If life is about relationships, why are we so busy tracking tasks?
Starting my day today, I began listening to my voicemail and making notes about who called and what was their message. As I made notes, the “primary field” of my note was the person’s name who called. I looked back, and realized that this may be very appropriate to the overall organizational process. How might I expand on this in the rest of my life?
In the last two years, I’ve taken on a technical sales job. There are different skills involved doing this job than doing a pure technical implementation type role. I deal with people then technology rather than with technology then people.
In trying to help keep me and my sales guy organized, we identified that I tend to organize my life from an implementation approach. I tend to organize by projects first, and the people are simply resources to accomplish tasks. He looks at the people first. His job is the people,
and he wants to organize his life by the people involved, and the tasks are simply milestones to accomplish to help build and further the relationship.
Whether or not we’re trying to sell stuff to people, there’s some wisdom in orienting life around your relationships. I personally have come to believe that the love of God and neighbor are the most important things. Organizing my day around my relationships rather than around my tasks seems to better fit that belief.
Hmph. Now I need to explore task and organizational systems that are relationship oriented rather than task oriented. I could apply GTD’s approach of creating a “project” for every person. I could apply the 7 Habits approach of orienting around the major “roles” (ie:
relationships) I have in my life. I could go down the path of using ACT or some other CRM type approach thinking of people as leads and tasks as opportunities.
Time will tell, and so will I. Stay tuned.
“Seeking the Grand Unified Theory Of Personal Organization (GUTOPO)”