Choosing the Right Task
While thumbing through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I came across this excellent bit of advice in the Introduction:
In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.
This actually isn’t a bad guideline for life. We should be taking on tasks that excite us—whether positively or negatively. Life is too short to waste time on neutral tasks. We should do the tasks we love because they nurture our creativity, and we should do the tasks we hate because we often only think we hate them as some perverse form of self defense that only holds us back from the person we truly dream of being.
This guideline could also be applied to GTD next action lists to great effect. When trying to decide which next actions to do off of your list in a certain context, ask yourself which actions excite you and gravitate toward them first. Listen to your internal still small voice as you move through these next actions and use what you learn in order to take on more projects that will excite you. Learning what type of projects excite you is the gateway to discovering your purpose or mission in life, which just an overly inflated way of referring to the person you truly want to be.
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