A Matter of Trust

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been using the methods David Allen writes about in his book Getting Things Done to try and organize my life a little better. In the earlier post, I promised more about this, however, I’m not going to explain it in too much detail. There’s a lot of really good GTD information out there already, and I don’t think I have much of substance to add to the discussion of tools, methods, and reasons why.

One of the biggest revelations I got from reading the book was the idea of the “trusted system.” You move all of your thoughts and commitments from your head into a trusted system, so as not to overburden your memory, or “mental RAM.” In doing so, you are (supposedly) reducing your mental/psychological stress level, because you don’t have to remember things as they need to be remembered – your system takes care of that for you. This is a simple, yet powerful idea, and one that’s taking a lot of getting used to. I’ve spent the better part of 30 years of my life doubting my own abilites. Now I’m supposed to trust a “system?”

My workload, both at the office and outside, has gotten really huge lately – lots of little projects taking up most of my precious time. Ordinarily, I’d be running around like a madman, stressing about this or that little detail.

But I ‘m not.

It’s freaking me out, because I feel like I should be more stressed than I am. Talking to Carla about it tonight, I realized that this could be the “mind like water” that David Allen talks about – the calm, focused mindset that only worries about things when you can do something about them. This is supposedly the ultimate goal of GTD. How could I be here already?! There’s got to be some mistake – maybe I’m not focused, just forgetful (…my inner critical voice can sabotage anything…).

Maybe Allen should write a follow-up book: Getting Used to Getting Things Done, all about how we learn to trust ourselves enough to trust our “trusted system.”