Taking the Hundred-Year View
A Practice for Quieting the Noise of Life and Gaining Focus on What Really Matters
For the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bit of a personal and professional crisis. You see, over the past 6 to 7 years, I’ve become quite good at recording and tracking my projects and actions. I’ve done it in various programs and notebooks. I practice ubiquitous capture — making sure I don’t lose what could be the next great idea, or the next thing I need to get done.
But much like a garden variety hoarder — who saves every little thing they believe they might use one day — I’ve become surrounded by projects and actions that quite simply don’t matter. And like that hoarder with a house full of collected trinkets and trash, I simply can’t bear to part with them, so they stay on my list. And the list of projects and actions keeps growing and growing.
And it’s killing me.
Productivity Hoarding and the Mind-Suck
When you have collected numerous projects and tasks in whatever system or list you use, what tends to happen is a kind of mind-suck. Every time you glance at that long list in an effort to figure out what to do next, you freeze, like a deer in headlights. You freeze, get overwhelmed by all that stuff, and you run far…
