Like many people today I suffer from lack of time and conflicting demands on my time both at work and at home. It seems as though the older you get the worse this effect becomes. Personally I am now the father of 4 children ( three under the age of 7 ) and manager of a large IT team in a busy NHS Acute Hospital that is currently in the middle of the biggest programme of IT development it has ever seen ( and ever will again I hope ).

Over the last year or so I have spent a little time reading around the subject of “Getting Things Done”. I read the definitive guide by David Allen and for a while tried to adopt his methodology for dealing with my lack of organisation, but like many others I faltered and slipped back into old ways and never actually achieved the ultimate goal of Stress Free Productivity.

Since then I have from time to time skimmed through articles I have found on the Internet at sites like the excellent 43 Folders which supports and encourages a lot of the ideals that David Allen proposes ( and others…. ). Ultimately though I haven’t adopted anything that I could honestly say has benefited me enormously and still find myself not getting the big things done, feeling overwhelmed by the amount of things I have to do, forgetting to do important things… The list goes on.

Tonight I have spent quite some time reading a number of articles by a guy called Steve Pavlina around the subjects of Self Discipline, motivation, procrastination and increasing your earnings potential and again have been inspired to try putting some of the ideas into practice in my personal and work life.

Steve’s articles make the move to this higher state of being seem like it should be achievable by anyone, and I’m sure once you have adopted the correct frame of mind it quite possibly is. Interestingly one of the articles on Steves site talks about the benefits of giving up coffee, this is something that in the last week I have been trying to do myself for health reasons, so it will be interesting to see if Steve’s points about the effect he believes coffee has on his creativity and organisational habits are reproducable for me ?

My plan is to try the 30 Days to Success method to see if I can start to develop some good practice. I have some thoughts on targets that I could use from Steve’s list. I have just started selling on eBay so his clear out clutter by selling one item a day on eBay could be a useful start. I definately need to re-start an excercise regime so that could be a second, and I third could be to begin developing a journal by writing once a day on my experience of the approach and how it is working for me. If this works I will then try this at work…