From an early age, for some weird reason, I’ve been obsessed with and intrigued by productivity.
I’ve explored them all: deep work, tiny habits, essentialism, 7 habits, eat that frog! And my favourite - Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.
The concept of GTD is deceptively simple. Get things out of your head, write them down, sort out your projects and next actions, then review everything once a week (I’m taking extreme liberties with simplifying this).
But somehow, the system never stuck with me. And I knew it wasn’t the system, it was me.
So I found it of great comfort to hear David Allen himself say on a podcast, that he falls off the GTD wagon all the time - life is busy!
The important thing is to get back on the wagon.
How does this relate to money?
Stop me if this sounds familiar: busted your budget? Ah well since it’s screwed, I might as well spend more money this month.
I get it, it’s difficult not to feel deflated or defeated, or that despite our best efforts we still make mistakes and “fail”.
But a better reaction would be: that’s fine, I’ll do better next month and track my expenditure every week instead of every 2 weeks, so I get an earlier indication of when I’m in danger of overspending.
Picked up a late fee? Maybe I’ll set a reminder 10 days before the next bill is due so that I can make sure to pay it on time. Once is a mistake, twice is negligence.
It’s important to view self-improvement as a process - it’s never going to be something we can strike off our to-do list and say we’ve achieved peak productivity or total money mastery.
What we can say is we’re continuing to get better at it each day, week, month and year.
See you in 2 weeks when I try to answer the question: Can one have too many routines?