The following excerpt is from Chapter 1: The Art of Getting Things Done.
The Principle: Dealing Effectively with Internal Commitments
A basic truism I have discovered over twenty years of coaching and training is that most of the stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept. Even those who are not consciously "stressed out" will invariably experience greater relaxation, better focus, and increased productive energy when they learn more effectively to control the "open loops" of their lives.
You've probably made many more agreements with yourself than you realize, and every single one of them -- big or little -- is being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you. These are the "incompletes," or "open loops," which I define as anything pulling at your attention that doesn't belong where it is, the way it is. Open loops can include everything from really big to-do items like "End World Hunger" to the more modest "Hire New Assistant" to the tiniest task such as "Replace Electric Pencil Sharpener."
It's likely that you also have more internal commitments currently
in play than you're aware of. Consider how many things you feel even
the smallest amount of responsibility to change, finish, handle, or do
something about. You have a commitment, for instance, to deal in some
way with every new communication landing in your e-mail, on your
voice-mail, and in your in-basket. And surely there are numerous
projects that you sense need to be defined in your areas of
responsibility, as well as goals and directions to be clarified, a
career to be managed, and life in general to be kept in balance.
You have accepted some level of internal responsibility for everything in your life and work that represents an open loop of any sort. In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and collect all those things that are "ringing your bell" in some way, and then plan how to handle them. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but in practice most people don't know how to do it in a consistent way.
Read more from chapter one here, or get the book...
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