At the same time, did you experience any sense of release, or relief, or control as you were did the drill? Most people say yes, indeed. How does that happen? Totally opposite emotional states showing up as you're doing a single exercise, almost at the same time — anxiety and relief; overwhelmed and in control. What's going on here?
When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you'll discover, as I did, the way to get rid of them. And if you experienced any positive feelings from collecting your stuff, you actually began the process of eliminating the negativity yourself.
The Source of the Negative Feelings
Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there's always too much to do. If you felt bad simply because there was more to do than you could do, you'd never get rid of that feeling. Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling. It comes from a different place.
How have you felt when someone broke an agreement with you? Told you they would meet you Thursday at 4:00 P.M. and never showed or called? How did that feel? Frustrating, I imagine. The price people pay when they break agreements in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship — a negative consequence.
But what are all those things in your in-basket? Agreements you've made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements — they're the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don't do it, you'll feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don't — voila! anxious and overwhelmed.
The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn't come from having too much to do; it's the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.
How Do You Prevent Broken Agreements with Yourself?
If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:
• Don't make the agreement.
• Complete the agreement.
• Renegotiate the agreement.
All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.
Don't Make the Agreement
It probably felt pretty good to take a bunch of your old stuff,decide that you weren't going to do anything with it, and just toss it into the trash. One way to handle an incompletion in your world is to just say no!
You'd lighten up if you would just lower your standards. If you didn't care so much about things being up to a certain level — your parenting, your school system, your team's morale, the software code — you'd have fewer things to do.[14]
I doubt you're going to lower your standards. But once you really understand what it means, you'll probably make fewer agreements. I know I did. I used to make a lot of them, just to win people's approval. When I realized the price I was paying on the back end for not keeping those agreements, I became a lot more conscious about the ones I made. One insurance executive I worked with described the major benefit he derived from implementing this system: "Previously I would just tell everyone, 'Sure, I'll do it,' because I didn't know how much I really had to do. Now that I've got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity I have had to say, 'No, I can't do that, I'm sorry.' The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed by my discipline!"
Another client, an entrepreneur in the personal coaching business, recently told me that making an inventory of his work had eliminated a huge amount of worry and stress from his life. The discipline of putting everything he had his attention on into his in-basket caused him to reconsider what he really wanted to do anything about. If he wasn't willing to toss a note about it into "in," he just let it go!
Maintaining an objective inventory of your work makes it much easier to say no with integrity.
I consider that very mature thinking. One of the best things about this whole method is that when you really take the responsibility to capture and track what's on your mind, you'll think twice about making commitments internally that you don't really need or want to make. Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don't know the balance or the limit — it's a lot easier to be irresponsible.
Complete the Agreement
Of course, another way to get rid of the negative feelings about your stuff is to just finish it and be able to mark it off as done. You actually love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you've completed something. If you've begun to complete less-than-two-minute actions as they surface in your life, I'm sure you can attest to the psychological benefit. Most of my clients feel fantastic after just a couple of hours of processing their piles, just because of how many things they accomplish using the two-minute rule.
Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done.
— Julia Louis Woodruff
One of your better weekends may be spent just finishing up a lot of little errands and tasks that have accumulated around your house and in your personal life. Invariably when you capture all the open loops, little and big, and see them on a list in front of you, some part of you will be inspired (or creatively disgusted or intimidated enough) to go knock them off the list.
We all seem to be starved for a win. It's great to satisfy that by giving yourself doable tasks you can start and finish easily.
Have you ever completed something that wasn't initially on a list, so you wrote it down and checked it off? Then you know what I mean.
There's another issue here, however. How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally — and successfully — completed? You'd probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days, guess what you'd have? Right — another list, and probably an even bigger one! You'd feel so good about finishing all your stuff you'd likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.
It's a lot easier to complete agreements when you know what they are.
Not only that, but if you have a boss, what do you think he or she is going to do, after noticing the high levels of competency and productivity you're demonstrating? Right again — give you more things to do! It's the catch-22 of professional development: the better you get, the better you'd better get.
So, since you're not going to significantly lower your standards, or stop creating more things to do, you'd better get comfortable with the third option, if you want to keep from stressing yourself out.
Renegotiate Your Agreement
Suppose I'd told you I would meet you Thursday at 4:00 P.M., but after I made the appointment, my world changed. Now, given my new priorities, I decide I'm not going to meet you Thursday at four. But instead of simply not showing up, what had I better do, to maintain the integrity of the relationship? Correct — call and change the agreement. A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.
Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, "No, not now." Here's the problem: it's impossible to renegotiate agreements with yourself that you can't remember you made!