I was on an America West flight to Phoenix in 1999 when David Allen sat next to me. The passenger compartment was bare bones -- no overhead vents, for example -- and I was in a pissy mood. Allen was not. He immediately struck me as the most seasoned, at ease traveller I had ever seen. After he got himself adjusted I asked him if he travelled a lot. He smiled and showed me his United frequent flyer card. It had his name, and "Five Million Miles" embossed on it. I asked him what the hell he was doing on this crappy America West flight. He was flying from Geneva to his home in California, and had missed his connection, so United put him on the next available flight.
He was a "CEO coach" at the time and, while I normally don't badger strangers on planes with questions, we ended up talking for a good part of the flight. When his book came out, I recognised his picture on the jacket, and wrote him an email. He remembered me, and offered to get together for a glass of wine when he was in Boston.
Of course I got his book, and of course it changed my thinking. I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't. I have ADD, and am also deeply suspicious of self-help literature. I couldn't stomach the moralizing of Stephen Covey and his ilk. But GTD, and Allen as a person, work just great for me, and work with my ADD. I've tried variants, electronic and paper, but everything that works for me is within the GTD ecosystem.
So, what is the current system that you are using for GTD? I need to be more organized and productive but I really don't have the time/patience to read the book. So, if you can give the tldr; of your system or a web app that forces one to use GTD without all the theory would help as well.
My current system is emacs org-mode for my inbox and all computer-based action lists, and Todoist for anything I need to carry with me. Since much of my work is done in emacs, org-mode makes the most sense for me. But honestly, the GTD ecosystem has gotten a bit polluted by really good team-based apps.
At the time GTD first came out, there was more of a hard line between personal task lists and team-based responsibilities, or maybe it at least seemed that way because the technology was so limiting.
That said, technology is not the solution; a decent process is. Google image search "one page GTD summary" or "GTD workflow" and the key features are technology-agnostic: a single inbox for actions, a good decision making process, and context-dependent action lists so you don't wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about something you forgot when you had the opportunity to do it. In the last 15 years, my favorite GTD systems have been a Moleskine notebook and my old Palm Pilot. I've changed my systems over time, but not because the current systems are particularly better in general; they are better for me in context.
> So, what is the current system that you are using for
> GTD?
Back when I had a job with responsibilities (team of 40), I did the following...
First of all, I used "Things.app", for the iPhone and for the Mac, although really any of the many tools should do - the important thing for me though was that anywhere I could read email - or have a random thought - I needed to be able to access my organization system; I wanted to get it out of my head and out of my Inbox in to a real organization tool as QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE so I could stop thinking about it.
I'll talk about three separate places here: Email Inbox, Things.app Inbox, and Things.app Today.
At the beginning of each day, I would go to my email inbox, and scan through. Normally about 100 items:
* 50% could be deleted because I was CC'd, but there was no action item for me
* Anything that could be done in under two minutes, I'd do; this was generally Yes/No type answers, or quick clarifications
* Anything that would take longer, I would - IF AT ALL POSSIBLE - attempt to delegate. Quick two minute email to someone else, trying to get them to do it, and then I'd add a todo list item: "FOLLOWUP: Did John send Dave the RFP for Acme corp", and then ask Things.app to schedule it to remind me (by placing it in Things.app Today) in x days, where x was task-dependent. Trying to get new managers in my team to delegate ruthlessly was always very difficult - but if they couldn't do it, they'd get swamped quickly, and no-one would win.
* Anything that would take longer that I couldn't delegate, I would add a Todo item for today with a brief summary of what it was to Things.app's Inbox list; incidentally the Inbox list is also where I'd put absolutely anything that cropped up during the day - my boss asked me for something, I remembered I'd promised someone something I hadn't delivered yet, or I had an idea that would take 6 months to do but was worth thinking about.
All email would be archived in this process.
This process would get me to Inbox Zero, but I would still have items in Things.app Inbox - generally about 8 - 14 items - that really needed my personal attention. First pass I'd try and make sure each was actionable; "Sort out team development plan" not in the least bit actionable. However, giving it 10 seconds though led me to realize that our HR Business Partner could probably help, so he got a quick email "Please could you schedule some time with me to sit down and talk about team development?", at which point, it becomes a "FOLLOWUP" item as above. This generally got rid of 4-5 items. Remaining items I would then drag to the Today list. These tasks could be pretty diverse: "Reread James' email about data governance", "Fill out ATR for new DevOps person", "Disabuse Neil of the idea that we should be using Docker".
The Today list was often 3 - 15 items long; generally about half were "FOLLOWUP" items, as per the above, and these could be ticked off very quickly by hitting reply and sending a slightly more urgent or threatening message, and I'd then reschedule the "FOLLOWUP" item to the next day.
Of the remainder, I would attempt to sort them in order of importance. Anything that was a multiple hour task, I would create an appointment in my calendar to do it, as well as a "FOLLOWUP" scheduled to make sure I'd done in - "Prepare salary review spreadsheet" was going to take 5 hours, so I'd block 5 hours off, book a meeting room where no-one could find me, and then forget about it until the appointment came up.
Of what remained - generally 30m - 90m tasks, I'd then take all but the top five, and reschedule them to the next day. This was a struggle to get my managers to done - people are hopelessly optimistic, and think they can get through more administrivia in a day than they can. If you restrict yourself to 3 to 5, it'll force you to delegate more aggressively, and you'll also be surprised how many items that keep getting kicked down the road take care of themselves.
The process up to this point took 20m to an hour depending on how conscientious I'd been in keeping up to date with it.
I'd then try and blast through the top five, generally managing two or three of them. I would attempt to get ALL of these things done in the morning each day, and set aside the afternoons for important meetings and for large blocks of work that needed doing.
The key features of this:
* You need a system where you can TRUST that if something goes in to it, it won't fall back out of it again. The scheduled FOLLOWUP tasks for me were that
* You need to be able to add items to this super easily - whenever you think about it. That way, you're not carrying around items in your head, which is when you get snowed under
* Your email Inbox is a very shitty Todo system, and it'll stress you out. Get items out of your Inbox and in to a real Todo system as quickly as you can. If you're stuck on Outlook, and so don't have an Archive function, create a folder where a copy of every email gets duplicated to so you can aggressively delete from your Inbox and still go back to emails that had important information in.
I too am interested in what particular system you use. I found that it was a useful framework for thinking about tasks, but in college I was never able to use that framework to implement a system and then keep up with it.
This may sound rather trivial but honestly the biggest problem I had with the previous book was how targetted it was towards the "traditional" higher-management executive in its language and examples. A lot of them were things that I had a very hard time relating to: preparing for the staff meeting, going over regional sales figures, working on your golf swing. I was sort of hoping he'd write a version "for the rest of us" with more down-to-earth examples.
Given his clientele the previous focus made sense, but since it became sort of viral I was hoping if it were revised it would become a little more all-encompassing. I'd be curious to know if the previous focus was still the case in the new version. (Probably not enough to buy it to find out, though; as I said that was my biggest problem with the previous book and it's not that much of a problem...)
In my experience, GTD is overkill and managing things that way is a time consuming task in itself. I converged on something simpler: I have four lists. One that contains everything that absolutely needs to be done. Then there is a list for things that can be done but are not essential. This list is a pretty amazing collection of ideas and when I have some time left, I pick an item that looks appealing in that situation. Then there is a reading list and a list for completed tasks. All lists are stored in one org-mode file (along with tons of other things). The list with important stuff is frighteningly long. At first this bothered me but I got used to it. Now I see it as a resources. There is always something on that list that I'd like to work on. Once a week I go through this list and move some items to the non-essential list. If something stayed long enough on the important list and nothing bad happened, it's probably not important.
I love GTD because it has the least amount of friction possible in any system that would actually work for me. I spend seconds at a time adding projects to my system (OmniFocus FTW), maybe 20 minutes a week sorting new projects into larger projects and contexts, and almost zero time deciding what I need to be working on given my location and available resources.
GTD seems like it has a lot of overhead, but I kept at it long enough that it became the way I think about work. It's practically invisible to me now.
Sounds similar to the 4-quadrant system of important / not important and urgent / not urgent. I forget the name of that, but it always seemed like a decent idea for guiding prioritization (if used as a hard rule, it would inevitably lead to not-urgent-but-important things never getting done).
I adopted GTD back in college (around '08-'09) after learning about it from Merlin Mann and reading about it in the book "Dreaming in Code." If it taught me one thing, it taught me to learn how to say no to commitments. Sure, I'd like to work on this fun software project or go to this hackathon, but then I think of all the work it will take and the existing work I'm committed to. At that point, as much as I'd like to do otherwise, I say no to the proposed commitment. GTD is core to my life. All my commitments are consolidated and up to date in my Things app. I honestly couldn't imagine how I could have been productive without it.
edit: I also recommend those familiar to GTD to listen to Merlin Mann talk about it on his Back to Work podcast: http://5by5.tv/b2w/95
I haven't read it, but I always liked the piece of advice from GTD about 5 minute tasks. If a task takes less than 5 minutes, do it now. During the day I usually accumulate small tasks and realizing that they take almost no time at all does wonders for staving off procrastination.
There are important concepts I've learned from GTD--for example, the mental strain of open loops and the importance of getting them out of your head--but I have never been able to implement it in full over the long term. Trying to go through the process consistently and in full every day is itself very time-consuming. Much like a dieter who has one cookie and decides, "Fuck it, diet's over," and eats all the cookies in the jar, if I failed to fully complete the GTD process for a single day then I would tend to never do it again.
Cherry-pick. There are a lot of good ideas. I found some of the sorting of tasks really useful. There are people who can sort, and people who can't. Give me ten things and I'll find 10! different ways to classify them. Other people seem to "just know" what makes the most sense. I found the classification scheme in GTD extremely actionable and simple. Most of the rest wasn't so useful to me.
My story goes like this. I listened to the messages, heard other variations, and still struggled with this concept. I'm not obsessed about the topic but for whatever reason, I struggled to 'catch' the idea.
I tried calendars, mail clients, to do lists, etc. Nothing seemed to help. Until I had someone teach me time management, in about 30 minutes. I'm not sure how, I'm not sure why but...it all finally clicked for me.
I've been using Things for about a year but I had it for like six years. It's my #1 application. I've been able to manage an 'inbox zero' for the past year.
My advice to newbies: Learn time management but start small. GTD isn't an all in one solution, it wasn't for me, but it's a great skill to learn. Do one thing, do it well, then build on that. If you ever overwhelm yourself with tasks, take steps back (ask yourself why you are doing these tasks). There is satisfaction to GTD filing system but don't let that guide you, it's your tool. Remember start small. A long journey always began with one step.
I am curious to hear what HNers have to say about this book. To be honest I always thought that these kind of books (i.e personal growth / motivational) were BS but that is problem a hasty generalization I made.
For those out there who read it, did it improve your project throughput or productivity? bonus if you have ADHD
> To be honest I always thought that these kind of books
> (i.e personal growth / motivational) were BS
I feel I've had a huge amount in my life out of self-help books, on a real variety of subjects. There's a lot of obvious bullshit out there (like The Secret), but also plenty of gold. Scanning through my notes, and in no particular order, I have extensive notes from (and thus enjoyed):
* 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
* Beyond Chocolate
* Driven From Within (Michael Jordan biography)
* Get Altitude
* How To Make Friends and Influence People
* Iron John (Robert Bly)
* Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
* Never Eat Lunch Alone
* Psychocybernetics
* Pulling Your Own Strings
* Ready For Anything (same author as GTD)
* The Dip
* Ten Days to Self Discipline
* The Power of Now
* Personal Power (Tony Robbins)
* Warrior King Magician Lover
Some were easier reads than others, and I suspect I am unusual in that I have a pretty rigorous system for making sure I regularly review my notes, and implement exercises and ideas in the books, but I feel I'd be a very different person for the worse without the value these books have added to my life.
As I mentioned I've only been doing it for like a week so take this with that in mind. It hasn't helped me do work directly or my focus(well kind of has) but it has helped my organising work and not missing tasks or things I need to do that I put off to tomorrow or next week.
I think for ADHD the time based contexts help more than the books recommended location based ones(office, home, at a computer, with a phone) since I'm pretty much always near a computer and a phone. I have
Full focus(tasks up to 30 minutes that require my full concentration)
Short dash(same but up to 15 minutes)
Brain dead(tasks that don't require much thought or concentration)
Bored(Non-work related things that I find interesting but are still kind of productive, blog posts I want to read and stuff like that)
Someday/Maybe and waiting for stuff in the future or pending other peoples actions.
I took them from a blog post I can't find right now but I find them very helpful since a lot of my wasted time or distraction is in spent deciding what to do next or in situations where I have to do something in 20 minutes so I end up spending 10 minutes finding an appropriate task then realize I'm out of time and 10 minutes reading reddit or HN.
I'm still working on the breaking tasks down to fit the 30 minute window though so I have a few longer tasks in there still but its helping.
When I was in my early 20s my immediate reaction to hearing about any new personal-development / self-help book was that it's probably BS.
Then occasionally a couple caught me. Seven habits, GTD, How to win friends... are the 3 books that left a lasting impression with me.
Now in my early 30s I look at new productivity / self-help tools like the way I look at any given religion. You probably don't really need it but it might just be the one that works for you. And if it makes you a better person without messing with anybody/anything else then go right ahead.
None of these systems fit anyone's personality or situation perfectly(or, if they do, you're the lucky one). All of them are ultimately about getting small stuff right, and so they complement you where they give you ideas for changing your process.
But if the problem is "I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, I'm unmotivated, and I don't want to live life this way," they don't do a lot.
I tried doing the whole works but the only lasting things from GTD were:
1) start each item on your todo lists with a verb
2) get lots and lots of folders and just keep creating new folders in a flat hierarchy to organize things all the time. Even easier on a computer on a computer.
> get lots and lots of folders and just keep creating new folders in a flat hierarchy to organize things all the time.
That's the most persistently useful thing I got from GTD. I have a cabinet full of plain, labeled paper folders for filling. 90% of them I don't really check at all, but I whenever I need that random document, booklet, photo, or whatever, I can always find it there quickly.
I have visions of David Allen writing Getting Things Done and then the next year thinking "I really should revise this". 13 years later a second edition is published.
I finished reading(well listening) to GTD last week and started implementing the system this past week. Though I've basically taken a bunch of ideas from it and changed it to fit my work and lifestyle(I also switched to time based contexts over location mostly). I kept the processes the same. I also almost never have paperwork so I ignored all the stuff about labellers and filing cabinets.
The community around the book is seriously full of weirdly obsessive people though. I've read discussions where people talk about how they've been studying it for 3-6 years and just now feel like they are starting to really get it and if you haven't put that much effort into it you won't get it. I constantly feel like I'm missing out on something because I just didn't find it that hard to understand?
The new book apparently drops all the talk about palm pilots which I'm sure is nice but from what I've read if you read the original you probably won't have much to gain from reading this one.
3-6 years? Sounds like someone who is in love with preparing for the actual work. I know this situation - whether it is setting up your development environment, getting the proper running gear if you want to get in shape or researching the best controller for your DAW (I used to work in audio production)...or reading books on how to get things done. These are tasks that easily provide a feeling of accomplishment, without ever tackling the actual work, the hard problems.
Don't get me wrong - it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle. At some point there aren't any remaining benefits and all that is left to do, is the actual doing.
> it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle.
I fall into that trap very often. If I'm learning a new programming language, I'll read every book and article I can find about it, try to learn best practices an architecture approaches, before even thinking about starting to write an experimental program in it. Sometimes I think I should just dig in, and research things on the fly. The worst is that I tend to repeat that mistake :-) It seams hard to change person's nature/mindset.
People take years to understand something like I say it took me 20 years to learn how to build software systems. I didn't spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 20 years educating myself. It was bits and spurts, interspersed with other goals and learning how building software systems relates to those other goals and my self and my life.
In other words, hard things are hard and if it's not hard, it's not worth learning. Twenty years from now I'm sure I'll be saying that it took me forty years to learn how to code.
My experience with it was really different. I didn't read GTD first. I read this: http://www.brool.com/index.php/using-org-mode-with-gtd. Then I read this: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html. I thought, hey, this idea of having a trusted system and getting things I needed to do out of my brain and into the system might really help. I also loved the idea of putting my todos in contexts like "home" "office" "lunch" "driving". Those two simple things really made a huge difference for me...
FWIW I listen to the audio book every year and each time I learn something new. For me the author's concepts of the natural planning system, cranking widgets and rapid inbox parsing have been key to my work and personal life for many years.
Has anyone come up with a solution for the problem of doing important tasks that require blocks of time measured in weeks? I have projects that I need to get to, but they need me to pencil in a few weeks of 100% time dedication to get them done (they are the sort of projects that are so complex that you can't do anything else while working on them). I find that I just can't carve out the time to get them done as I have too many urgent and must-do-today activities to be able to block out the time.
Large projects are just a sequence of inter-related smaller tasks. GTD is exactly for learning how to deal with these kinds of problems. Oh, and if you have too many urgent and must-do-today tasks, learning to delegate and learning how to say "no" will change you life.
My experience: I read the book, learned the concepts. It was great, and I even setup OmniFocus (Apple only) on my iPad and iPhone. Life was great, and then I changed employers and I was back to Windows and BlackBerry. It completely broke my workflow and I spent (WASTED) months trying new tools and finally dropped it. I am now using the ToDo templates in OneNote which is a much simpler approach, but still use many of the concepts.
Some ten years ago I got hooked on GTD while at United World College. I thought it might make me a better student.
Today I am more careful and would steer clear of GTD simply because it doesn't help me do the things I don't want to do. And the things I want to do, I'll do anyway. While the things I don't want to do will be put off.
If everything I need to do and keep in my head at a given time doesn't fit in a mess of bullet points on a single letter sized sheet, then I'm simply doing too much. No need for a system. Just recopy over the sheet by hand every few days without the scratched off items, and add in some new stuff that comes to mind. I have difficulty imagining a life so busy that a page of terse notes couldn't suffice to keep on top of things.
He was a "CEO coach" at the time and, while I normally don't badger strangers on planes with questions, we ended up talking for a good part of the flight. When his book came out, I recognised his picture on the jacket, and wrote him an email. He remembered me, and offered to get together for a glass of wine when he was in Boston.
Of course I got his book, and of course it changed my thinking. I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't. I have ADD, and am also deeply suspicious of self-help literature. I couldn't stomach the moralizing of Stephen Covey and his ilk. But GTD, and Allen as a person, work just great for me, and work with my ADD. I've tried variants, electronic and paper, but everything that works for me is within the GTD ecosystem.