While this process is working for me, I should recognize that there is certainly room for improvement, and disclose that I fall off the horse pretty frequently. People\'s GTD processes evolve over time and mine, described here, is also a work in progress. If that happens, and you know that it would, you no longer have to remember where you put anything, and only that you looked at it and did your workflow on it. I think that there in lies the discipline of GTD – that you recognize that your commitments, todos, papers and other \"stuff\" can only be in those 7 places, and that they were put there via some very straightforward rules, and that you could redo the process and everything would end up in the same places. If you collect all your “stuff” (an accomplishment in and of itself), and process it all into these destinations, you know that that’s all there is to do (until more comes). It’s all either trash, something you might do someday, something you need to keep and refer to, or delegated to someone, or need to do yourself when you get a chance, or need to do on/by a certain time and date, or a project. There is no 8th or 9th place something could go. The seven places are the only places everything can end up. The destinations are and must remain comprehensive. In GTD, time isn’t managed, and tasks don’t have priority (it’s assumed you committed to do something because it’s important enough), they have contexts. Once something leaves the INBOX, it never goes back in.There are also some rules for how things flow through the GTD workflow, which are kind of dogmatic: If a next action has a specific time it needs to happen on, or happen by, it goes on the calendar. The contexts are defined by you, but the list shouldn’t get out of hand, because you’ll need to remember them.Ĭalendar records appointments and things with due dates. The tasks are organized into contexts like etc. These are usually organized on list of things you need to do when you get a chance, called the Next Actions list or task list. \"NextActions\" are discrete actions that can\'t be completed at the moment. This could range from little things like \"Plan picnic on yyyy-mm-dd\" to big things like \"Successfully complete merger with Company X\" \"Projects\" are goals that require more than 1 step to accomplish. \"Stuff\" is everything that life throws at us that requires or demands our attention, like mail, email, text messages, memos, notes, thoughts, ideas, bills, etc. This is not an original thought, as many people have found this to be so, and GTD methodology is extremely popular. If either isn’t the case, then little bumps on the road that were fine when driving at 5mph suddenly become car-flipping bumps at 100mph.Īmong the many productivity and schools of thought on how to keep our mental house in good order, I found David Allen\'s Gettting Things Done methodology to be most applicable to me. If your car and driving skills are in good order, speeding up isn’t a problem. I’ve heard it likened to a driving a car. There is some control imparted by actively deciding for oneself what to do among the sea of things to do, instead of letting emergencies dictate what’s going to happen now. Managing what to do – writing them down, looking at them to decide what to do next, or now, or tomorrow – at some point becomes almost as important as doing the work, as efficiency has to be brought in somehow (in addition to working harder) to get everything done on time to the degree that they need to be done.įor me, thinking about and deciding what the best thing is to work on right now was the first step towards gaining some perspective, or having some ideas about what\'s important (although that in and of itself doesn’t impart perspective). When workload becomes large enough, it becomes entirely possible to work really hard on the wrong thing for that time/situation.
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