Anne Truitt Zelenka

I don’t find most productivity or organizational schemes useful. I’m too spontaneous to collect everything, review regularly, and religiously chart my goals and plans. I work on waves of inspiration and procrastination.

One thing I do find useful is to keep a very loose list of projects I’m working on at a given point in time and what their status is — beginning, middle, end and front burner or back burner. My projects list has become the center of my productivity system. It’s where I track my motivation and my interests and also the things that I simply must do, even though I don’t want to, like getting the taxes done every year. I try not to have more than one of those kind of projects at a time though.

Paul Graham says this in his essay from December 2005 on procrastination: “I think the way to ’solve’ the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.”

My project list mainly records what pulls me with delight. It comes after my action; it doesn’t define my action. It’s about process not results. And every project is provisional — I prune at will, as people around me know. I may be too quick to pull the plug. But I find so many fascinating opportunities in the world that I want to try it all. If something feels stagnant or inauthentic or just plain stressful, I don’t want to do it. There’s too much energy and realness and satisfaction to be had to waste my time and energy.

How I use projects to work with my spontaneity instead of against it

I update my list of projects every couple of days if not every single day, adding new projects that have emerged, moving projects on hold onto my “back burner,” and pondering what I want to work on next. If I notice that I’ve been inspired and motivated to work in a certain area (for example, I’ve been shopping for fall clothes and decluttering my closet lately) I create a project to capture that inspiration and motivation (in the case of the clothes and closet, a fall wardrobe revamp to include getting rid of old clothes and rearranging the closet).

If I have some important tasks related to each other to get done that aren’t getting done, I put them onto “project status.” That means I define a project for it and I put some effort onto making forward progress. How much effort? However much I feel like! I’m responsible and active enough that when I really need to do something I start feeling like getting it done. And if I don’t, I make other arrangements: hire it out, eliminate that project, redefine, etc.

Goal setting didn’t work for me

I used to follow typical goal setting advice, engaging in goal-setting sessions and planning for my short, medium, and long-term future. I made the goals specific and measurable. I made plans for their achievement. Then three months or six months would pass and I wouldn’t have achieved most of them. Yet in that time, I did do important and rewarding things. So what was wrong? Conventional goal setting just didn’t work for me.

It may be that my projects list works where my goal-setting didn’t because I lean towards right-brained creative more than left-brained analytical (though I can do the left-brained thing reasonably well). I am a “perceiver” not a “judger” on the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator. I am a hippie not a nerd.

Projects emerge from action

For me, the most important aspect of projects is that they emerge from my action rather than controlling my action. I’ve spent my whole life letting my direction emerge rather than taking a controlling hand to it… and I’ve gotten to this really satisfying and connected place. Now of course perhaps that was pure chance. I can’t discount that possibility. But it sure seems I’ve found a system that works well for me.

Example 1: When I was maybe 11, I wrote to my favorite author Piers Anthony and told him I wanted to be a writer. I never set an explicit goal to become a writer though. Instead, I followed whatever engaged me through my career and found more and more that writing was what I wanted to do. Would I have done better to set a goal of becoming a writer? I doubt it. My background in software — which I got because I was for many years fascinated by and thoroughly engaged with programming computers — gives me a really valuable subject to write about.

Example 2: I had the urge to own a house shortly after I graduated from college. It was 1993 in California and I wasn’t married, but Rick and I were living together. I convinced him we should buy a house. Then I didn’t like that house, so we bought a different one. Then I decided we should move to Virginia because we could afford an even nicer house there. This continued for a few more steps, and voila! I’m living in my dream house in my dream neighborhood in my dream state of Colorado. But I never set out to get my “dream house in dream neighborhood in dream state.” I just had various projects that eventually got me there — starting with my urge to buy a house in California in 1993.

What’s the point?

The point is: you may have read a million times about how you should go about setting goals and planning your life. And that might all be wrong for you if you lean towards spontaneous, right-brained, creative, hippie, and perceiving rather than planned, left-brained, analytical, nerd, and judging.

How do you manage your own goals and projects and inspiration and procrastination?