johnwin

Pick-Up Sticks and Next Actions – lifehack.org

Download of they Day: 2007 calendar Word templates – Lifehacker

Great calendar downloads!

How to sync Outlook with GCal and Gmail – lifehack.org

Software: Jello – A GTD implmentation for Outlook – lifehack.org

This article was written for BlackBeltProductivity.com:

* what your state of affairs was like pre-GTD:

Working as a construction industry project manager and cost consultant for the last 19+ years I had to develop many coping strategies in order to get my job done at a level at least approaching competence.

The methods I used were sufficient to raise me to a reasonable level of seniority within my various employer companies. There does come a time though when the work load (professional and personal) reaches a point where you have to stand up and say ‘enough is enough – I can’t do any more’. Once I did that and calmed down I started to wonder why I could not do more. There were clearly people around me who were getting more things done and had managed to hold on to more of their hair than me as well!

Don’t get me wrong – I had never got to the stage where I was simply failing to do what I needed to do. I was just not happy how I was doing it. Too many hours in the office after everyone had gone home and to many missed opportunities to do things I wanted to do with my family. Things had to change.

* how you found out about GTD:

I tried all the usual self help books on the topic of time management but at each turn came up against a huge stumbling block: All these methods immediately ask you to plan out your entire life and write some kind of nebulous mission statement to act as your guiding light for the rest of your life! All I wanted to do was get all my stuff done as scheduled and with enough time left over for me and my loved ones.

In the absence of nothing better I embarked on the Franklin Covey method of time and personal management. Skipping over the esoteric life planning I got straight in to the ABCD task management kick and quickly felt even more overwhelmed – now I still had 300 tasks but also need to sit and score the importance / urgency of them all and then find a system to record them and remind myself about them. My work load had suddenly INCREASED, not an ideal situation.

Long story short: I stopped using the FC method after 3 weeks and had actually burned up more hours trying to get the system up and running.

There followed a hiatus of around 6 weeks before I felt confident enough to consider another method. After a few minutes Googling ‘time management’ I kept seeing references to David Allen and Getting Things Done. I seem to recall that the first sites I spend much time reading about GTD were 43 Folders and DavidCo.

David has the foresight to realise that by making quite a bit of his content free he can reel in more customers – so I gathered what free stuff I could and it all seemed to make sense to me: No ‘mission statements’, no prioritising of ‘tasks’, a down to earth approach to defining ‘Next Actions’ , and the real clincher for me was ‘Contexts’

*how easy/difficult was your implementation

After reading the book twice I felt ready to begin my implementation. As a long term Palm PDA user I knew that I wanted Outlook and my PDA to form the backbone to my Trusted System.

For me the Collection stage was actually both tremendous fun and a real eye-opener. Fun because you really feel like you are doing something to tame this beast of your own creation. And an eye-opener because I could not believe how much stuff was occupying physical space and mental RAM that just did not belong there and had no Next Action. So I could just throw it away! Great fun.

I found setting up my Contexts was also surprisingly easy, though I did more or less just copy the suggested Contexts from the book. I know from the various discussion groups that a lot of people seem to struggle with defining their Contexts but for me it really was very easy – maybe I was just lucky.

One mindset shift that did cause me to wonder if it was wise was the notion that processing you stuff into Next Actions does not then contemplate the idea of prioritising your Actions. Looking back now I think I struggled with this notion just because every ToDo application I have ever seen (Palm and Windows) always does stress the picking of priorities – in other words it was a habit I had to break. The effort in un-learning the habit is paid back in spades thanks to the flexibility it give you to choose exactly the Next Action that best suits your Context, time availability and constantly shifting deadlines.

Reviews: Agh! Why can I not be better at these! This was (and still remains to some extent) my Achilles Heel when it comes to implementation. I’ve tried every which way to ensure I carry out at least the weekly review of my Project List and Next Actions: an appointment with myself every Friday afternoon – often too busy; ditto but on a Monday am – again often too busy; a session one evening in the week – struggle to find a quite place away from the family. Of course these are all just excuses to procrastinate and really there is time to do the reviews. All I can do is keep plugging away at this until it just becomes part of my GTD – I’m getting there.

*what are your current tools for your system

My box of GTD tools consist of the following:

1. Outlook (work and home)
2. Pocket PC Smartphone, running Pocket Informant
3. A4 Daybook (work only)
4. Labeller (of course!)
5. Tickler file
6. 3 drawer filing cabinets (1 at home, 1 at work)

Here is a quick rundown of what each of these tools do for me.

Outlook – at work I live in Outlook for Calendaring, e-mail, tasks and notes. Therefore I do all home GTD stuff in Outlook at home also. It’s not perfect but it is very powerful and I find new features all the time. I did try the GTD plug-in but as I cannot install it at work I found it to be of limited use when only used on my home PC. This is synced to my . .

Pocket PC Smartphone – used for all my on the move GTD stuff. With Pocket Informant running on there I can view my Next Action lists grouped by Context. I also make good use of the voice recording facility to capture ideas and Action during my commuting time (10-15 hours per week).

A4 Daybook – all my non-electronic notes and meeting notes go in here and the book is never more than 12 inches from my elbow!

Labeller – no explanation needed.

Tickler File – I have one at home and one at work. A great way to post reminders to your self when you actually need the item in your hand in order to action it (meeting minutes, water bills etc). For more general reminders I rely on Outlook / Smartphone alarms.

3 Drawer Filing Cabinets – 1 draw for tickler files and 2 for project and reference filing. I keep my work and personal files separate for reasons of privacy – not ideal but the best I can do.

* what is the state of affairs like now, post-GTD

So – what is better now that I have control over the many pulls on my time?

I have a much greater feel of control and knowledge of all my projects. Many of my projects are delivered ahead of schedule and, with a few exceptions, none are delivered late or incomplete.

But for me the greatest advantage has been that this control has allowed me to focus on the bigger life goals and look at where I want to be in 1, 5, 10 years and beyond.

By bringing the day to day work under control I am able to focus on the mid to long term and that is where the real power lies in GTD. And the best news is that the better you get at GTD the better GTD gets!

So many In-boxes!

For me the single most enjoyable part of setting up my GTD system was identifying all my inboxes and collecting all my ‘stuff’ – what David Allen calls your ‘RAM Dump’

Like most people I finally threw up my hands and said “I cannot do this anymore – I have too much to do and it is not going to get done unless something changes” – so after my first ‘dump’ it was with some satisfaction that I looked at all my overflowing in-boxes and thought “Told you so!”

Under the GTD methodology you must free your conscious and unconscious mind from having to worry about just how much stuff you have to do.

So here is how to do it:

Identify your inboxes

What you need to do is realise just how many inboxes you have. To fully account for them all you need to remember that these do not simply refer to the wire tray on your office desk! These things can be found all over the place! Here is a far from exhaustive list of where your inboxes (real and virtual) might be:

Office Desk

Den / Study

Personal email

Work email

RSS Feeds

Phone text messages

Voice mail

Faxes

Pile of correspondence accumulation on the hall stand

‘Honey do’ notes

Kitchen whiteboard

Your head!

Dump their content into one place. If these are physical items – letters, faxes, reports etc pile them up in one place. If they are emails print them out and add these to the pile. Write down the other items on a single sheet of paper per item and add these to the pile. Keep going like this until you think you are finished – then go have a cup of tea/coffee and come back 30 minutes later and add all those other items you forgot half an hour ago when you thought you had finished!

One note of caution – in this initial ‘dump’ do not attempt to action ANYTHING! Just add them all to the pile and do not make any kind of value judgement. You will find that an action to ‘close out the £1m property deal for work’ will sit next to ‘fix lock on kids play house’ – but that is fine – we are just collection stuff at this stage.

Now – take a deep breath and then launch into the next Phase of GTD – processing!

 
Process your inboxes

This does not mean ‘doing’ all your stuff – it means processing their contents and making a firm judgement on what you need to do with each thing.

Starting at the top of the pile process each item in the order the pile presents them – don’t be tempted to cherry pick the easy ones or put of the more complex – just sit and crank through it.

 In processing each item consider the following:

-          Is this item actionable? Do I need to do anything with this at all? If there is no action required you have 3 options: trash it (there is nothing to do or you never intend to do anything with it); incubate it (you might need to do something with it one day); file it (you might want to refer to it one day). I was surprised how much stuff I had on my desk that just needed throwing out!

-          Is there more than 1 single action required to complete ‘thing’. If the answer is yes they you have just found yourself a Project. This is a fundamental of GTD that you need to understand – anything that requires more than one action is a Project. When you find a Project you first add it to your project list and then identify the very next action you need to take and add that to your Next Action List.

 
Next Action Lists

The core of your GTD system is the discovery, recording and doing of you Next Actions. A Next Action should be thought of as the very next thing you need to do to push forward a desired outcome or Project.

An example from my own inbox is an item to phone my mum because I have not done so for a week and it has been prying on my mind. If you came across this scribbled on a sheet of paper in you inbox pile what should you do?

First consider what this is – is it a Project? For me the answer is no – my mum in my mum not a Project (though she does generate Projects for me!).

So it’s not a project – it’s a simple single action item. Next I must consider if it is a next action that I have to do or is it an item I can delegate to another? Well clearly my mum would not appreciate a call from one of my work team to see how she is and catch up on the latest family news – so this is an item for me and me alone!

Whilst cranking through your inboxes the first time you need to be aware of the 2 minute rule – if an item from the inbox can be processed in less than 2 minutes then just do it! The rationale is that recording the Next Action within you GTD system will take a minute or so anyhow so why waste the time recording what you could be doing. Now – will my phone call to my mum take less than 2 minutes? What do you think! No – it has to go on to a Next Action List.

So – go through you inboxes and list out each and every Next Action and record them either on paper or in your preferred electronic format (Outlook, Palm Desktop, GTD TiddlyWiki etc). Where an item from your inbox represents a Project – and under the GTD definition almost every item will be a Project – take a few minutes to consider what the next action(s) are and write them down. More complex Projects will have to be planned in more detail to tease out the Next Actions. In theory you should do this on the fly during this first pass of your inboxes. Personally I have no problems with the idea of taking a complex Project ‘off-line’ and planning it in more detail later on – just don’t tell the GTD purists!

Once you have a full list of all your Next Actions you need to consider what Contexts each item belongs to and this will be the subject of Part 3 of this series of articles.

Finally . .

. . . an apology – last time I promised to provide a nice flowchart to help you Get Things Done. Unfortunately I have not found one that I feel comfortable in reproducing here – I don’t want to violate anyone’s copyrights – so please follow this link for a great example of a GTD flowchart.

The Getting Things Done (GTD) system of, well of, getting things done is extremely simple in concept but do not be mistaken – there is a real need to work at your system to get it to a state where you can trust it and know that you are getting everything done, when it need to be done by and freeing up time to do even more.

There are 4 basic tenants to the GTD system, these are as follows:

1. Capture all the things you need to do and record them in a trusted system. These are referred to as ‘In Boxes’, discard all things that do not require an action.

2. Decide which of the above are projects (things that require more than 1 action).

3. Decide on your Next Actions for all items in you inboxes and record them in your system based upon the context in which you can action them (very important!).

4. Carry out regular reviews of varying depth of insight – short, medium and long term goals.

This first instalment will take a quick overview of the above.
Clearing Your In Boxes

The first question you have to ask yourself is ‘what are my in boxes’. It sounds simple at first doesn’t it? You have the physical post that drops through the door and you’re electronic in boxes on your pcs. But is that all? What about phone calls requiring you to do something? How about all those ‘honey-do’ notes? And the favours you promised to carry out for friends and neighbours? All the stuff just buzzing around in your brain that you are sure you will not forget? I’m also sure you have a pile of stuff in a junk draw somewhere in the kitchen that hides a number of actions you need to do?

It was a real eye opener for me to list all my In Boxes. It is also a good idea to try to reduce your total number of boxes to reduce the risk of item falling through the net. To this end I have asked my wife to email me all her ‘honey-dos’ – she was sceptical at first but now she sees that they actually get done so she sees the power of the system.

The GTD book calls the collation and recording of the contents of all your Inboxes as mental RAM dump. This is a great way to describe the process. The book goes on to explain that once you dump all the stuff that nags away at you as an internal dialogue you can achieve a clearer way of thinking and be freed from all those little pulls on you mental powers. This is slightly esoteric for my liking but I do see some truth in the idea.

At this point you will be like I was – terrified by the sheer volume of what you need to get done. In the words of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – DON’T PANIC!

This is a good bit – throw away everything that you either do not NEED to action along with everything you DO NOT INTEND to action. I was amazed by how many things fitted into this last category – I took the view that if it had been on a to do list or in an In Box for more than 3 month I was not going to get it done and so in the bin it went – most satisfying!

Is It An Action or Is It A Project?

Under the GTD system this classification will most likely differ from your current thinking. GTD classifies a Project as any item captured in an In Box that requires more than a single ‘thing’ to be done to it for it to be complete. As a result a couple of examples from my Project List demonstrate the huge difference in scale of ‘Projects’ as defined under the GTD system: Procure Manufacturing Building for ********* Ltd; Clear out garage ready for summer.

The first item is obviously a project – I have A LOT of work to do before the facility is up and running to my client’s satisfaction. However most people would consider clearing out the garage as a single ‘to do’. But this is why clearing out the garage is too difficult for most of us to tackle it. The reason I never get around to this job is that in the back of my mind I know it is not a single action – I need to take a load of junk to the local tip, the I need to fix the up-and-over door, then paint the floor, then see what shelving I need to install, buy the materials, fix them, stock take all my screws, nail etc. . . . . . . . . . .

I hope you now see the logic that even the most mundane Project deserves a level of project planning to get you over the hurdle of just getting on with it. I was much more willing to action the requirement to take all my junk to the tip this weekend than tackle the large but un-planned task of just ‘sorting out the garage’

On the flip side of this is my weekly ‘to do’ of putting the bin on the boundary of my property every Friday morning before I go to work for collection by the bin men – this is an action and not a Project.

You need to compile a full list of ALL your Project to use in you weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews – more of which later.

Next Action and Context

GTD works on the premise of Next Actions – what is the very next thing you need to do to move a project forward (or simply do something that needs doing). So in my example of clearing out the garage my next action is to go in there and put all the stuff for the tip to one side ready to fill the car and take it there.

You will quickly compile a very long list of Next Actions. This can be daunting – but GTD has another neat trick to teach us: Contexts. What is the use of seeing everything you need to do in your life when you circumstances at the time preclude you form action on the majority of them?

Everyone’s list of Contexts will vary but the following is a list of my contexts (the figures in brackets show how many live actions I have in each context)

@Calls (12)
@Computer (27 – down to 26 once this article is published!)
@Errands (28)
@Home (47)
@Office (67)
@Waiting for (17)

Buy maintaining you lists by Context it means you can review only those next action that you can currently action. For example items in my @Calls list can be done anytime as I always have at least one phone available to me, where as I can only action items on my @Errands list when out and about in the car with no pressing appointment to attend. @Computer items can be worked on either at work or at home.

Reviews

This is a huge topic and one that I cannot cover in this first article. All I will say here is that you need to make a full review of your In Boxes, Projects and Next Actions at least once a week to be sure you are capturing everything and making progress on all your projects.

Next time . . .

I hope this has provided a useful introduction to GTD and I expect you are all thinking how you can PDA-ise the process of setting up your trusted system of running GTD? Next week I will look at In Boxes and creating Next Action lists in more detail along with a nice flow chart to help you Get Things Done.

All ideas, terminology and the system described above are the brain child of David Allen. The words above are mine but the ideas behind them are all David’s