There are too many things to keep track of
I am easily overwhelmed by the exponentially branching tree of things I must think about in order to get a single thought thunk or a single action performed. Maybe writing some of it down will be helpful, but a lot can happen between a thought and its recording.
I pulled my voice-recorder out of my bag today, because I was thinking about how typing things requires enough of my brain to chase the thoughts out of my head.
I need some system for keeping track of things in my head and sorting things out, for serializing and prioritizing and scheduling. At the moment I’ll think of one important thing and maybe it’ll make it onto my hand, but more likely it’ll be chased out of my head by another thought that seems equally urgent in just a few minutes. Worse, I know this is going to happen, and it taints exciting new ideas with fear and frustration.
Just this morning I thought to ask Tyler if there’s anything in the Bible that you couldn’t possibly figure out unless you knew some elusive culture fact. Remembering that I had thought of that question in the shower and then feared that I would forget it prompted this blog post. As soon as I thought the question, I feared I would lose it, so I repeated it to myself a couple of times, and then suddenly thought of something else which chased it out of my head until now. I’m full of these. What should I do with them? Tyler has been out of the office for hours, and I won’t remember to ask him this tomorrow.
Perhaps if I scheduled a time to read my TODO list, and whenever I thought of a new TODO I’d say it in the voice recorder and have another time to fill in the list… I’ve tried all sorts of things, though, and none of them have ever taken root in my life. Events get scheduled in my Google Calendar, which texts me when things are about to happen. I still miss some of those notifications because I’m so used to them that I ignore them, or because they come an hour before the event and I forget to set a more proximal alarm.
Problems with that: It’s hard to have a set time to do anything as seemingly trivial as a time to read and act upon my TODO list. It also doesn’t contain any method of prioritizing or pruning entries that require more than a couple of minutes to do, like replying to some email or writing a blog post…
How do I know how to prioritize things? I actually have a TODO list (I always do – it’s just not very useful), and it looks like this, copied verbatim:
——————————TODO:URGENT TASK: Play level 18 of Portal so Katie can beat itwordpress theme for crusade and ccflon my own time, learn:everything about rspec, remarkable, pickle and cucumbervim scripting, specifically how to run quick bash commands with strings from the document from a hotkey (I want a grep -r “<string>” *) http://bit.ly/aWZdq2how to make gemshow to use Nokogiripray for WALT for guidance during his exit from compacencypay stu $25 for the shaverpay ben $35 for the bike———————————-
There isn’t actually any urgency in my playing Portal, but making the ccfl and crusade websites is extremely important and will take weeks of hard work. There really should be a better place for non-daily prayers, but I don’t have one so it gets dumped here. I owe ben and stu money, and mentioning that to myself here doesn’t really ever help them to get paid, but it does keep track of the amount I still owe them, assuming I remember to update it every time I buy stu a sandwich… Who knows what should be in here?
This causes me a lot of stress, and I hope I figure it out. I’m sortof open to your suggestions, but I have tried a lot of things, and just getting the trivial organizational schemes that work for you just because you’re better endowed for this sortof thing may not feel that welcome. Writing about it has been helpful, though, so I guess writing does impose some order on the chaos.
Anyway, here ends the first of many rambly blog posts. The new philosophy is to prioritize the creation of blog posts over blog post quality.
I’ve been waiting for this.
Adam is next. And maybe we can Albert in on this too.
I can’t say that I have a solution to this. Wish I did. But I can definitely relate to what you’re feeling. The way we lose sight of things is different. Something pressing or exciting or painful seems to override what was whereas with me, a passivity blooms and brings forth a forgetfulness. In the end, we both are stressed and at points of despair.
I can’t say that I’ve grown substantially in this, but one theme that has grown is how much a dependence on God saturates everything. This memory problem that we exhibit is no different. God is sovereign over our thoughts and if we wish to produce this fruit in our lives, we must first remember that it is He who produces it and not some ability or gadget. And what this knowledge should point us to is prayer. These things come from God, so we seek them there. We pray earnestly first and foremost. Experience tells me that the rest follows.
What do you think?
I’m not sure I think this thing is spiritual for me. I felt like I was just ranting about how my systems don’t work and I get lost in even a little bit of chaos. I have the spiritual problem too, though.
What’d you mean when you said, “Adam is next…”? Next for what?
hey daniel,
i, too, am working on such a system. since becoming youth director, i can set my own hours, and do pretty much what i feel like for now, as long as i get my 20 hours in for the church. so i’m starting to implement something i learned from driscoll: the idea that each day is a bucket, and i can fill it with only so much stuff, and having a day a week for specific things. so i’m trying to have a day for sabbath, a day for going through old things/writing down thoughts/etc., a day for lesson prep for the yg, a day for meetings, and a day for catch-up (reading blogs, doing laundry, general maintenance stuff), which leaves two days for whatever life throws my way.
that helps me keep sane with a lot of things to do. if i don’t get something done on the day i’ve assigned, i could use part of the two spare days, or it’ll have to wait for next week. and then i only use that day for that purpose (no meetings on lesson prep day, no catch-up on sabbath day, etc.). and if i get a thought or a need for a non-day subject, i write it down, or put it in an email to myself, or something, and get back to it on the proper day.
i’m still working this out, but it seems like a good plan, and apparently a lot of leaders and successful dudes do stuff like that. i’ll try to find the rest of my notes from driscoll’s “don’t burn out” ministry ideas and send them to you.
Hmmm… That’s very interesting. I can’t do the same thing exactly because I work a 9-5 job (actually 11-7), but that combined with a thought from BBC that each day contains three modules (morning, afternoon and evening) making for a 24-module week, it could work for me.
The difference between this and, say, Google Calendar is that GCal gives me too much freedom. I can pick how long pre-scheduled events are going to be, but in reality I almost never know how long the events should be. This way I’m forced to make each event a third of my day, which is not likely to underestimate. I’ll give that some serious thought.
I mentioned other problems in this post, though, like thoughts coming too quickly and not having a good system for taking them down in time. Still have to solve those problems.