Do Things in Ten Years
You no longer hear that a lot of people talking about the system improve “performance the Getting Things the Done ». It’s not as colorful and Insta-friendly as Bullet Journal , and while various apps have claimed to “work with GTD,” they all lag a bit because GTD is analog at its core. This is a system that works less. it’s good if you let Gmail automatically sort your email into categories, or if you let the app scan your documents to pull out tasks or calendar items, as the whole point of GTD is that you actively track and collect every task, responsibility, or concern (also known as “Open Loop”) that comes your way. You have to go through every email and record every appointment because if you spend any time worrying if the app has taken care of automatically scheduling something, it’s an open loop that takes up space in your head and prevents you from doing what. something else.
I’ve spent the last ten years fixing these loops. Processing my email. Planning your own calendar. I write down my own tasks. I use apps (calendar, fitness, bank) to help me manage all this information, but I don’t trust anybody but myself with part of the collection.
All of this – GTD practice – changed my brain. I can no longer think about things without breaking them down automatically into components, individual actions that must be performed before the thing itself is done, sorted, resolved . I can’t imagine Monday without a weekly review or an open loop that lets me stay in my head longer than I need to get to my ubiquitous capture device.
However, I no longer think of it as a universal gripper. This is just my notebook.
Much of what David Allen wrote in his 2001 opus How To Do It All: The Art of Stress- Free Productivity is outdated. (He used to advise people to create a separate list of the following actions that they could only do when they were around the phone.) There is a revised 2015 edition that I haven’t read yet, and I assume it has to do with word processing and scanning. Twitter feeds, and they’re probably outdated by now because they don’t have guidelines for grabbing open loops from Slack.
But I don’t need to read this, because I’m already … transformed. I asked again. Optimized for stress-free productivity and ready to go.
How getting things done changed my life
I can’t remember if I read Gina Trapani’s post on Lifehacker about “simplified GTD” before or after I discovered Merlin Mann’s 43 folders , but a lot of people talked about GTD back in 2007, and since I just started to work in the first office I was ready for a job that required me to do more than just “answer calls”. (I wrote the cases on scraps of paper, crossed out the points and rewrote them the next morning.) I told my boss I wanted to read this book on productivity, and then I went to the Borders across the street from my office and bought it.
It all fit into my brain like a melody; instantly memorable, every detail flows into the next. I opened a spreadsheet and began cataloging each unfinished task, adding new lines below the cells to break open loops into separate next steps. I went to the closet to find something that could serve as a dedicated mailbox for sheets of paper and other physical items that needed to be converted into tasks and activities. I asked my boss if the office would allow me to buy 43 folders and a hanging file in which I would store them.
I am very confident that after that I became a GTD Dork in the office. I converted to my faith. I asked my colleagues to read the book and I even convinced some of them to take part in an online webinar with David Allen himself . (He accidentally shared a screen that showed some of his more personal Next Actions. It was weird.) I asked HR if attending one of the big GTD workshops like the ones they do in hotel ballrooms would count as professional development.
But I did a lot. I became known as someone who could balance multiple projects without missing a deadline. I wrote down each responsibility, broke it down into individual actions, and checked all of my outstanding actions once a week. I also did the part of GTD that is secretly the most difficult; one that turns GTD from a spreadsheet system to a productivity engine: I did what was on my list.
GTD works because it allows you to collect all your outstanding responsibilities in one place. You don’t have to waste your brain space thinking, “I need toilet paper, don’t forget about toilet paper” because this is written down along with the “draft plan” or “Melissa’s invoice email” or whatever. need to do. (Yes, you can categorize your list if you don’t want toilet paper mixed in with your work materials.) This was a big watershed for me; the idea that I can write down every little thing , break it down into separate activities, and put all those activities in one document.
GTD also works because it gives you the ability to quickly go through your to-do list – literally your life’s to-do list – and pick one action to take right now . But you must also complete it. Then, once you’re done, you need to do something else.
How GTD Matches With Other Applications and Systems to Improve Productivity
Since launching GTD, I have tried several applications and systems to improve performance. I’ve downloaded and uninstalled Remember Milk more than once; it was good, but I could track and organize tasks much faster in my spreadsheet.
I’ve been trying to dump projects into a Kanban chart for a while, and while it was fun to move the stickers around, I was just recreating the data I already had in my main GTD list and didn’t need two lists. (Having two lists means you can update one and forget to update the other, and if you have to waste time worrying about whether your system is accurate, this is a time when you don’t waste time on something else.)
There was a period of time during which I did not maintain a spreadsheet and brought everything to Basecamp because it only gave me the functionality I needed and nothing else . I wanted to keep a single list of next steps that could be categorized. I didn’t want the app to offer, advise or organize on my behalf.
But this old version of Basecamp eventually stopped syncing with my phone, which meant I couldn’t trust it anymore, and the new version of Basecamp has a lot more features than I needed.
So I keep my table. It looks very different than when I first started using GTD, but it works. Sometimes I think about switching to Bullet Journal – I love colored markers – but then I remember that the paper is crumpled and stuffed into boxes, and my spreadsheet system contains accurate records of everything I have done in several years, that I can drive up and reference when I need to.
How my GTD practice has changed
I have been practicing GTD for about ten years now. I still write everything down, even if it’s a task that I plan to complete as soon as I get out of bed and go to my home office. (We all know that going through a doorway makes us forget about things, right?)
I also still maintain a dedicated inbox for mail, random paper documents, and random things that need to be sent somewhere until I figure out what to do with them. I stopped using the Tickler folder around 2012; Google Calendar could handle most of my reminders, and there wasn’t enough paper to support the 43 folder system.
I used to do weekly reviews on Fridays to reflect on the week I just finished; Now I do them on Mondays to plan for the week ahead.
I also sort my next actions by date – for example, “this is what I want to do on Tuesday” – instead of putting them all on the same list. I have a spreadsheet that I organize like a calendar, and each day has its own list of professional and personal tasks that I mark as I complete them. When I process the items in this table, I not only break the items down into their individual actions, but I also decide which day they will be executed.
I still maintain a separate Someday / Maybe action list in my old Basecamp account that I haven’t gotten rid of yet – it contains a record of so many tasks completed! – although this Someday / Maybe list is mostly dead. GTD made mine someday now ; I accomplished a lot by saying, “Okay, I want to do this. How and when am I going to do this? “
And then I do it. This is the hardest part in achieving your goal. Other than that, just good notes.