Diagnosis: Generalized anxiety disorder, mild to medium major depression (you read that right—it’s not an oxymoron), and a pinch of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

I received this summary after speaking with a psychiatrist for an hour, a few weeks ago, finally ready to surrender to the idea that maybe, maybe, I didn’t need to endure days-long crying jags, uncontrollable fixation on painful thoughts, and a constant, pervading sense that I should be probably be doing something other than what I was doing and if I made enough lists and plans and journal entries, I’d figure out what exactly that was.

I added the emphasis at the end of the quote because I suspect that people who fail at using David Allen’s GTD are using it to solve the wrong problem, be that depression, OCD, mid-life crisis, a failing marriage, or what-have-you.

If implementing GTD has seemed impossible to you, then, as the above suggests, maybe it’s time for you to step back from all of your “implementing” to see if you can get some insights into what the real problem is.

One of those quotes also deals with how we spend our time:

REACTING TO OUTSIDE EVENTS No doubt the euro zone mess, debt problems in the United States and other world calamities are threats to global investing. But such problems often involve too much information to process. Investors need to make decisions one at time, in a manner that corresponds to their own goals. “There’s very little relation to the importance of problems and the time we spend thinking about them,” Professor Kahneman said.

I added the emphasis at the end because it hits on a problem that so many of us have: not spending enough time on the most important matters. Not only are we spending too much time reacting to outside events, we are also spending it on things we want to do instead of things we need to do. (Examples of the latter are spending excessive time on Facebook and Twitter, instead of filing for taxes or spending time preparing for Monday’s all-important meeting.) Or, as Anthony Robbins stated in Awaken The Giant Within:

In fact, I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things.

In my view, nobody does a better job of describing how to focus on the important than does Dr. Stephen Covey. My recent article on his 7 Habits book provides several of his insightful quotes regarding time management.

Note that, while I’ve taken this opportunity to focus on proper time management, Dr. Kahneman’s book (linked above) focuses more on the financial mistakes we commonly make, and why we make them. It is a great read, and I highly recommend it to everyone who (1) wants to improve their finances and/or (2) better understand how our minds work.

I think Google + is what Facebook should have been. But it’s years too late. When I set up a G+ account, I figured several of my friends and family from FB would follow me on it, but only a few did. They are still using just FB and not posting on other social media sites.

I found G+ to be pretty interesting, at first, but now it’s sort of old hat … I don’t see anything on it that I didn’t see first on FB, techmeme, or Twitter. There are a few good discussions but they are buried amongst too much self-serving crap.

And then there is the annoyance of notifications. Everyday I get notified once or twice that 5 or 10 people have followed me. But a few days later my follow count is back to about what it was, suggesting that they only followed me to get me to follow them, and then unfollowed me when I didn’t. It’s the same follow game that’s played on Twitter, and it’s just annoying. I send all my Twitter notifications about new followers to the trash can — I began doing this sometime ago, after discerning that it’s just “spam bots” or social media “zealots” that are following. But, I can’t do that with G+, so I am just deleting it altogether.

I think quitting G+ will help me get a bit more focus in my life, along with deleting my posterous and tumblr accounts, and training myself to spend less time on the few social media sites I will keep (FB, twitter).”

Admittedly, the Tumblr and Posterous accounts were not actually distracting me, because I haven’t posted to them in a long while. They were experiments that didn’t pan out.

But, I suspect my subconscious still had to deal with the occasional question of “why not post to Tumblr/Posterous today?” So, hopefully deleting them frees my mind up a tad bit more.

Do you have any social media accounts that are more distracting than useful?

It’s an impressive article, but to me the main takeaway is that you can often use a tool for purposes that it was not intended for, and do just fine with it. For example, I’ve seen people struggle with using the complex Microsoft Project for managing a large project, while someone else could manage the same project using Microsoft Word.

I believe in the concept of the right tool for the job. But sometimes what defines “right” is “simple and something I don’t need new training on.”

“That Keener sure did know a lot.”

With another friend saying

“Yes, but it would have been better if he known less and had done more.”

And another one said

“Yeah, he sure didn’t do much with all he knew.”

Ouch. Obviously my conscience was talking to me.

So, I thought over my actions of the past several months and found that I had been spending a lot of time on Twitter, using it to find links to a lot of articles to read. And, I had been spending a lot of time reading articles through my RSS feeds, and reading one book after another. Yet, I could not think of a single instance in which I had really enriched anyone’s life.

I had become an information addict. Acquiring information had become a focus in my life.

I had let what could be a strength (learning new things) turn into Resistance to Worthwhile Action. While you might not be an information addict, you too probably have resistance in your life, so I want to say a few words about it.

Steven Pressfield, in his highly acclaimed The War of Art, talks about resistance as if it were something external to us. In fact, he claims that demons, and even the devil, make up Resistance, noting that their aim is to keep you from accomplishing your destiny. (Scott Peck had some of this theme in one of his Road Less Traveled books, where he talked about how he had come to view his time as God’s time, and how he had become determined to not waste any of God’s time.)

A more prevalent view is one described by Seth Godin in his book Linchpin. He devotes an entire chapter to Resistance, and talks about how the oldest part of our brain (which he calls the lizard brain) fears change, and works to keep us from changing and from doing anything it doesn’t consider to be in our best interests.

I’m inclined to think there is some truth to both views. Regardless, I do believe it pays for us to look at where there is resistance in our lives. Pressfield would say that the areas where we encounter the most resistance are the most important ones, the ones most worthy of our attention and effort.

Of course it will do no good to just acknowledge that there are areas where you face resistance. Ultimately we have to do something to deal with it. In my case of information addiction, where it is causing me to spend time unwisely, I have taken the action of abandoning Twitter for at least a month. I’m also working on getting a handle on purchasing books, to cut down to something reasonable.

Regular readers may be wondering if I am now saying that we should not be constant learners. No, I am not saying that. In fact, I was pleased with my buddy Paul Stamatiou for his article yesterday on how he switched from WordPress to Jekyll … one of Paul’s motivations was to do this just so he could learn. (I also love that Paul shares what he learns.) Many has been the time when I have taken something on just so I could learn from it. I do not plan to stop doing that … it is part of my nature. And, I still strongly believe that we have to keep learning just to ensure our brains stay in shape and so that we can develop fresh insights, instead of remaining stale.

But, ultimately there must be balance, even in our efforts to learn. The clock is constantly ticking, and, in the end, it’s what we get done that will matter, not what we knew.

• clean house
• organize tax info
• organize bookshelves by author
• clean Mac files and folders
• write year-end employee reviews
• clean WIndows files and folders
• clean garage

Although these are simple tasks (except maybe for the employee reviews), they can still take hours and are therefore easy to put off.

But the FlyLady has great advice that helps us get stuff like this done: do them in 5-minute bursts. For example, to accomplish the “Clean House” task put an item on your calendar that says “5-minute room rescue.” Then, spend the 5 minutes on the room you most dread cleaning. Do it again the next day. Or once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Spread it out as needed.

Of course, at some point, your mind realizes “hey, this isn’t really that bad,” and you just go ahead and do it all.

A couple of ebooks that emphasize this message well, along with other important change-making principles, are

• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

After you try this out, I suspect you’ll want to tell others about it, just like I did.

There’s even more motivation for iPhone, iPad, and Touch owners to do such a review, though. I discovered this morning, as I was reviewing my calendar for 2010, that there were some events in the early part of 2010 that were really supposed to be in 2011.

This scheduling problem arose from my misuse of Apple’s Date Wheel. Let’s use an example to show how it happened. I had purchased some new flowers for my wife’s grave, and then wanted to schedule for the next purchase. So, I took the existing December 22, 2010 event and used the Date Wheel to reschedule it:

I spun the wheel from December to March and then touched the Done tab. But, I failed to advance the Year Wheel from 2010 to 2011, and the Date Wheel does not do the advancing for you. Over the years of using Palms and Pocket PCs and Outlook and Google Calendar, I am accustomed to having a date-picking tool that advances the year automatically for me. Like with this one from Google Calendar:

When I click the double-right-arrow ( >> ) at the top of the calendar, the month advances to January and the year automatically advances to 2011. Not so with the built-in iPhone, iPad, and Touch date-picker.

Good thing I did the review, because I found a couple of other items that I had mis-scheduled.

Now, you might say that I could just convert the example entry, about Vickie’s new flowers, to a recurring appointment of, say, once every 3 months. But, it is not something I do exactly every 3 months. Sometimes I wait 4 months. In the summertime, I might even leave the flowers in place for six months, if they are particularly beautiful. (I use custom-made silk arrangements, so they are typically very pretty and they are durable.) And, even if I did choose to replace her flowers every 3 months, it wouldn’t always be at the same time of month.

Anyway, back to the point: it pays to do an end-of-year review of your calendar, especially if you reschedule items using your iPhone, iPad, or Touch.

And, yes, I know better. We all know the techniques for avoiding having our precious time sucked away from us, without our using it as we should have. But, knowing the techniques and living them are not always the same, are they?

When I saw two posts today that dealt with this subject, it seemed to be an omen. So, I thought I’d link to those posts and discuss each briefly.

The first post, and the most important tip, comes from Seth Godin:

Zig taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.

Isaac Asimov wrote and published 400 (!) books using this technique.

The better you plan your day, the more you can get done. Specifically, you can get more of the important things done by planning your day.

The second article comes from Paul Stamatiou. It specifically address startup funding, but it is an excellent discussion of how some activities can almost suck the life out of you, and can certainly eat up time.

In reading Paul’s fascinating account of the difficulties of getting funding, it is clear to me that one of the best things he did was to thoroughly research the area. This sort of gets back to my previous post about what we can learn from Google about managing time: it pays to research an area before wading into it.

You may be thinking that this sounds too obvious to mention. But, again, do we really do it every time we should? I haven’t. There have been times when I have done my homework before taking something on, but there have been times when I haven’t done it and paid for it.

Anyway, these tips really hit home with me, so I thought I’d share them with you.

But, they have also demonstrated that they take on too many new projects, and often do not meet commitments they make to others on those projects. MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote and in-depth article on this yesterday, going so far as to suggest that Google is living in a dream world. (He makes analogy with the gist of the movie Inception, suggesting that Google is even living in a dream within a dream.)

When I first read Siegler’s piece, I thought to myself “what a waste of talent … how sad.” But, as I was using OmniFocus on my Mac a little later, it occurred to me that I am behaving very much like Google: taking on too much stuff. It’s so easy to do when you have a great GTD tool like OmniFocus, which is designed to help you capture everything you think of that might turn into a task. Before you know it, you have a few hundred items, and have not adequately addressed how important and how practical those items really are.

So, one thing we can learn from Google is: limit what you take on. Our desire to have as much impact as we can makes it easy for us to take on too much. I am not saying we all need to scale back by 50%, or by any specific amount. In fact, it is good to push yourself. Too a point. The key is to figure out what that point is for you, and stick to it.

And another lesson from Google is: be practical. We’ve all been told that it’s good to dream big. And it is. But, before you take something on, you need to look at the realities of implementing it. Siegler’s discussion of Google’s intentions with Android are a perfect case in point. They started out with the dream of making smartphones, based on an open-source OS, available for free for everyone. They had apparently not considered the realities of dealing with carriers, who have their own agendas and their own self-interests to protect.

One more example, a bit more personalized: when I set up this blog, I knew I would want to share insights on life management and technology. Later, I realized that I wanted to also share insights on learning, because I believe we should learn all of our lives. So, I have shared insights on these topics for almost 4 years, and the blog has not grown hardly an iota. It has about 500 subscribers, about the same that it’s had for the past couple of years.

And I realize, in hindsight, that I have taken on too many topics. The only real way to have a successful blog is to carve out a specific niche. Technology, and technology only, for instance. Or life management. Or learning. Not all three. In essence, I have pulled a Google. I wanted to have an impact in all three areas, and thought that I could, given my background and interests. But, having too many topic areas thins the blog down. People who come to the site to read a technology article (say on the iPod Touch as a PDA), are not going to continue to browse around on the site because they see it is filled with “other stuff.” So, instead of having impact in three areas, I have no impact in any of the areas.

In conclusion, each time you do your weekly reviews (you are doing them, aren’t you?), be sure to spend enough time asking yourself, for each item, if you should really be spending time on it. Ask yourself how practical you are being in taking it on, and what the barriers to success are.

Of course that post referred to the “final end” (what some call “the big chill”), but the principle of keeping the end in mind also applies to projects and goals. It is so important that David Allen, in his best-selling Getting Things Done, emphasizes the importance of specifying a Successful Outcome for each project (and goal). I think this is so important that I wanted to emphasize it. You may very well be aware of it, but needed a reminder to get you to do it more consistently. I know I’m not always consistent on it: it’s easy to not specify it for smaller projects, but sometimes those are the ones that benefit most from our specifying the successful outcome(s) we expect.

Just about any software will let you specify the outcomes you want, even if it’s just by giving you room to do it in the Notes for each project.

I also encourage you to write down the resistance you might face in achieving the goal or completing the project. Writing down any barriers you might have will help you anticipate how to deal with them. It’s important to consider any internal resistance you might have, too. For example, you might have a goal of obtaining a promotion but you might also internally resist it because you kinda fear the added responsibility it will bring, along with a potential change in friends and so on.

The point about writing down the resistance is something I learned long ago from Zig Ziglar, although I cannot now remember which book of his it was in. (It may have been in his How to Get What You Want.)

Your thoughts?