I was thinking about all of the things I need to do and want to
do and all of the people/projects who want a piece of me and somehow before I became whelmed an idea! burst forth. I’m kicking it around now; we’ll see if it amounts to anything.
I’ve been toying with GTD methods for a handful of weeks now, and I’d have to say that it is pretty good stuff, with the exception that with my long project list (40 work-related items or so at last count, and growing), I can easily get “wrapped around the axle” trying to figure out where I would best be spending my efforts. David Allen maintains that one should determine priority based on your informed and felt sense of the shifting landscape of priorities, but I can’t keep it from shifting in my head much less in the actual workplace. So I’m casting about for ideas, methods to remind myself of some important facet of the project landscape to inform my decisions about priority.
The idea is to make a massive venn diagram with all of the projects/initiatives overlapping where they naturally do, ideally to find out where the points of greatest convergence are and attack those areas first for maximum benefit. Ideally the knots will reveal the areas for greatest leverage, where effort will move the greatest number of initiatives at once. Sort of a project utilitarianism, perhaps.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
