Do You Have Too Many Projects?

According to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (GTD), an average person typically has between ten and a hundred current projects. If this is the case, is it any wonder so many people are stressed out and overwhelmed?

David defines a project as: “anything we want to do that requires more than one action step”. This will likely cause us to treat almost everything we do as a project. For example, booking your car in for a service will, by this definition, be a project;

You decide when to take your car in, call the service centre, and finally take your car in on the assigned day. That’s three steps.

When we break things down so small, we start to overcomplicate things. For example, when I booked my car for its last service, all I needed to do was call the service centre, with my calendar open, and book it on an appropriate day. It was a single step that took less than five minutes.

Over the years, I’ve worked in several industries. Beginning with hotel management, then car sales, law, and teaching. I cannot think of any time I considered doing my work as a project in all these jobs. In hotel management, preparing meeting rooms or organising a wedding was never considered a project. It was our job. The banqueting manager’s job was to ensure there were enough staff to cover the wedding reception and the bar for…