Country Living with Francis Farragher

IT’S a typical late Thursday afternoon and the ‘back has been broken’ in terms of wiping out the workloads that comes with earning your crust from working in a provincial paper, before your mind wanders a bit, and you say to yourself, that the same thing has to be done all over again next week.

For years I’ve been a great believer in the list [pronounced out the country as the ‘lisht’] when there’s a certain relief from writing down the things you need to do today, tomorrow and for the week ahead.

The old-fashioned way of doing it is of course the daily page in your diary or a piece of hardened notebook cover paper but now there’s the notes app on you iPhone, which can seem to be a good  idea, and look at all the ink and paper that you save.

For me though, the notes on the mobile have never really floated my boat and I usually revert back to the tried and trusted method of the Bic four-coloured ‘biro’ with the red insertions always topping the high-priority list.

The formula can often be followed for days with some measure of success but then a Tuesday or Wednesday at the peak-production days in provincial newspapers can be just too busy to write things down and ‘the lisht’ becomes a forgotten friend.

I’m almost certain that somewhere around the house, I have a David Allen book entitled ‘Getting Things Done’ [GTD] which I embraced with great gusto a good few years back, and imagined that, at last, I had workload issues sorted out.

It worked for a while but as days passed into weeks the ‘Getting Things Done’ book was left up so carefully that I could never find it again and a month had passed without any ‘must do’ instructions being written down.

The problem with ‘getting things done’ in real life is that at times the sheer volume of tasks big and small seems to inject a kind of inertia into our functioning brain and we either decide to go to the pub to clear our minds or to slunk off to bed and pretend that everything will be better and fresher in the morning . . . but it won’t!

Apparently, according to people like Dave Allen, who can get things done and make loads of money from writing books telling us how we can emulate him, the list that I occasionally scribble out with serious intent is not really the way to go. Discipline has to be factored into the equation and that seems to be genetically absent from my system.