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How often have you struggled through a stressful day because there was something bothering you from the back of your mind? My guess is that this happens to everyone at one time or another. Perhaps it was an unpleasant task, or even just an idea for a project that you’ve been kicking around.

Where does the stress come from?

Part of the cause of the stress that you are experiencing is due to this unaknowledged commitment bouncing around in your head. Keeping something like this in your mental “RAM” is a waste of your psychic energy and a drain on your motivation. Part of the goal of the practice of Getting Things Done is to create a stress-free environment for you to do your real work, thinking. David Allen writes in Ready for Anything:

“Left only in the mind, these self-commitments create infinite loops that make to progress and produce inner conflict and stress. As soon as you make any sort of commitment with yourself, not completed in the moment, your mind will demand and take psychic energy until it’s resolved. That is mental karma.”
p. 27

How can this be overcome?

There is an elegant solution to the problem of having nagging worries and half-formed ideas in your head: Write it down. Grab a pencil and your Capture Notebook and jot down the idea, the project concept, the errand, whatever it is. Write down its name, what is involved, who needs to be informed, and when it needs to get done. After you have defined the thought, consider why it needs to be done, what will success look like, what is the proper context for tracking it, and what is the very Next Action that you can take to get closer to executing the goal. Taking these steps is extremely important if you have a bit of ADD.

Use the Workflow Method

Now that you have Collected and Processed the thought that has been bothering you, it needs to get Organized and placed into the proper category for action. Is this something that you can do in the next two minutes? If so, just do it! If not, which is much more likely, log it in your Calendar if it is time-specifiic, or add it to the proper Next Action list within its Context. Make a note to Review this thought at your next Weekly Review, and then move on to the next thing.

The benefits of trusting your system

Following these very simple steps can be an aid to clearing your mind and reducing the level of stress that you experience. From Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff:

“…there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress…As you lower your tolerance to stress, you will find that you’ll have far less stress to handle, as well as creative ideas for handling the stress that is left over.”
pp.53-55

When you can rely on yourself to use your capture system, and you trust that your system will work to provide you with the information that you need when you need it, your stress level will go down. Review your Workflow system on a quarterly basis, making sure that it is as invisible as it can be. Use your system, let it work for you.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike (/wink, nudge): Mike St. Pierre and Geoff are thinking about this too.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5flrx6. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen