This week’s post was supposed to be a description of how I completed my iterative initiation to GTD by putting my home stuff through the GTD workflow. However, I spent much of last week recovering from surgery on my ruptured appendix and the completion of my iterative initiation was put on hold.

I was so convinced that I actually had a stomach flu. I asked a friend who was in medicine about my symptoms and she agreed with my hunch. Hence, I ignored the initial warning pains a few more days before it grew to the level that forced me to the emergency room. I can at least claim good judgment there, because I was thinking about being efficient and wait to make an appointment with a doctor the next morning to save time from the emergency room wait.

The nurse that took my vital signs needed only a few seconds to guess it was appendicitis. The ER doctor took even less time to guess the same thing. It was only a matter of hours of waiting for my CAT scan results to confirm it.

The next morning after my appendectomy, the surgeon scolded me for letting it delay for so long. He told me that he nearly removed more than my appendix. My feeble reply was, “I thought it was a stomach flu.” In reality, it was that I was hoping it was stomach flu for convenience’s sake.

I had sufficient warning, but I conveniently misinterpreted the signs to avoid a trip to the hospital. Instead of coming to the hospital on my own terms and taking care of a simple appendicitis on my own terms, I had a much more risky situation and nearly had permanent damage to my GI tract.

Problems are always easier to solve before they grow to the level of being an emergency. One of the reasons I turned to GTD was I found myself being reactive with my activities instead of being proactive. We know what the necessary actions are that will address problems before they occur, but often we procrastinate on these preventative actions to take care of other actions that seem more urgent. In reality, the preventative actions are just as important, and GTD helps to not let the preventative actions fall through the cracks.