Zerebria

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 system is a very tight tool to use; as he himself states in “Making it all work”, with a delicious lack of false humility, (more…)

One of the parts of the Getting Things Done methodology that I found most difficult to apply at first was writing down “purposes and principles” for each project (more…)

That’s the title of the productivity prompt #11 in David Allen’s ‘Ready for Anything‘, which I’m currently enjoying (to say the least: it’s like a productivity earthquake). Allen makes a unique work in (more…)

I’ll admit it: everything I do, I do it for my fiction. I honor writing as the art with the biggest powers, when considering its effects, and the degree of intimacy, elevation and sometimes “possession” it grants (writing, in its finest hour, becomes invisible, the words stop being “black boxes” with a meaning inside and become something similar to music). (more…)

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As a product of a typically non-productive culture (sorry for the tongue twister), I have found a very useful tool for implementing the GTD method in monitoring workflow interruptions. The first thing I noticed was (more…)

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…”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) (more…)

The weekly review, or where we mix 1 and 2

So now we have 1) lists of tasks (one for each context), and 2) project plans full of future tasks, grouped by sequences, priorities and components. Let’s mix 1) and 2) and we’re almost there, can you believe it? (more…)

Natural planning

So now that we have discussed the basic “bricks” of an organization system (lists), lets take it a step further: let’s talk about project planning. First of all, what is there to plan? Almost everything, in fact, because the GTD methodology (more…)

Like Buddhist communities or UNIX programming, the GTD organization system has a modular structure. It means it is integrated by a series of elements completely independent between them, so a failure or misconception in one of them does not affect (more…)