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Work / life balance and GTD?

I work too much. I am fully aware that I do it but that does not stop me, even though the extra work that I do is not even expected of me. From what I have heard from friends and colleagues, this seems to be fairly common across most modern professions. Perhaps it is something do to with the kind of knowledge work that we all engage in these days?

Getting Things Done has helped me get a handle on what I am working on, but I am concerned that GTD does not really help in attaining a proper work / life balance. In particular, I have found that my contexts (for example, @computer, @phone, @errands) tend to have next actions relating to both 'work' and 'life'. When I am at home during the weekend, I end up looking at all of these actions and I tend to engage my 'work brain' in response.

Has anybody else experienced this? Or found ways to get around it?

Last week I tried changing my contexts so that I had a single @work context and a single @home context. Unfortunately, I found that I would get nagging feelings that I should be looking at one or other contexts, because I half-knew that there were things on them that could be done at that moment.

D

emuelle1's picture

I can't say I have...

I can't say I have that problem either.

What I've done is to put all my work tasks under either the context @work or the role Employee (I'm working out a hybrid GTD/Covey system). Some tasks such as phone calls and emails go into the @contact context. I can tell which are work and which are personal related.

 
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