Monday, February 26th, 2007...10:45 am
2am
Several smooth jazz musicians have recently titled some instrumental tracks with a time stamp. Boney James, for example, has a track on his “Pure” CD simply titled “2:01am”. Michael Lington recorded a tune called “3am” for his “Everything Must Change” CD. So I entitle this “2am”. You will understand as you read.
If you have been practicing GTD very long, you have had at least one night where your mind just would not shut down. You know the drill. It is like that windows app that locks up. You try to close it, only to have it pop up and tell it is not responding. You click “End Now” and NOTHING happens!!! That was going on in my head last night. For some reason all kinds of “stuff” started popping into my head that was NOT in my system. Yikes!!! I would tell my mind to shut up, and remind me in the morning. It would respond with, “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!”.
Here is my dilemma. The bedroom is dark. My circa and Lamy Studio were actually lying on the nightstand. Turning on a lamp at 2am might have put me in the doghouse, though. Those of you who share a room with a spouse or significant other can certainly understand. Especially if you already know they think you are a little crazy anyway for practicing this personal productivity “noo noo naa naa” called GTD. Some people can just roll over and write. Maybe they sleep with a lamp on.
So I finally get up and take my circa and pen into the den at 2:15am. There was no sleeping for me if I didn’t. I spent around 30 minutes dumping this “stuff” out of my head in ink. After this mini mind sweep, I was able to return to bed….and my mind let me rest peacefully.
Anyone else have a night like this lately?
-Jason
12 Comments
February 26th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Often I find that turing on Pzizz[1] in sleep mode does just as well. As a matter of fact, I did this just last night after lying in bed for an hour and was alseep within 10 minutes.
[1]: http://www.pzizz.com/
February 26th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Other way round, as it were — one morning last week I woke at about 5.00am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Eventually a couple of issues surfaced (*) and the sensible thing to do would have been to get up and write them down.
But I didn’t, so didn’t get back to sleep!
Steve
* — one was ‘make sure you sign and post your brother’s birthday card’. The other was ’so THAT must be what’s wrong with that email account’. A good example of the David’s comments about your brain not being able to distinguish the relative importance of things.
February 26th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I have a Palm E2 that I use at night. I’ve made a special ‘night’ profile so that it doesn’t make any sounds and with only the minimal background light on.
Works for me…
February 26th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
This happens to me all the time. I have a pen with a built-in light that glows to light up the paper that I use to avoid the hairy, spousal eye-ball during mid-night brain-dumps.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I really hate getting all comfortable in bed just to realize I forgot to dump something out of my head. Most of the time as I wearily push back from the computer a little alert siren goes off. I pull myself back to the computer, load NovaMind and do a night time brain blast of anything, dribble and all, into some map. It may or may not be relevant, it might have things I’ve already said, committed too, or otherwise mitigated, but I listen to whats in my head. At the end of that I can usually sleep well.. but I forget to listen to the siren on occasion.. The other night I found myself down at 11pm, and back up at 1am to fire off a message to Jon in the UK because I just had to finish the threads we started before he had breakfast that morning.. dammit I thought as I slipped out of my comfort zone.. but I was fast asleep once the last of my thoughts were out.
We’re nutty beasts. We can only continue to strive for greatness and regain control whenever it slips (as it will) out of our grasp.
If all else fails you can follow my wifes remedy of a tylenol PM haha.
-a
February 27th, 2007 at 11:49 am
I usually just have single thoughts that I have to dump, but sometimes it’s a half hour session.
As Ryan mentioned above, a lighted pen is a great idea I got from Matt’s Idea Blog - http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/search?q=spy
You can get them here:
http://thewritersedge.com/powerglo.plain.cfm
or here:
http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/NightPen.cfm
My wife is a very light sleeper and the illuminated pen doesn’t wake her up
February 28th, 2007 at 12:19 am
[...] Black Belt Productivity ยป 2am Jason Echols describes nightly restlessness I have quite often. The only cure is indeed turning on the light en jotting down what’s dancing around my brain. (tags: gtd night thinking productivity) [...]
February 28th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Had it happen, hate it when it happens, but I like it more than the laying there worrying that I’ll remember to do it later.
It actually took me a while to get to the point where I was only wanting to write it down and not actually DO it, whatever “it” is. I’m getting to the point where I trust the system more so just writing it down will allow me to get to sleep. I think that’s actually a step in the right direction isn’t it?
March 6th, 2007 at 10:02 am
My nights are always like that. I just take it as an opportunity to, well, Get Things Done.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:35 am
How odd to find this blog just now. I woke up at 2:00 a.m. after just three hours sleep. What thoughts were rolling around in my head? — Mainly the 1,001 undone projects at work; and secondly, how I’m anticipating the arrival in a few days of my copy of “Getting Things Done”, which I had read about in Time Magazine and ordered last night online. Will it help the seemingly chaotic nature of my world at work? Will it be a better system than what I’m using now?
After lying awake for what seemed an eternity, I decided to get up and explore this site, also mentioned in Time. Naturally the 2am topic caught my eye. So I’ll read on for a while, hoping to snag an idea or two that I can use tomorrow.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Thanks everyone for the comments…
@Dean, I will have to try pzizz out for myself.
@Steve, that has happened to me too. I feel a “5am” post coming on
@Ben, I like that idea a lot
@Ryan…now that is clever
@AndyC…For some odd reason that night we did not have any Tylenol PM in the cabinet…or I would certainly have given that a try
@Birch…Thanks for the links. I will look into that
@Rich G…I agree completely. That nagging desire to complete the task is tough to control.
@Maryanne…If I could take enough time to do ti, I would follow that approach myself.
@Sheryl…Welcome to BBP. Feel free to add to the discussion anytime. Hope you enjoy the reading.
March 12th, 2007 at 4:41 am
As I’m new to GTD I’ve yet to experience this. I’m hoping that when the times does come that I’ll just get up, head down stairs and do a brain dump.
What I connected with in this post is the spouse aspect. My spouse has yet discovered that I’m actually following something like GTD. So far she’s just seen the fact that I needed some drawers. The in-tray we always had but was lost along with all the paper work. I’m sure she’s seen the books on GTD I’ve bought but she’s not mentioned it yet.
I’ve certainly not mentioned it to her and wouldn’t dream of it. See in the past I’ve talked about doing this and doing that to improve something either around the house or in my/our life. There are a lot of things that I’ve not implemented shall we say and have ground to a halt. So I’ve stopped talking about those things now and I’m hoping that GTD will just allow me to “Just do it” as Nike quote.
I’m not sure if she’ll ever become converted - maybe when she sees just how productive I could become (fingers crossed.)
I wanted to know what experiences others have had with spouses and GTD. Have they become converted? Have they just blocked it out and ignore it?
If they don’t welcome it has the impacted you in implementing GTD at home? If so do you manage your things with GTD and they manage theirs?
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