…”but I used to have a calendar!”
Don’t worry: you still do. It is just that it is not going to be that populated anymore. Allen’s methodology reduces its using to:
a) events with a fixed date (dentist, birthday, deadline set by somebody else)
b) reminders for things you want to reconsider… but not now (”I’ll decide about that in three month’s time, once I finished my x classes”).
All the rest must be turned into items and processed as previously explained. The best thing to do with the calendar is giving it the highest priority in the morning. Once you have dealt with all the items in your calendar one by one, (or moved them again to a different date when it is possible), then and only then you can move on to process the other elements in your setup. I always process all my stuff in the morning in this order:
1) Calendar
2) Inboxes
3) Action lists
The calendar must also be revised during the weekly review, both the week you left behind (”did I forget something?”), and the weak that lays ahead (”what does my upcoming ‘hard landscape’ look like?”).
Files and folders
So here we are, with our wonderful GTD setup quite configured, and a general desire to take on the world (a common effect of this getting organized). There are only a few details left to tighten the screws in our system some more.
Support folders: as usual, quite a simple concept. It is a folder that contains the elements that you need to work in a certain project. According to the nature of your project or your setup, there can be sometimes more than one, for example one for virtual files and a different one for physical stuff. There is a currently tendency to make setups as digital as possible, I guess that for the sake of the planet and also to avoid this certain “schizophrenia” of materials that prejudices productivity. I am also in the process of making such optimization (I don’t think 100% is possible, though), and in the meantime I try to be as digital as possible, except for my beloved notebooks.
Not much left to say, the using of support folders is straightforward, their contents are conditioned by the nature of the project. Be careful not to clutter them, though. When I was at home and the computer was off, I used to write down my sudden ideas in scraps of paper and put them in my support folders so I could find them during the weekly review. The result was that my weekly review became XL, I started to procrastinate, and the content of those folders became rather ambiguous (alert! alert!). Now I am more digital, and those scraps go to the inbox so they can be processed every day and included in my outliner.
Classifying: ask Grover
Classifying elements that I no longer use has been a pain in the ass for me for a long time. I usually woke up up one morning and realized that I was surrounded by clutter. “I won’t stand it anymore!”, I yelled, and declared a superhuman session of war against clutter, figuring out where to put things along the way. I tried classifications according to projects, interests, mnemonics… in all cases, a couple of months later I was surrounded by clutter again. My systems were not organic, they were not “alive”: I never consulted all those already “organized” things because in fact I wasn’t that sure of what I could find there, very probably trouble. So I procrastinated.
Perhaps, as it happens in life sometimes, my problem was artificially fattened. The point was not increasing efforts, but reducing them. Just like in the case of natural planning, David Allen proposes the return to simplicity. Congratulations, you already own the most natural and intuitive classifying system. It starts by A and finishes with Z. Sounds familiar?
The book recommends to keep a single, huge file system for all the things that do not require an action but you want to keep for any reason. The amount or nature of things you decide to store, is fully up to you. But do it in the universal order, the order of proven efficiency, the order by excellence: the alphabet.
Such order also prevents your classification from becoming too exhaustive, too “stiff”. For example, let’s say that you want to store the poster of a concert by some friends at your institute fifteen years ago. There are more than one, but not too many, locations where you would automatically try to find it later (my preferences would be: “Music”, Name of the band, “Institute”, “Friends”). You can speed up the search even more if you keep an external list with all the categories you have used so far (so that you know that you have to get the “Music” folder and not the “Institute” one), but in any case it should take no more than a few seconds once you have all things set up, this time for sure.
When a folder becomes too big, you can also split it into several ones with subsections to find things faster:
“Manuals”
=
“Manuals - Computer”
+
“Manuals - Kitchen”
+
“Manuals - Washing Machine”
(etc…)
You can keep on adding categories, and you are always sure that you will find anything you need, it is so simple… Then, if one day your file becomes too big, just set the required time aside and start a new project called “clean my file”, to reconsider what to keep and what to throw away. That’s it.
Filing equipment
An important contribution to the success of GTD is its deviceless nature, which makes it suitable for the whole continuum from die-hard geeks to absolute computer illiterates. Nevertheless, Allen does offer some suggestions and preferences along the book:
Regarding physical folders: forget about hanging folders. Use normal, cardboard ones. They are easier to add and remove, they are cheap, they are nice.
Labeling: Some people disagree here, and maybe it is not a “crucial” aspect of GTD, but I agree Allen when he says that electric labeling modifies your relation with your own stuff. Having your things labeled this way is fun (=productive) and looks gorgeous. We live in a visual world, where the choice of typography in an advertisement can push us in favor or against a product. Why not giving ourselves the same treatment, why don’t we add that little degree of detail and quality in what we do for ourselves? In my case, at least, this kind of details do count.
This far, my summary of David Allen’s renowned book. I hope it’s been useful for profanes and maybe those who wanted to refresh the basics. A common criticism I’ve read against GTD is that it is not good at dealing with routine tasks, sort of “headless projects” with no termination date, and in fact I have tweaked my setup a bit to fulfil those areas (and I will be probably trying new things while you read these lines). What about you? Which of these techniques is the most valuable for you? Have you fully adopted GTD? Partially? You left it behind long ago? You think it sucks? Do you have an alternative?
Related posts:
The GTD First Aid kit (Part 3)
The GTD First Aid Kit (Part 2)
Use verbal icons for your projects
Prevent your books from becoming stuck
GTD for writers