Say you love David Allen… (O.K., say what you want). Long and steep is the road from messy to productive, but gratifications are spread like sweet fruits all along the way. It is not about upgrading; it about growing. Once you get it, Allen’s Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done is simple, but its implications are deep, to the extent that I don’t think anybody has ever reached the end of them, David Allen included. Here are some of my most recent stepping stones, in the hope that some of them can be helpful to you:
- Getting Things Done is not rational: the inventories of things you do are rational. You put your stuff arranged in them, and then read them all very carefully. But you decide what to do next by a hunch. There is no “magic wand” to tell you what to do next. (Of course, your hunch in GTD is very well grounded on, repeat after me, time available, energy available, and priorities).
- The “simplicity shock”: GTD is device agnostic. You apply it with whatever you prefer, from paper napkins to an iphone synchronized with a home computer. It is all about dealing with lists of items, after all. But that freedom of device is frequently misunderstood, and we tend to overcomplicate things. It is as if our mind said “what? List management, and that’s all?”, and, embarrassed, felt that it had to add something of its own to the mixture. For example, subdividing the Someday/Maybe list into columns or areas of focus. What for? Funny how our mind works, or maybe we have been trained to think that organization must be like rocket science.
- Calendar phobia: apparently, the simplest of habits is checking your calendar in the morning. According to GTD, we only put there our “hard landscape”, the kind of things that must happen at a precise date, or not happen at all. Well, maybe this is more personal, but, to my surprise, when I got into GTD, I found that I experienced a certain rejection towards the habit, and I suspect that the subliminal reason is that checking a calendar is something that reminds me of my former, messy life… and I’d rather be dead than getting back to that. With time, I’ve come to thing that the best way to regard the current day’s calendar is as another contextual list, no different from the others. But very important.
- Capture DOES NOT imply commitment: another bad habit from our “former life”. One of the things that GTD does is dividing our everyday activities into their different inherent processes and making batches with them in order to improve performance. I have been a die hard note taker all my life, but my underlying mentality was always “I write things down only when I am interested in taking action about them”. But look out: the effort of taking a note and then switching to “decision mode” right away must not be underestimated. It is better to capture as much as you can, without getting yourself tired with judgments: there’ll be a moment for that later, in the process stage. By doing this you find nice surprises, like that note that you considered almost idiotic in the morning, but becomes a very interesting project under the afternoon light. The objective of capture is only to recover mind clarity. An idea comes, you tell her you’re busy and show her the waiting room. That’s the spirit.
- Things not done are perfectly normal: finally, if one of your tasks sticks week after week in a list, you don’t have to feel bad about it; you’ve been doing other stuff. Maybe the task was not well formulated (there are tricks to reach a better formulation), or maybe, it is simply something that you didn’t want to do after all; you can then wait until the action “withers” with time, or, like a king who decapitates an irritating servant, send it and its attached project to the Someday/Maybe area to wait for its turn. In other words: context lists are not exactly to-do lists. They are not exhaustive, their point is showing you all your options available at any time. Those options are always renegotiable, but you have to know that they exist first.
So far my productivity wars. I’ll keep on reporting.
What about you? Any GTD geek reading? What have you learned?
Related posts:
The GTD First Aid Kit (and 4)
Reach for the moon, but start with your (two) shoelaces
A few low level capture tips (part two)
The GTD First Aid kit (Part 3)
GTD: the power of context-based lists
