Panic

On Thursday I posted a post which made little to no sense whatsoever.  I've since realised that this was actually a symptom of a good thing, rather than mad angry wooly thinking.  You see, it goes, a little something, like this...

It all started on Tuesday, when I set myself a little goal.  The goal itself isn't too ambitious, in fact you could say it is trivial, the only reason I made a resolution was more to make myself do it rather than anything else.  I set myself the deadline of two weeks from the following day - i.e. Wednesday - which seemed more than enough time.

Problems began on Wednesday morning, when I began to realise that the goal wasn't as simple as I had thought.  Nothing worth panicking about, but it would require two stages, a clear pre-requisite needed to be done first.

So far, so good, but it kept on like this; I kept identifying more and more blockages and pre-requisites.  By the end of Thursday I'd exhausted all my options, there was no actual path from where I was to my goal, hence my proclamation that everything was "off by one"; everything that I needed to do to make stuff happen was denied by each step being slightly out of place.  Nothing was where it needed to be to get things done!

This was made all the more annoying by the virtue that each of these little failures were minor, by most objective measurements, hence why I hadn't been too worried about them up until that point.  Everything was just slightly wrong, was literally one step off where I wanted it to be.  If I had big problems it would be no problem, but oh no, they were small, they just happened to make a direct attempt at solving my immediate goal impossible, that's all.

I've since schemed up a path, and still have one and half weeks to get it done, so everything should still be alright; but that sense of panic served a useful purpose, it identified several other areas - some a million miles away from the actual problem - which need solving too.  I can add all these things onto my todo list, and get round to them in due course (some are very un-urgent, years could pass before I get round to it or it causes problems).

But, if I were to adopt this practice of a two-week goal every fortnight, then my "Getting Things Done" system would be very complex indeed.  I've been meaning to write a post about my GTD system for some time, in fact I have a draft of one waiting, it's already 2,000 pages long.  I have the long-term list, the short-term list, miscellaneous assorted special sub-lists (lists of books to read, etc.), and now I'll also need a list of goals to be tackled in two-week sprints.

It's running the risk of getting overly complicated.  That can't be a good thing.