A very good Office Manager I once worked with coined a phrase around our office that she eloquently titled “GSD.” Not to be confused with David Allen’s GTD or Getting Things Done, although at a high level it did share some aspects, GSD just meant “Get Shit Done.”
Most often this was used in the context of either me asking her for something that she had already done, “I’ve already done it. GSD.” or in the context of her asking me for something I had not yet done, “Did you validate my TPS reports? GSD man, GSD!” Similar in the meaning, she was saying that she had done it because she Gets Shit Done or that I needed to do it in order to Get Shit Done.
It’s actually a very good method of getting work done, when you distill it to what she was actually talking about. The most common reason I would put something off was because I either didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it or because I thought it was going to take a lot of time. Difficulty could also be a factor, but primarily it would be in the area of tedium. All of those can be summed up by a phrase I learned very early in life: “I don’t wanna.”
The GSD method is the answer to that stall in that it says “I don’t care if you don’t wanna, just GSD.” Another way to put it is “Do the things you don’t want to do first.” In any scenario there’s a reason that something else is more important than that thing I don’t want to do. Time is an issue, resources, any number of other issues. I can rationalize that me doing 10 important things is just as productive as me doing that one tedious item. The problem is that one tedious item will never get done, unless you have a very good Office Manager pushing you to GSD.
Most of us don’t have that in every aspect of our lives so it does require a little discipline, but every time that I think about stalling on an item I think about GSD. It makes me smile, but it also reminds me that there’s no reason to stall if I want to GSD. I do the things I don’t want to do, and that lightens the burden while I’m doing the things I do want to do.
It’s very simple and it’s not going to change your life, but the next time that you are daunted by a task, think “What’s it going to take for me to GSD” and I think you’ll be surprised at how simple moving forward is.