Chris Murtland at his blog has formalized couple of strategies to approach his tasks. He called them workflow strategies which he may deploy along with the GTD methodology to accomplish his daily projects. Some of the are mentioned in the book or elsewhere – but he have done a great job to consolidate them:
- alternate projects
- big chunks of time on certain projects
- complete as many small items as possible
- oldest first
- newest first
- squeaky wheel
- goal driven
Those strategy patterns may help you quickly go through some tasks that you have to juggle or priroritize during the day:
… Anyway, the point is that I move to other criteria when choosing actions to complete from a very long list of @Computer actions. In the book (p. 192 in the hardcover), David tells us that context is only one of four criteria to apply when choosing actions. The other three, in order, are time available, energy available, and priority. I don’t generally track these in any formal way, but I do use the criteria intuitively, although I steer clear of priority for the most part. If I have agreed to do something, I need to do it, and setting priorities on actions tends to create a false order (for me). I intuitively know how to discern a real crisis from pedestrian actions anyway. This all works fine, as far as it goes…
Revolving workflow strategies – [Murt World]
