Our Mommyhood

By Mommie V, Staff Writer, My Little Slice of Mommie Heaven, (@mommiev1)

Have you ever been somewhere and thought, “I need to do X when I get home”? And then forgot all about it? Working mamas, ever been sitting at your desk knowing there was something you needed to do, but your entire to-do list relates to home items?

This is the first post in a series on Mommie Productivity. As I began to write the posts about the tools that I use to try to keep things straight, I realize that I rely heavily on a particular philosophy/system of personal productivity. Explaining my use of the tools will perhaps be easier if I first explain the system – or, my version of how I have adopted and use the philosophy behind the system.

I first read the book Getting Things Done by David Allen when I first became an academic administrator. Lots of people had recommended it. Lots of geeks and scientists use it. People devote entire blogs to implementing it. Most people on the web refer to it as GTD for short, and everyone has their version of how to “do” it that works for them.

I honestly didn’t find that it helped my productivity any at the time. Sure, my huge planner looked nice and organized, but I didn’t see an impact in my ability to actually, you know, get things done. So I abandoned the system and didn’t give it another thought.

Until I had a baby, went back to work  and found that I really wanted to limit my wasted time at work to get back home to my snuggly little wee one. So how can I become more productive? Suddenly I realized that a selection of the concepts in the GTD system were helping me to be productive, both at work and at home.

Helpful Concept #1: Contexts. This is the aspect of the system that addresses the questions that open this post. You spend your life in different contexts. Shouldn’t your to-do list be organized in the same way? What’s the point of looking at a long list of to-do items that requre a computer if you’re not near a computer? Or a list of work to-do’s that bury the one item you need to work on at home?  A single phone call buried in a list that includes “buy peanut butter”? It’s no wonder our eyes glaze over when we look at a task list; it’s hard to sort out what we need to do given the time and place where we are and the amount of time available.

Allen’s solution is to organize your to-do list by Contexts. @Home is a separate list from @Work. @Phone should list your phone calls and @Computer might list tasks requiring a … okay, you get the idea. There are electronic methods of doing this (covered in the next post) or you can just devote the next page of your planner or notepad to a different context.

I thought the idea sounded convoluted and ridiculous when I first started trying to organize my task list in this way. At the time I was single and a workaholic, and I was pretty much always near a computer and/or working, so I didn’t really need to organize things in that way. Now that I have to try to accomplish tasks in small snippets of time, and I am trying desperately to keep home and work life separate, it suddenly makes tons of sense to me. Funky Mama Bird wrote a post once about all the hats she wears – it might make sense to have a different to-do list for each of those hats.

Helpful Concept #2:  The Mind-Dump. That’s what I call it, at least. The heart of Allen’s productivity program rests on the idea that your mind can really only hold a few items in attentive memory at a time; the rest will be forgotten. If you want to truly remember something, you need to write it down and put it someplace where you will come across it in a time/place (context) where you can deal with it. Everything; write it down. Once a week, or more often if it works for you, you gather up your post-it notes, your scraps of paper, your emails and voice mails and half-done lists and you “process your inbox”. You go through all the items and put them on context lists or figure out what needs to be done with them.

I loved this part of the system. I’m never far from a piece of paper. If I am, I use my phone. Have a thought? Write it down. Don’t have to spend the effort and energy to remember it.

I had an “inbox”, i.e. a wire tray on my desk at work, and I had a notepad in my planner.  Between the two of them I collected lots of little pieces of paper.  I would process twice a week, once on Friday morning to make sure I wasn’t forgetting to finish something important by the end of the week, and once on Sunday evening to plan the week ahead.

I haven’t been as diligent about this part of the plan lately.  I’ve been really bad about trying to keep things in my head.  So you can imagine I have been horribly bad about forgetting things also.  When I get like this, I get anxious, my blood pressure goes up and either my kid or I don’t sleep well (sometimes both).  I’ve started carrying a small pad of post-its in the pocket of the diaper bag, one in my work bag and one on the kitchen counter. When I get things out of my head and down on paper, I feel SO MUCH better. You know the items will be dealt with as you “process” and put things on your contextual task lists.

Helpful Concept #3: Next Actions. Do you ever write something on a to-do list and keep skipping it? Go back and look at that item; is it really just a task? Allen makes the distinction between projects, which require multiple steps and individual tasks that he refers to as Next Actions. Anything you write on your context lists should be Next Actions.

I really believe that there has to be some psychology behind this concept. Even if there isn’t, I know that it works for me. If I write “Schedule a meeting for X”, I manage to skip that item on the list time and time again.  It’s too big, and the way it’s written, too amorphous. What is really the thing to DO there? Call the secretary to schedule the room? Write an email to see when people are free?  If you want to be more productive and get things done, write your task list so it’s a list of things to get done.

I suggest giving the book a read, since I have really only lifted a few relevant ideas and explained them in my own way. The next few posts in the series will outline some tools I use to be more productive using some of these helpful concepts.

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