Task Collection Days
Some days are days of action. I rip through entire contexts of next actions and reduce the overall number of projects on my list. On these marvelous days, I’m left largely alone, and the lack of interruption allows me to get in a state of flow that makes me feel that all the work on my lists—even the difficult tasks—is effortless.
I have had no such days this week. No, this week has been a series of task collection days. I have gone through more than three times my usual amount of index cards on the Hipster PDA, and my lists are growing at a prodigious rate. As soon as I sit down to knock some projects out, someone sends an email or stops by my cube long enough to present me with yet another project for my list.
I’ve learned not to get frustrated about task collection days because they no longer mean stress for me. At no point am I wishing for the ability to blow up things with my mind, and that’s real progress. Task collection days—even concentrated strings of them—are part of the normal flow of accomplishing things. It’s impossible to ever be completely “done”. My task lists will never be empty because I wouldn’t allow them to be. In order for days of action to be possible, you have to have had more than a few task collection days to keep the highly productive you supplied. To use a computer metaphor, you’re pre-fetching your instructions for efficient processing.
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