How to reduce stress while helping your parents
If you’ve been helping your parents sort out the vagaries of Medicare, or with their prescriptions, or running errands, or…you know the time it takes out of the day. If you’re of the sandwich generation and are managing kids schedules too, you either have the constitution of Martha Stewart, or don’t feel like you’re doing any of it as well as you’d like.
That’s why Getting Things Done (GTD) has become so popular among the Internet crowd. Those of us who are regularly online, on the Blackberry, or iPhone, manage to pack the day with interruptions, misdirections and a level of productivity that leads to a stressful life. Helping seniors can be particularly rewarding, but only if we can reduce the stress.
The main tenant of GTD is that a stress-free day is attained through recognizing that the process will manage all the balls in the air for you. While the process takes a little time to get used to, it’s not particularly complicated, nor could it be to be effective.
The overall workflow follows five main steps:
- Collect
- Process
- Organize
- Review
- Do
Initially collecting can be a very long process. It’s gathering everything you want to do, or need to do, into buckets–your email inbox, your physical inbox, etc. The idea is to get everything that’s in your head into an inbox and ready for processing. All of these buckets are processed, or emptied, at least once a week.
When processing a bucket, a prescribed workflow is followed:
- Start at the top.
- Deal with one item at a time.
- Never put anything back into ‘in’.
- If an item requires action:
- Do it (if it takes less than two minutes), OR
- Delegate it, OR
- Defer it.
- If an item does not require action:
- File it for reference, OR
- Throw it away, OR
- Incubate it for possible action later.
In the organize phase, there are four set of list that you’ll maintain:
- Next actions – For every item decide what the next action that needs to, and can, be taken. It might be make a call, send an email, or schedule a meeting. While there are many items that are required to accomplish an item, there is only one ‘next step’.
- Projects – Projects are things that go on for a period of time and need revisiting on a periodic basis to make sure that there is still a next action associated with it.
- Waiting for – When there is someone, or something, that you must wait for, it goes here. These items are periodically reviewed to see if there is something that can be done to move the item forward.
- Someday/Maybe – These are items that you legitimately want to do, but you’re not ready to start…like learn Russian.
Review
Really two things fall into this area. The first is to review the next actions at least once a day. During the review, you should be determining the most important action that needs to be done immedately. The book covers a number of strategies to make the review step more effective.
At least once a week, you should review all of your outstanding actions, projects, and waiting fors.
Do
Basically the “Do” phase takes some emphasis off of the organizing and puts it on…Getting Things Done.
While certainly not for everyone, Getting Things Done will help many of you enjoy the time you spend with your parents.
Related Links
Tech Junkies Crazy About ‘Getting Things Done’ (NPR)
43 Folders (productivity site and big fans of GTD)
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