After nine months working remotely full time, I found myself drowning in paper. Handwritten notes, lists — so many lists — references, and sticky notes accumulated around me faster than time and mental capacity could process. But with a cluttered desk comes a cluttered mind. The added volume of email, meetings and chat messages weighed me down even more. I had lost the ability to be proactive or think past the most urgent task in front of me. Stressed and anxious, I was afraid I would drop one of the dozens of balls I struggled to keep in the air. I knew I was working harder than I should to achieve less than my workload demanded. Burned out and overwhelmed, I desperately needed a system to help me organize my work. My life raft came in the form of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, and Microsoft OneNote.
Distributed Cognition
Lucky for me, I write shit down. I know better than to rely on my memory for ideas, reminders, and action items. Because of this, I’ve been building an external mind to capture and store information. This process of getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats is referred to as “distributed cognition.” By capturing thoughts externally, you free up space in your mind for other ideas. Store thoughts in your mind and you’re likely to forget them or limit the flow of other ideas, ultimately limiting your productivity and creativity.
For example, you’ve surely needed to memorize a long number for a few moments. You repeat it in your head over and over, solely focused on this one thing. One distracting thought and boom, gone. Need to go to the grocery store? Try memorizing the five things you need and most likely there won’t be room for the thought that you’re also low on eggs. But go with an external list and your mind has the freedom to wander.
Thanks to my habit of writing everything down, I had already built a sort of external mind. Unfortunately, my external mind was a disorganized shit show of handwritten notes, lists — so many lists — references, and sticky notes. That’s where David Allen’s book, and Microsoft’s OneNote, came in and saved me.
Capturing Open Loops
Getting Things Done is an organization and productivity system. The book delves into painstaking detail at times and probably could have been shorter, but with thirty-five years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach, Allen knows his stuff. I took what I wanted from the book and left what I didn’t.
The first tactic I implemented that immediately paid dividends when it came to my productivity and reducing my stress was capturing my “open loops.” Allen defines open loops as “anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is.” Open loops are the thoughts that leap out at you at seemingly random times when you’re least likely to be able to act on them. Everything from planning a vacation, emailing an agenda in advance of tomorrow’s meeting, or picking up milk.
Not capturing these thoughts, to-dos, actions, etc. is like going to bed without an alarm clock. You spring up in the middle of the night afraid you overslept and have little peace of mind. That is precisely what was happening to me, but with work thoughts.
So I set to capture every “open loop” from my mind, scrap of paper or lingering list with Allen’s instruction. The more I captured, the more open loops sprang to mind (a benefit of distributed cognition) and the more confident I felt that tasks wouldn’t fall through the cracks. Already, I felt more in control of what I needed and wanted to do.
I created another document to capture meeting notes after experiencing the benefit of keeping notes electronically. I could keep everything together (in a searchable format) rather than shuffling through notebooks to find that note containing what that guy said in that meeting two (or was it three) weeks ago.
Do you know about OneNote?
I can’t be the only person who didn’t know about Microsoft OneNote. I only “discovered” OneNote late last year and it’s changed my life. In case you’re uninitiated like I was, it’s a digital note taking app where you can create digital notebooks and add sections to the notebooks, then pages to the sections. So long, Word docs! I keep everything in OneNote. I have a work account where I keep a master work notebook and a personal account where I have notebooks on everything from this website to ideas for my Youtube channel, Big Appetite. Small Kitchen., ideas, goals, etc. It also syncs to all my devices so I can access my notebooks anytime, anywhere as long as I can access my Microsoft account.
Next Actions
Once I formed the habit of capturing open loops and started using OneNote, the quality of my life improved. I’m serious. Despite being an organized, high-performing person, I was wasting a lot of time struggling to get organized, and causing myself a lot of unnecessary stress.
David Allen goes into great detail regarding what to do with open loops once they’re all captured; specifically, how to determine your next actions. According to Allen, the next action is the most immediate physical, visible activity required to move a task or project toward closure. It cannot depend on any other action. For example, if you have an open loop to talk with your child’s teacher, then the next action is most likely to email them and ask to meet.
This way of thinking about immediate next actions has helped me to move so much forward. Often my tasks and projects (personal and professional) are large and feel overwhelming. I sometimes don’t know where to begin. Getting in the habit of identifying immediate next actions has increased my productivity and decreased that sense of dread, and therefore procrastination (which we all know compounds stress and anxiety).
Staying Organized
At the end of any given day I may still find myself with pages of handwritten notes and dozens of unread emails. Staying organized requires proactivity. I take the time to transcribe notes into OneNote and am vigilant about the cleanliness of my inbox. Otherwsie, I can end up right back where I was — disorganized and stressed.
Now, having captured my open loops and updated my master next actions list, I am able to shut down my computer at the end of the day with peace of mind. No more waking in the middle of the night in a panic. No more starting my day with anxiety because I have no idea where to begin. It is a beautiful thing and one more lesson I learned to help me achieve a simpler, happier, more peaceful life.
