Several years ago, I went to an exhibition of sketches by Francisco Goya, and was struck by the image that accompanies this blog. Appropriately entitled Man Carrying a Huge Load, I recognized the feeling expressed in that simple ink sketch.

I recognized it because it was me carrying my bulging briefcase back and forth from work to home every day.

Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill just to watch it roll back down, I lugged home heavy stacks of paper night after night. The burden I carried was a hodgepodge of things to be thrown away, time bombs in the form of urgent actions I hadn’t captured anywhere, and things that simply needed filing.

Each evening, I had the lofty vision of making headway on that stack which, in truth, had haunted me in one form or another my entire working career. More often than not, I lugged it back to work the next day – untouched.

A similar moment of recognition occurred a few years earlier while watching The Mission, the 1986 movie about the work of the Jesuits in South America. Captain Mendoza, played by Robert Deniro, killed his own brother and, in penance, drags a heavy parcel of weapons from his former life as a mercenary up a steep Amazon mountain.

It sometimes felt as if the physical exertion of carrying that briefcase – which often blossomed into two briefcases and a carryon suitcase – was penance for not having done anything with them. When someone would comment on my “luggage,” I would joke that, “This is the only exercise I get.” (That’s a topic for a future blog…)

This sense of overload wasn’t just coming from stacks of papers. The deluge of emails we all endure also added psychic weight.

The avalanche of email peaked for me this spring just after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. It was if the earthquake had also spawned a tsunami of emails. At one point, I had more than 3,000 messages, with more than 2,000 of those unread.

Like many of you, my bookshelves had become a graveyard for the latest treatises on improving performance. I studied Covey’s habits, spent sixty seconds on the One Minute Manager and lusted after the thought of The 4-hour Workweek.

But in the end, my stack continued to grow, my emails piled up and my sense of accomplishment waned in proportion.

I paint this bleak picture intentionally to put into stark relief the change I have gone through in the past month. This is going to sound like an infomercial if I’m not careful, but I recently read a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done that has changed my life.

Want proof?

I went from more than 2,000 work e-mails to zero. That’s right – zero, zip, nada, zilch. The stacks of paper – which had taken on the form of an archaeological dig – are all gone. The trash has been trashed, the actions have been captured and the reference material has been filed away. Not even a sticky note in sight.

Last time I could say that was, well, uh….never.

So how did I achieve this radical shift?

In a nutshell, Getting Things Done is about setting up a process to capture all the things you need to do – so you can get them off your mind. Allen describes this as achieving “mind like water,” a phrase found in Zen literature that refers to a state of mind not encumbered by all the things our minds “think” we should be doing. This enables us to focus on the moment, responding fully to whatever is happening right now.

As Allen says, our minds are really kind of stupid. We have thoughts about open action items whether we are in a position to do anything about them or not – which triggers stress.

To get those things out of the RAM of our conscious mind, it is necessary to put them into a simple, yet comprehensive system we can trust will remind us about them at the right moment. It entails thinking about each project you have – determining the desired outcome – and then identifying the next step you need to take to move that project closer to completion.

The final step is to review these lists of projects and next steps as often as needed to keep them “off your mind.”

Got a “to do” list?

I did. It was a 400-item blob of amorphous phrases. I hadn’t done the simple task of thinking through the next physical action that needed to happen to move the project forward.

As a result, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of that murky list, I spent any “free” time perusing my mountain of emails looking for quick hits to make myself feel productive. But my “important but not urgent” projects languished from neglect.

The fallacy of that approach, of course, is that important projects that languish become urgent, important projects – which is the textbook recipe for the stressful life I had cooked up for myself.

And that stack of papers that mocked me from the corner of my desk? Through the rocket science idea of setting up a filing system of alphabetized manila folders, every scrap of paper that I might need someday is filed away. It’s key that the folders are in a cabinet at arm’s reach. Otherwise, I’d be tempted yield to the old habit of stacking things on my desk.