As you may have read about at www.FixYourToDoList.com, or the short blog post I wrote the other day, I finally came to the hard decision of shutting down Foresight. As I have always done with this blog, I want to turn this into a “lessons learned” in hopes that my lesson will be a valuable lesson to others.
“Being comfortable” is the best theme for the lesson. As I have written about at least once here, David Allen himself once told me, and I firmly believe that you have to be “comfortable” with your To Do list. You have to be comfortable with what is on it, the size of it, the importance of things on it and the “do-ability” of things on it (all my words). When it came to Foresight, I was getting uncomfortable with it as the do-ability was gnawing at me. I knew with a full time job, with my children and my Fiancé that I did not have the time and resources to devote to Foresight. One might think the decision seemed easy. However, there was one item that kept holding me back.
Challenges
You would think with all the above reasons that I would just pull the plug. However, there were a couple of things holding me back. The first one was money & debt. I have a relatively significant amount of debt built up from developing and deploying Foresight. That debt stares at me every day. When I started thinking about shutting down Foresight, a little nay-saying voice would say to me, “But you have to keep it going; you have to pay back the debt.” And, it is that little voice that would keep me basically frozen, which is not a good state.
Action
Lately, my Pastor has talked a lot about a two themes:
- Things must remain in motion, otherwise they stagnate and die. (For example, think about a stream of water in nature – if it flows, it stays fresh. If it does not, it stagnates and grows crud.)
- Action is required to make progress in all facets of life.
In thinking about this, I identified that I was not taking action and thus things were stagnating and slowly dying. I figured action – any action – was better than none. Does shutting down Foresight help with my debt? Well, not on the surface; the debt is still there. But, taking action might help in the long run.
Giving
I’ve always been a generous person. And, over the past couple of years, I have purposely tried to increase my generosity; to give more and to be a blessing to people. Being that I use Foresight everyday to keep many projects (27 is today’s count) successfully moving forward, I decided that my success should be one major factor in taking action. I said, “Foresight is still a great tool as it is. Let’s let others gain what I gain out of it every day.” It is my hope that with giving it away, my generosity will be returned by people who find it adds the same value to their lives and choose to make a contribution. And, in continuing with the giving desire, it is my plan to give away a portion of those proceeds to charity, hopefully keeping motion, in motion, for some time to come.
Closure
So, even though my “action” on the surface may seem like it will not address my severest needs, I have high beliefs that it will. On top of that, it brings closure to a chapter in my life, makes my To Do list comfortable again and allows me to move forward.
Sometimes you need to prune the bushes to get the best flowers to grow. Sounds like you made a very wise decision!