things down into manageable amounts and if it is still unmanageable break it down even further. Even learning Tai Chi Chuan my Internal Boxing instructor, Bob Engel, a former special education teacher, was meticulous about breaking things down for me so I could grasp the moves. Overwhelm ceased. It was all a matter of breaking things down.

That led to Life Design Principle # 5 which states:


There is a simple next step to everything, and
that simple step can always be taken in a relaxed way


Whenever I am taken by a feeling of overwhelm, resistance, a voice telling me it can’t be done, or procrastination, I go over the principle in my head, sometimes several times, sit still with what needs to be done until I get the simple next step, and then do it—in an as relaxed way as I can.

Small Acts

The flaw with words is that they always make us feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we wind up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a warrior seeks to act rather than talk, and to this effect, he gets a new description of the world--a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.

Don Juan in Carlos Casteneda's Tales of Power

For however long I can remember I have found solace in philosophy and day-dreaming. I have long struggled with the idea that one has to "do" something. Believe me, I would much rather make it up in my head. And I did--and enjoyed it. Only recently have I found that I had been imprisoning myself. I had limited my options.

It dawned on me one day that I lived in a world of action, of doing. That everything I perceive with my senses is in constant movement and change. Things weren't getting done in my head, which was becoming more and more like cotton wool, despite the wonderful stories I had made up. And so I found that a small, purposeful act, one in the direction I wanted to go, (for example, it could be Halfland), opened up new options and, as Casteneda says, "new reflections." And I broke out of my prison. Sometimes it is just a minute or 5 minutes that opens doors and possibilities. After all, our life here is just one single moment after the next.

Ulysses

In James Joyce's Ulysses published in 1922, Odysseus the hero of Homer's great classic The Odyssey is recast as Leopold Bloom, an aging salesman. As Matt Blanchard describes in the book The Intellectual Devotional:

Though Bloom seems unassuming and ordinary, he emerges as a heroic figure, displaying compassion, forgiveness, and generosity toward everyone in the odd cast of characters he meets. In his mundane and often unnoticed deeds, he practices an everyday heroism that is perhaps the only heroism possible in the modern world.

I am interested in the everyday heroic acts that are found in the ordinariness of life. Shelley was a hero this weekend. She took a microscopic step in the direction of Halfland. The significance was not in the distance but in the direction.