It's a Draft!

• 26 Jul 2006
• to do

A bouncing baby draft, and not a moment too soon.

I’ve got a long list of other tasks that need doing, a list that has had me feeling increasingly anxious over the last couple of weeks. Perhaps I’m a little slow on the uptake, but it took the launch of Merlin Mann’s Back to GTD series to make me realize that some degree of that anxiety was being produced by the incompleteness of the list itself, by the fact that I’d remember in the middle of the night that I still need to buy a new filter for my air conditioner, and that the deadline for having my car smogged is creeping up without my having done anything about it. So I’ve spent part of the last couple of days attempting to do something like a mind-sweep, getting everything that needs to be done down on my list.

And something about having that list in full, and consulting the list frequently at moments when I’m between tasks, has calmed me down and helped me figure out how I can accomplish something, even though I’ve only got twenty minutes to do so. And somehow clearing all that stuff out of my head made space for me to finish a draft of that article, which was the most pressing, most looming task on the list.

Now revision. And a long list of other stuff.

• Previous: Current Stats
• Next: More from MediaCommons