Comments on: Why do we procrastinate on the good stuff too?

By: Itay Neta, LAc

Itay Neta, LAc — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:19:44 +0000

Thanks for the article, Sarah. Another piece of the GTD puzzle this touches on for me is feeling like I have the time and space in my life to do something fun. I’m an acupuncturist, and one of my hobbies is stone sculpting. The down side of this hobby is that I can’t really spend 15 minutes on it. It requires at least a couple hours by the time I’ve set everything up and cleaned up after myself. (Don’t have a dedicated workshop yet) :)

When I don’t have everything down on my next action lists and I have the nagging feeling that there is more left undone and floating around, I can’t let myself relax and take a few hours to carve. It’s only when I know that I’m not dropping any balls that I can let go of work and life duties and enjoy.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:55:18 +0000

Thanks for posting the article. I always think it’s ironic how we can stuff our diaries with things we want to do, and then get really stressed at the thought of doing them…

By: D

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:08:20 +0000

Sarah, I think Patricia noted something that you glossed over. You have already completed the first next action; you have decided that you want to redeem your Target gift card for storage containers.

I recently used a gift card from Canadian Tire that I had been sitting on for quite a while. There was nothing I really needed to buy nor anything that I really wanted so I was not motivated to use it. After waiting for several months three items that I kind of wanted went on sale in the same week so I got the double whammy of deep discounts and free money that justified the purchase of some nice-to-have tools.

I looked at it as exercising the GTD principle is being ok with not making the decision right now. If you are not really sure what you want then you can put the gift card in your tickler file (make sure it will not expire before you get to it!) and forget about it safe in the knowledge that it will be brought to your attention later.

By: Patricia

Patricia — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:36:46 +0000

I agree with this article. I had an American Express gift card in my wallet for over two years. I thought putting it in my wallet would be enough to remind me to use it. Nope. It wasn’t until I decided to use it for something specific that I finally made progress on using it. In my case, my next action was to call the store (it’s a small, local store) to make sure they would accept it. After I decided what I was going to use it for, it took only about two weeks to schedule a trip to the store, and then spend it.

By: Tara Rodden Robinson

Tara Rodden Robinson — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:47:13 +0000

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for bringing these interesting findings to our attention. It might have helped to have taken a less GTD-centric approach to your post, however, and focused more on the findings of the research.

The take-home message of the science is that people are bad at predicting how much free time they’ll have in the future, and overestimate. It’s likely that next-action thinking, even as powerful as it is, will have any effect on building people’s predictive power. A better approach might be to spend a bit of time assessing how one might build free-time in and putting free time into one’s hard landscape, thus avoiding the prediction trap altogether.

Many best wishes,
Tara