After a while, it’s a good idea to take a step back and consider… well, like the heading says, everything. In fact, you want to do this repeatedly.
You have a few choices about what conceptual altitude to take when you do this. If you just got out of college, it could be a big deal to plan out a year in advance. If you’re feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction with life in general, you might want to map in broad strokes from tomorrow until your eulogy.
It seems to me that most people should visit both extremes, and a few touchstones in the middle, from time to time. Speaking for myself, thinking about what I want to do with the entire rest of my life scares the willies out of me—which is fairly good evidence that I haven’t thought about it enough. Do what’s comfortable at first, but push gently against your boundaries from time to time.
The following time periods are guidelines, not rules. Adjust them based on how quickly you acclimate, how well your system is working, and how rapidly your bigger picture changes. As you read this chapter, set up tasks that point you back here, to each section as their time period occurs.
There is one instruction on what not to do, and that’s make any large decisions about your new system.
Consider a New Year’s resolution to “get healthy.” That’s huge. It includes better management of your health care, eating better, exercising more, cutting out bad habits, and basically modifying every waking hour of every day. You don’t do that all at once. By February, if you’ve broken the habit of having a hot fudge sundae for breakfast, you’re ahead of the game.
Same thing here. Your resolution is to “get organized,” or “reach my goals,” or “be less stressed.” Your system, your task app, your circumstances, and you are all large moving parts. All you’ve had time to do so far is identify and fix a few small habits.
The problem right now is category error. Almost no one faces the problem of “I didn’t get healthy” and decides, “Okay, I’m just never going to get healthy.” But right now is when plenty of people either spend another three months picking out software, or decide that they’re genetically unable to be organized. Both are bad ideas. Don’t abandon your system now because it “doesn’t work.”
Right now, you’re spending the maximum amount of time you’ll ever need to manage your system. You’re paying attention to things that will become automatic. You’re thinking harder about everything. And the biggest benefit that’s supposed to come out of it—getting more done, giving yourself permission to be human, and making realistic assessments about how balance those together—you’re not used to doing those things yet.
Stick to small changes. You have permission to go bigger in only one case: when your prior choices are actively and obviously detrimental in ways that I haven’t said will automatically get better. If that’s happening this early, go back to the beginning and start over with better information.
If you don’t need that kind of wholesale revision, don’t revise at all. Tweak.
It takes two to four weeks to form a small habit. It takes months to form larger habits that have small ones as a prerequisite. That’s around where you should be by now regarding your system. Some of your pointers are redundant, more things are in muscle memory, and during your regular reviews you’ve tightened things up and sanded down rough spots.
Now you can look at some medium-sized pieces, including your task app and the other apps and tools you use, if it’s still eating too much time and you’ve learned all the preferences and modifications that you’re ever going to. If you do switch, don’t start from scratch; figure out what methods and approaches have worked for you when the tools didn’t, and re-implement them in the new tools.
This is also a good time to tackle the life changes we discussed in Understand Your Brain, Understand Your Body. If you’ve already started sleeping better, congratulations, but you’re a true unicorn. Everyone else has put that off until later. Now is later.
Congratulations! By getting here, you’re already doing better than nearly everyone who’s ever cracked a book like this one. You may not have the best small and medium habits, but you’ve developed one big one: you’re approaching your time systematically. It’s not a question now of whether you’re going to organize yourself, it’s a question of how.
That’s a big deal. Reward yourself—and do so regardless of whether you’re “doing enough.” If you’ve seen only small improvements, you have the wrong system. So long as you don’t ditch the concept of systems—and when you’ve drifted into older habits, you’ve managed to Fail Successfully—you’re doing much better in ways you likely haven’t noticed.
Now you have the experience to make larger changes to your system if you feel the need. You may also have some really big changes identified about your life in general, that you think you need to address. You’re just about ready to attempt that, but do you want to do that now, or will you be better prepared later, with some more time under your belt?
If the answer is “obviously now, yes, I can’t wait,” jump ahead to Are You Rereading This Book?
Everyone else: make projects to consider and implement the changes you want for your system. Schedule additional time for them accordingly, and like every other time you’ve worked on managing your system, keep an eye on whether you’re still accomplishing enough of everything else. Deliberately dropping a few projects, and extending a few deadlines, is a good idea to make room for this. With any luck, you’re in the habit by now of adjusting as needed, and have a few successful strategies for doing that.
Again, congratulations for sticking with it. This is as big a deal as getting an annual gym membership, and being in the 10% who actually use it. Well done.
By now, your goals have shifted (probably unconsciously), your circumstances have changed, and your attitudes are different. If having a system stressed you less, you might have since decided that lower stress is a good thing in and of itself, and should take precedence over what you earlier considered to be top goals. Maybe you’ve gotten into the habit of letting additional free time from being more organized become unstructured leisure time. Or maybe you’re still aimed at being a productivity machine with any time freed up. Your choices.
That last part requires more thought. One other thing has happened: your body has aged a little, your peak sustainability has altered a bit, and unless you’re good at listening to your body, you likely haven’t noticed. If you’re young, you’d probably need a microscope to measure the difference. If you’re, uh, not so young, it starts to happen dramatically. By now, I hope you’ve learned not to try to “power through it.” That’s never sustainable.
Go ahead to the next chapter. It’s time to take another spin through this book; a quick skim is fine every year or two, but a thorough reread is called for less often. You should clarify everything that’s been unconscious until now, set new directions and new goals, change what’s not working, and concentrate on getting the most of what does. Or you can decide that it’s all good, in which case, now’s when you decide that and know it’s the right choice, rather than proceeding out of inertia.
If you make any major changes, you’re resetting the clock on this chapter: go ahead and set new one-month, three-month, and six-month reminders to come back here. If all is well, or mostly so, set another year-or-two reminder.
What you’re doing right now, this big-picture thinking? It never stops, and that’s a good thing. Looking back on where you’ve been and how you’ve improved, and choosing where to go next, should recharge your batteries. If it doesn’t, that’s a trigger that you’re making the wrong choices.