GTD and “Reducing Mental Debt”

While I’ll mostly cover topics here that are directly related to ExpressionEngine development, I do sometimes want to venture out to more general topics that may apply to your life as a web professional.

A large part of our working lives is spent organizing projects and tasks and then completing them. It’s an absolutely essential part of our business and it’s why the GTD methodology has become so popular among people in our field of work.

Think about how complex a website project can be. There are many different phases of a project: securing the project, discovery, design, templates, client approvals, revisions, development, deployment, getting paid. Many of these happen simultaneously and it can quickly become overwhelming.

The first reaction when overwhelmed is to freeze and protect. You become paralyzed by having so much to do and you protect yourself by doing none of it. Sound familiar? I’m sure it does because it’s something we all do: procrastination. 

Leslie Camacho (EllisLab) had a thoughtful post on his personal blog that covered this very topic and how he applied a fix to his personal unfinished tasks:

[W]e should consider approaching our tasks as reducing mental debt. We have all this “debt” and the gut instinct might be to try to go for the big items first, but that’s exactly the wrong thing to do, as any decent financial planner will tell you. We should tackle the small stuff first and chip away until we’re back in the black.

[...]

I needed to get my “GTD” life back in order and I’ve been furiously chipping away at my personal mental debt. I reclaimed my office space, cleared out all of last year’s files, plowed through an old inbox, hung a new calendar, organized the dog area, and have done a 100 other little things.

This same approach can be applied to how you work in your day-to-day life as a web professional.