Ask Readers: Your GTD Hacks
July 14 by Chris Brogan | Uncategorized
I wasn’t going to admit this, but I can’t stay quiet: I’m really underwater because I fell off the organizational wagon. Have you ever been in this spot? You suddenly get SWAMPED with things to do, and instead of using your system to manage it, you throw it all away and just let stuff fall on the floor. Oh, is that just me?
Let me lay out the way I think I will make the system work for me, and then, what I really want, is YOUR implementation. What are you doing different than the book?
First Collection Points: Gmail-into-a-wiki for electronic stuff, and 3×5 card into a wiki for thoughts. I was using backpack, but I dunno. What about you?
Communication: I need to better gait my email swimming. I do it too often. I love writing back to readers, and I have lots of balls in the air. I can’t NOT do email, because it’s part of my efforts, but maybe I can gait it better. What about 10 minutes out of every hour? What are you doing? Oh, and now that MySpace is into the picture (I finally figured out how to make it useful to me), I’ll add that to email time.
Process: Do It Now- I think the “do-it-now” stuff owns me right now, and that’s bad. I need to work more on “habit 2″ stuff, to mix systems. I have big projects that get pushed into obscure times because I’m focusing too hard on the correspondence. Maybe I can scale the do-it-now stuff into a defer, and then give that one hour a day?
Process: Projects- Here’s where I really need help. I’ve got a trillion projects. I multitask (and MUST). I need a way to better parse stuff. Maybe I also need a better way to delegate, because I have some help on some of these projects. How are you managing that? **You know what? I think what I need is to better define process flows for the projects I’m working on, and just look at the process flow when I return to that project. You know. Things have a shape. They have a form. Maybe I’m not respecting that enough. Thoughts?
Your Hacks: How did you over-clock David Allen’s great framework? What did you add in, subtract, tweak, edit? How are you rolling with this? I need your help. LOAD this with your thoughts and feelings. And if you’re willing, take the “distillation” of your thoughts, and load it into our wiki. That would be even way-cooler, because people will be able to find it thereafter. But really, I’m selfish, so help me! : )
–Chris Brogan is looking for ways to get back to sleeping more than 4 hours a night. He writes about self-improvement (which evidently doesn’t include sleep deprivation) at [chrisbrogan.com]. He’s helping organize Podcamp Boston and working on super-secret projects too. Oh, and a book.
I hear ya, and I’m in the same boat. It’s not just the system, it’s the devices–what I need is something that’s as fun to write in as a moleskine but integrates with my email, beeps my appointments, and also carries e-books like my palm. Oh, and it should be able to share calendars with my loved ones like Gcal does.
(hmmm, I’m not helping here, am I?)
I do see a vague glimmer of hope in the trial version of LifeBalance that I downloaded. It uses contexts like GTD, but also assigns a weight of importance to things that GTD tends to lack (i.e., the next action is not always the most important action). I’ll let you know how it works.
Part of my frustration with the palm is graffiti 2.0. I find that writing and not having things actually go into pen form drives me NUTS. Any ideas for how to make the palm read what you write?
My daily review is VERY elaborate. Includes:
Japanese word of the day
review
put gym clothes in laundry
floss
breathe
You can’t schedule every aspect of life. It reaches a point where the time you spend (or waste…) organizing far outweighs any benefit you receive from it.
Did you get the important things done before you picked a system? How about when you first started using the system? If the answer to both of these is ‘yes’, you may find (as I have) that it was the system itself making things hard to manage. You spend so much time thinking about the best way to categorize, process, and handle things that you aren’t as focused on … well, getting things done.
I’m still a GTD newbie myself, but I think my system is right for me – at the moment.
My biggest deviation from the book is that the tickler file was worthless for me. I don’t have enough “hard landscape” tasks to make use of such a tool.
The two most important things for me have been collection and review. My success (or lack thereof) with GTD has been directly related to the frequency and quality of reviews.
E-mail and IM are Major tools in my job. When it’s past 9am and I’m not logged into IM, I start getting flooded with calls and E-mails asking if I’m in the office.
The trick is to:
E-mail.. Evaluate if that response needs to be done now.. I treat my Mailbox as my “Inbox” and skim the mail, processing only the things that are important enough to contend with my current NA list.
Everything else sits until the afternoon or when I get caught up on my NA list. Then I work the mail inbox.
For IM- if it’s chatter I respond ‘otp’ [on the phone].
Hack. I have to take a ton of notes in the course of a day… some of them I need to process, but most are just mental RAM. Things I only need for a few moments and will not need a half hour from now. I’ve taken to keeping a stack of 3×5′s for the RAM notes.
Write it, use it, toss it.
A lot of the DoItNow stuff, really doesn’t fall into that category.. it’s Trash.
Play close attention to what you’re spending, the limited time you have, on.
BTW – This was on my NA list as GTD/Lifehack Read and Feed [GTD/Lifehack]
Marburg
Current meatspace coordinates: N21 18’43.98′ W158 01’06.29
My life is “backwards” in terms of Work/Life balance. I spend a lot of time at work, but my day is mostly long periods of excruciating waiting, punctuated by bursts of activity. My need for GTD is really in my “home” time, where I am working on the blogs and websites, sort of a second job. Planning Projects and executing them is the most important feature of GTD right now.
I can’t get graffiti to work for me either. I can deal with the Palm screen being small but my problem is “speed of entry” into the system. I can write an appointment or type it on my desktop much faster. Graffiti inevitably doesn’t recognize two or three characters out of every 10 or so…
sigh.
I have the same problems with Graffiti 2.0, but I highly recommend using TealScript to get around the problem. It essentially lets you define letter keystrokes, so I set mine up to emulate Graffiti 1 (which made far more sense, IMNSHO). It’s not free (only downside), but it’s very effective.
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I use my email inbox as my INBOX. All email accounts end up there. When I’m on the road I use my blackberry to send myself ideas and tasks. When I get back to the office I schedule what I need to and file the rest. If I’m too busy to type somthing to myself I use Jott to do it for me. I use ClearContext to manage everything. I use a tickler file for hard copy, but I’m finding that I need it less and less every day.
Man, I really think the problem here is not the system nor the gear.
GTD, as explained by David Allen, is a method for stress-free productivity. Note the first words are stress-free. And not by chance. I think your problem arises when you loose this point to focus only in a powerful implementation.
And how does one reach that stress-free status? The so-called mind-like-water?
David Allen never says that one can achieve more than it´s physically possible. David Allen says that you should only commit with the possible and feasable stuff. Learn to say NO. The rest goes to Someday/Maybe.
I suggest you give the book another review. Of course I assume you have read the book, so a review would only take you a while. And stop in those chapters where the focus is not in the system implementation, but in the philosophy of the system. I would say you can go directly to Part 3.
Man, if you only get 4 hours of sleep is not the system´s fault, it´s probably you aren´t saying NO to anything.
Best regards.