How to Get Things Done When You Have Trouble Getting Things Done

Struggling to complete tasks can be a daunting experience. Discover strategies to overcome procrastination, enhance productivity, and transform your approach to work. Let's delve into the art of getting things done, even when it seems impossible.

Some people seem to be natural doers

When there’s something that needs doing, they get uncomfortable and start doing it

• The gravity in the doer’s inner world draws them in the direction of action
• For those of us who have always struggled to get a reasonable volume of stuff done, whether it’s because of ADHD, depression, or natural temperament, the prospect of becoming a productive person is extremely appealing

The Bandwidth Problem

The standard how-to book contains too much new stuff for a human brain to take in once

• Implementing a single habit is hard, even if it is simple
• We non-naturals can get things done with simpler tools
• Instead of aspiring to become a ringmaster and expert plate-spinner, we can become a sort of expert one-trick pony

Try it my way

After disclosing his ADHD diagnosis, I received a flood of emails from people with similar executive function issues.

• I decided to create a guide meant for the productivity non-naturals among us
• For now it’s a brief ebook, but depending on early feedback I may polish it into a one-day course or whatever format seems most helpful to people
• Dramatically increase your productivity
• Create this dramatic increase in a week or less
• Provide the know-how in a resource you can read in one sitting and implement today

The Gold Standard

David Allen’s landmark book Getting Things Done

• Gives a watertight system for gathering all of your obligations into a giant funnel and cranking them through a coordinated workflow system so that pure success gushes out the bottom
• I love the system, and I’ve spent much of my adult life fantasizing about having it in place.
• Then at some point I forget to check a few of the interconnected lists and folders, and soon my work becomes another pile of papers with important things written on them that I will get to someday
• This pattern seemed to happen with every productivity book I tried

How the Other Half Works

There are two reasons some of us don’t do well with the popular workflow approaches

• Selection bias
• Mass market books are always gargantuan projects, each of which depends entirely on the timely output of one self-starting person
• It also takes some productivity-related clout to even get the book deal, so productivity books tend to be written by natural doers
• The Pomodoro Technique is relatively lean, at about 150 pages, and it’s that much better for it

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