Covey said what is important is determined by your mission and the sense of values. To think with words, you need to have a handle of words attached to your mission. How do we make a mission into words?
It is often said that to clarify the goal of life is important, missions, and values. However, many people cannot tell their mission in their words yet. Even if they make quick decisions, the words will not connect with daily activities. It is a phenomenon similar to ”I took the top box of the pyramid but it is different from my expectation” in (1.5.3) Learn from patterns.
The goal of life is the top part of the pyramid.
The goal of life is the top part of the pyramid. There are two directions to thinking about life goals. One direction is descending from the top to the bottom. In this case, we decide the goal of life first. And then, we judge the daily choice of actions. Let ‘s call the direction ”top-down.”
The opposite is ”bottom-up.” In this case, we start from the daily choices. By observing daily decisions, we eventually find some common patterns from them. It is the information gathering and the pattern discovery we learn in Chapter 1. Through this abstraction, we finally get our goal of life as our own words.
David Allen of GTD recommended bottom-up approach. *15 Allen described between the purpose of life and the current behavior as follows.
- purpose of your life, sense of values
- Plan for 3 to 5 years
- Milestone for 1 to 2 years
- field to pay attention, what you are responsible
- current projects
- current actions
Many people are busy every day. Busy people already have a lot of “current actions.” In the top-down approach, we first set the purpose of life. By breaking up the purpose, we get tasks to obtain the goal. In other words, the approach generates a lot of new tasks in addition. Is there time to accept them?
In GTD, we concentrate on ”current actions” which we do every day. For example, suppose your colleague asked you to write a small automation program, you made it, and your colleague became happy very much. You are surprised to know that your colleague is so pleased with your work, which is not a big task for you. By having an interest in the automation, you find many problems that you can solve with your programs. You like to do more because these activities are fun.
The above is a story of the bottom-up approach. You find “the field to pay attention: solving problems of colleagues by automation.”
When the field to pay attention is translated into words, it begins to affect “project” and “action” below. For example,
- “I thought this implementation was a boring task, but I can use it to the automation.”
- “This meeting was planned just for reporting on the current situation of development, but how about to ask if there is anything else in trouble. ”
Daily actions are made meaningful from a high point of view. Now you can steer yourself to the direction that makes your life more interesting in the range of discretion.
Footnotes:
- *15 An explanation in “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”(2001) and a sequel by David Allen “Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life” are different a bit, so I merged from both expressions.
- *16 Jiro Kawakita strongly insist that bottom-up is better than top-down in the structure discovery of the KJ method. I describe it in Chapter 5. There are many similarities between GTD and KJ method, such as collecting concerns before judgment. I am very interested.