Perhaps the diametric opposite of GettingThingsDone, LettingThingsSlide is an AntiPattern. I'm writing this page because I HaveThisPattern. Unfortunately. So I'm seeking feedback on how to deal with it.
Sliding things have nasty dynamics of their own above and beyond the ordinary run of things that need doing. I'm trying to understand these. Here's my observations so far - I'd appreciate anyone else's thoughts on these or other observations in the same vein:
- Things slide when there's no attention paid to a pattern of negative observations. For example let's say you have a pet and you notice it's looking run down. The next day you notice this again. You begin to think, oh, my pet is run down. I must get around to finding out how come. But by the time your pet suffers some sort of medical crisis it's way too late for you to do anything about it. Maybe your pet survives - but the whole experience is one you'd have avoided if you hadn't been LettingThingsSlide - if you'd noticed that things were sliding in the first place.
- Slides start small. When you're walking on slippy ice you're careful to put your feet down carefully, vertically, so that you don't start sliding. Starting to slide is such a serious situation that you actually have reflexes to deal with it before your brain is aware of it - suddenly you're kicking your feet and flailing your arms like a windmill. Unfortunately most sliding things in your life don't have such reflexes to help you out. Your relationship, your project, your business - when these things begin to slide there's nothing that kicks in and makes you go, "Woah! That's not normal behaviour!" So you just go about your business without changing your mode of reaction until you hit the crisis ... and maybe you survive that crisis, but there's another on the way if you keep LettingThingsSlide.
- Sliding things need special attention. You can't just stick a momentary correction in a GettingThingsDone list and expect to halt the slide. Sliding is a process. Once you start to slide, you need a process of corrections to your behaviour to stop the slide. If you're a GTD afficionado then you start a "Slide" project in your GTD that represents the generation of slide correction projects. Your next actions will thus always contain one "Slide" action - a nag to get you to work on setting up to unslide same. You prioritize your sliding actions on the "Slide" project and get them done one at a time, rather than having them creep up and gang-mug you at 3am. The tasks generated by a slide correction project each require reflection on the process of the slide too.
- Many sliding things are maintenance tasks - things that are too regular to put on a GTD plan. Deal with these like PavlovsDog. Attach some daily maintenance task to something else you do every day. For example, brush your teeth, then clean the catbox - that way the catbox will be clean. Always, robotically. Attach a weekly task to some weekly event - doing your financial review upon getting up on a Saturday morning frinstance.
I don't think I really have this problem licked but at least I've recognized that not working on your
LettingThingsSlide is itself a generator for sliding things. That's to say, if you have a habit of
LettingThingsSlide and you don't recognize it then more and more things will slide ... and not uphill ...
Sliding issues not accounted for in the above: AntiTraffic time-management, ArchitecturalSpikes for maintenance tasks ...
Letting Things Slide