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 | Centre Pompidou Museum. Paris, France October 21, 2006 |
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« Earth To Nickels: It's Over | Main | Back From Virginia » September 21, 2006Getting Things DoneKeith and I recently got into a conversation about productivity - he noticed that my e-mail inbox was relatively clean (3 or 4 messages) and was curious as to what, if any, techniques I use to stay on top of things. I'm a recent convert to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology (aka "GTD"). Allen's methods have caught on like wildfire among the geek crowd (see also: 43 Folders, Lifehacker), and for good reason - they're simple, easy to implement, and they work. Buy the book. Allen's techniques boil down to a few simple concepts. First, when a new 'thing' comes in to your life (e.g., an e-mail message), you make a decision, right then and there, what to do about it. The motto is, "do it, defer it, delegate it, or delete it." Doing is appropriate if the item is simple (2 minutes or less) or really important. Deferring is better when the project can't be done right this second - it might require a special kind of attention or thought, say. Delegating is when you need to throw the ball to someone else for their action; Deleting is just what it sounds like. (And personally, I've found the DELETE key to be my best friend. It's incredibly liberating to just zap stuff that you know, in your heart, you weren't going to deal with anyway.) Generally, this works great for quick-hit stuff (you've Done it), team/collab stuff (you've Delegated it) and unimportant stuff (Deleted). Problem is, you're now leaking all these non-trivial tasks into your Deferred list -- and that's not helpful, right? I mean, the deferral list for important items ("Write business plan", "Suck up to boss") will compete with the list of other Stuff You Have To Do Sometime that's rattling around your head ("Get milk at grocery store", "Buy a birthday card for Richard", "Run marathon"). You need a system to track your deferred tasks, or else they'll just congeal into this unmanageable, amorphous blob. Enter the comprehensive project list. Allen proposes that you use a system to capture all these various Deferred items. When he works with his clients, he actually will spend a couple of days going through their office and files, capturing every last thing the person is doing, needs to do, intends to do, or thought it would be "cool" to do some day. (As you might imagine, for most people - especially go-go-go Type A's - this is a big, hairy list.) Most of the items on the list are going to be unevenly sized - that it, some items will be small, and deferred because of timing ("Go to Hallmark next week and get that birthday card") while others are larger, and deferred because, well, they're daunting ("Plan Paris trip"). So, armed with your comprehensive project list, you walk through it and figure out what the smallest next step is for each item. In the case of the birthday card, there's not much to break down (I mean, just buy the card, right?), but with the Paris trip, a first step might be to call a travel agent, or go on the Web to find out what fares look like right now. Whatever that next thing is, identify it. OK. So now you've got your project list, and you've got your set of next steps. Problem is, these steps can't be done in a vacuum - some require equipment (a computer, a phone), while others require you be in a specific location (at home, at work) or in a specific mode (out running errands). Allen calls these "contexts", which refers to the situation you need to be in to work on the step in question. There's no canonical list of contexts out there; rather, people create their own, based on what makes sense to them. I use a short fairly short list:
Your list of contexts may (will) vary, but these have been quite useful for me. (And if you want a deeper dive into contexts, be sure to check out 43 Folders' article on the subject.) So you've got your project list, your next steps, your contexts. Whew! Sounds like a lot of work, huh? Well, actually - it's not. What's has been a lot of work, for me at least, was feeling drowned in tasks and projects, or worrying about whether or not I was forgetting to do something, or - even worse - knowing that I had some projects lurking in my mind or on my hard drive that I was simply not doing because they felt too big or too amorphous. Getting clarity on what my projects really are and what I need to be working on next is ... wonderful. My mind clears up, anxiety drops, and I can focus. Not only that, but the ongoing overhead of project/task management is low. It's actually really, really easy to maintain things once you've got your project list, and, if your tools support the GTD methodology, it's unbelievably trivial to stay on top of the various things you're trying to shepherd. For example, I have a project called "gavinshearer.com" for blog-related items. The top-level project has two subprojects - "Entries" and "Site". "Entries" captures ideas for posts I'd like to write, or posts that are currently in progress. "Site" is a list of improvements I'd like to make to the physical site itself - software upgrades to Movable Type, that kind of thing. When I have an idea for an entry or a site improvement, I just drop it in to the appropriate project folder. Nothing gets lost. And, every Sunday or so, I go through my project folder and figure out what I want to work on this week - just assign a context ("@Mac") and a due-date, and I'm in business. From a mechanical standpoint, I manage my life in software (natch). As it happens, the Mac is a hotbed of GTD software development, and there are a number of options available to Mac users to make this stuff dead-bang easy. My kit consists of:
iCal is my calendar, and it runs my world. Think of iCal as the dashboard that lets me know, at a glance, what the heck I need to be doing on any given day. My contexts are different calendars in iCal, which means they're all color-coded and easy-to-read. OmniOutliner Pro is a list-making and list-management tool. It's a great product on its own, but it shines when you pair it with Kinkless GTD, a set of free AppleScripts and templates that customize OmniOutliner so it's a) optimized for the GTD methodology (project list, contexts) and b) can talk to iCal. OmniOutliner is my project and task repository - my brain. It's where I go when I need to add a task to my radar, and make sure it Gets Done. Then, I click the "Sync" button, and OmniOutliner populates iCal with the appropriate tasks on the appropriate days. (And, in a moment of utter coolness, if I've modified something in iCal, that gets synced back to OmniOutliner.) Kinkless GTD + OmniOutliner Pro is the glue, the core, of my system. Mail.app is straightforward e-mail software, but when paired with MailTags and Mail Act-On it becomes a GTD machine. I've written about this before, so I won't repeat a lot of that material here except to say that it's incredibly easy to defer a task in e-mail using MailTags; just tag the mail with a context, give it a due date, and then file it: you're done. Mail Act-On speeds this process up, helping me fly through mail messages by keeping my hands on the keyboard. Together, they're pretty amazing. So. That's my productivity system. I can tell you honestly that I've experimented with a lot of different systems for managing projects and getting things done, but Getting Things Done(™) is the only one that's been truly effective. I don't worry any more about whether or not I'm missing projects or forgetting things - instead, I can just glance at iCal and go from there. Heaven. If you're on a Mac and want to try this, most of the tools - OmniOutliner Pro and so on - have free trial periods. Get Allen's book (or visit his Web site), download some software, and see what you think. Posted by Gavin Shearer at September 21, 2006 11:12 AM. Posted to Geek. CommentsJust to let you know that we have developped a free Java based (means it can run on Mac, Windows and Linux) application ThinkingRock (www.thinkingrock.com.au) which according to many of our users help them to follow the GTD process very well. We have now done 3 releases so the product is quite mature (and fully tested). There are more features coming as well. Posted by: Frasy Thanks Gavin, thoughtful stuff! I'm going to dig into GTD some more! Posted by: Jeff Merriman-Cohen at March 19, 2007 1:48 PM Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
