Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
Recently the role I play in my organization has begun to change again and I’m in one of those really great places where I get to define the role and create the systems that I need to be successful. As this all started to happen, I thought it would be a great time to finally read David Allen’s best seller Getting Things Done. I know I’m a little late to this particular party seeing how the book was first published 9 years ago, but I figure better late than never.
Before you tune out thinking “oh boy here comes another rabid fan of GTD who hasn’t really done it well himself”, that’s not actually what I wanted this article to be about (although for the record I did find the book insightful and helpful to my specific situation, though your mileage my vary). Instead this article is about what GTD and books like it represent for leaders who practice Reflection Leadership.
Practicing Systems Reflection
As I was nearing the end of the book, my brain was going into overdrive thinking about how I could best incorporate GTD into my workday and life. I was able to recognize that I was in a perfect position to make changes to my own systems because of the transition I found myself in with my position. Unfortunately, most of the time we are so busy and caught up with the day-to-day that we don’t take the time and effort to stop to evaluate our systems to make sure we are being the most productive and effective.
As leaders, we need to make Systems Reflection part of our ongoing reflection practice and we need to be able to reflect on all of the systems that we have responsibility for. But here I want to stay focused on our own personal systems; the things we use and do to stay organized.
Most of the time we are in constant motion moving from one thing to the next. The more we try to do and keep track of the harder it gets and the more anxiety that we feel when we have to worry if we are getting everything done that needs to be done. There are any number of organizing schemes and computer programs to help with this, but in the end how we keep ourselves organized is habitual. It is pretty much what we do because we’ve always done it that way.
Our Personal Systems Are Habits
As I was reading Getting Things Done and really taking the time to reflect on how I keep myself organized, I was able to see a pattern that actually dates back to the my very first job out of college, long before I could ever contemplate having a computer based digital organizer let alone something handheld. Over the last 25 years or so, my organizing habits have pretty much stayed the same, they’ve just been modified over time to adapt to newer technology.
Some might say that given my relative success over these past 25 years I must be doing something right and I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that. But my point here is that if our personal systems are mostly based on habit, how do we know if we’re being the most productive and effective as we can be? Might there be a better way for us to be doing what we do? This is why Systems Reflection at the personal level is important.
We need to make the time and effort to stop and remove ourselves from the day-to-day so that we can take a real look at what we do and how we do it. Once we’re able to really see our personal systems we can start to take a critical look to see if there are other ways to do what we need to do.
David Allen suggest that getting started with GTD may require two full days just to figure out where we are and setup our systems. And there in lies the problem: Who has two full days to give up? So to me, adding Systems Reflection to our continuous reflection practice is the answer. When we consistently monitor our personal systems we can make changes and adjustments along the way instead of having to make a clean break to make changes.
It is important for leaders to be able to reflect on their own personal systems and make any adjustments needed to be more productive and effective. When we are able to reflect own our personal systems it then allows us to expand to reflecting on the organizational systems.
Leader’s Reflection: Our personal systems of organization are mainly habits we have done over long periods of time that might not be the most productive or effective. When we practice Systems Reflection on a regular basis it allows us to make adjustments to our systems incrementally allowing us to be more effective leaders.
