Konubinix' opinionated web of thoughts

Be Clear About Your Non Commitments

Fleeting

gtd is among other things, about being appropriately engaged.

Hence I’ve setup a trusted system that captures my commitments.

To my mind, it is stressful to be in a situation where you feel like people expect something from you and you think you might well no fulfill that expectation because you did not put it in your system. In that case, it helps a lot to clarify that you just did not commit to this. People’s expectations becomes not your problem when you made clear the distinction expectation vs commitment.

Unfortunately, from time to time and no matter how clear I clarified I did not commit to it, people still behave like if I was committed.

This happens mostly in team commitments, where other members of the team behave as if they were committed (and they most likely are). As a member of the team, I become part of it against my will, at least from an exterior perspective. This is independent of disagree and commit, where I can commit to some team goal while not believing it. Here, on the contrary, I might agree with the idea but did not deem reasonable to believe that I (and likely the team) would make it, hence I would feel that committing would be intellectually dishonest.

The strange thing with such situations is that being surrounded with people behaving as if I was committed tends to make me doubt: Did I actually commit? Why isn’t that in my trusted system? Did I miss it?

Hence, to keep having a clear mind and make sure I’m appropriately engaged, I need to capture also stuffs that are non committed expectation in my trusted system. That way, I can feel good reminding me of when, where and with whom I clarified the non commitment.

Notes linking here