My absolute favorite book on personal productivity is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The system it lays out is excellent for getting organized and more productive. It was my productivity bible for several years, as I began my career.
But there’s something at the core of the GTD system that a lot of people don’t quite grasp the first time around. In fact, it’s a deeper truth about productivity in general that gets missed quite often: The goal of a good personal productivity system is to allow you to relax.
Relaxation, Focus, and Power
That’s right, the goal isn’t to check more boxes, or cross more things off of lists, or even get engaged in more activities. Those are means to an end. The end is relaxation.
Why? Well for one, being relaxed feels great. But more importantly, relaxation makes it easier for you to do two supremely important things: focus and generate power.
Being able to focus allows you to make sense of what’s happening in your life. It allows you to separate the signal from the noise, so you can prioritize, strategize, and make important decisions.
Generating power is important when you need to push yourself or others to grow. No productivity system will prevent hard work. But a really good one allows you to conserve your power so that you can use it on the most important things, and little else.
And it all comes from the ability to consistently be relaxed.
The Nagging Problem
One of my favorite quotes from Getting Things Done is this one:
“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.”
The more you can relax, the more powerful you can be when power is necessary. But relaxing requires not having a bunch of things nagging at you.
Now, there are two ways that things can nag at you: They can be on your mind or in front of you. In order to relax and prepare to generate power today, it’s important to address both of those modes of nagging.
You can address the things that are on your mind by writing them down. GTD is an excellent system for doing that. Capture everything as soon as it pops into your head, and have a trusted place where it all goes to turn into action or a reminder of some sort.
But systems like GTD don’t address the second way things nag at you and prevent you from relaxing. If you have a huge list of things in front of you, even things arranged and filtered by context, they are all still pulling at your attention. You won’t be able to relax.
This is where the Today System’s Card comes in. A separate index card for each day.
Small on Purpose
The Today card is small on purpose. It allows for just 9 items maximum, and in a small space. This prevents your mind from being overwhelmed. A maximum of 9 things in a small space today; you can handle that.
And by putting those items on the card, you’ve agreed that these are the things that matter most. So you can relax knowing that all you need to do today is look at the card, and do what’s on it.
That’s why the card has to be separate. Because separate and small is manageable. Separate and small allows you to relax, which allows you to generate power, and get things done.
This card is separate from wherever you keep your list of projects, reference material, ideas list, etc. It must be separate. It alone is your focus for today.
Tomorrow is another card. So is next Tuesday, and some day next year. They will all have their own cards. So you don’t have to think about them. Just think about today’s card and relax. With that relaxation comes the power to keep on achieving more.
Everything big started small. So stay small today, on just your card, and allow yourself to start building something big.
