Today’s Homemaker

[Here we go…day one! Aren’t you excited? If you’re just starting with us, be sure to start at the beginning. And by the way, don’t be intimidated by the length of this post. It might take a minute for your brain to wrap around what we’re doing here, but once we get started, I promise it will make a lot of sense!]

One of the most basic principles of the Getting Things Done system is the concept of what Allen calls “psychic RAM.”¹ It’s not as new-age as it sounds. Basically, we take in all of this “stuff” every day — more stuff than we can possibly process at one time. We see the pile of laundry and think, “oh, I need to do laundry.” We see that flea market find from a year ago and think, “I definitely need to paint that chair.” We see that email from our boss and think “I need to get working on that project.” In this way, we are constantly making commitments to ourselves, whether formally or informally.

These are natural things. They’re not bad. But the problem is, our brains are not equipped to remember all of this stuff. It wants to, but it’s very inefficient at it. And when we don’t have a system to handle it all, our brains keep working on it in the background, processing it over and over again until it’s taken care of.

This principle is demonstrated in the simple test-taking skill that you’ve probably heard a dozen times — teachers tell you that if you find a question you don’t know, skip it. Your brain will be working on the answer in the background while you answer other questions. Psychic RAM.

In our practical, every day lives, this can be a problem because of the sheer amount of stuff that we are reminded that we need to handle daily. Not only are our brains inefficient at handling this volume, but it creates a vaguely uncomfortable feeling of stress that we can’t easily define. We just know we have a lot to do, and we’re afraid of forgetting some of it.

Now some people try and remedy this by using organizers or planners of some sort. This is a good thing. However, unless we have a system of capturing ALL of the “stuff” that comes at us every day, we are still going to have that mild feeling that something is going to fall through the cracks. If we can’t completely trust our systems, then we still have anxiety. We can’t just capture our “work stuff” or our “home stuff” or our “kid stuff.” It’s all part of our lives; therefore, we need to have a handle on all of it.

Not surprisingly then, the first step is to capture all of those commitments that we’ve made to ourselves. Take a loose blank sheet of paper, and start to make a list. Do not try to organize it right now. Just let everything come out. You might fill three sheets of paper. You might fill ten. The important thing is to capture it all — even the seemingly small, insignificant things.

As you might imagine, this is going to take some time. We are going to be doing this over the next several days, so don’t feel pressured to get it all right now. You are going to need to carry that list around with you everywhere while we empty our minds of the stuff that we’ve been holding in them for so long. Inevitably, you are going to see things that remind you of other commitments that you have made to yourself, and you will want to write them down.

Try not to make up new commitments arbitrarily, but if you see something that needs to be done (even if you don’t think YOU’RE the one who needs to do it — very important) write it down. Leave no stone unturned. It’s time to free up your RAM for more important things.

GTD day two: Letting it all out >>

1. I told you this system was originally intended for nerdy, tech-y people. If you’re not one of them, RAM stands for the Random Access Memory in your computer. When your computer is making all of those funny grinding noises, it’s actually processing information stored in its RAM. That’s the simple version anyway. [↩]