The Opinionated Bastard

The cult of Getting Things Done or GTD, that is:

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

I'd read First Things First and some of the other time management books before, and while they had some useful insights, they didn't really help me get more organized. This book has done so.

There are several things that make this book different then other books of this ilk.

• Its relentlessly practical. The book bluntly states that if there's the slightest bit of friction in your organizational process, you're not going to do it. That's very true. Absentminded as I am, I have problems executing, and I hate fuss. So the book is filled with little tips on how to “lubricate” the little things you do to stay organized. Those tips in most cases were enough for me to actually do what I needed to be doing.

• It its based on practical experience. Everything suggested in the book comes out of the author's experience coaching people so most things are time-tested.

• It's not dogmatic. If a Palm works for you, great. If it doesn't, don't use it. If an organizer works for you, great. If it doesn't don't use it. The main point of the book is to have one place where you keep track of things. Once you have one, trusted place, then you can free your brain for your actual work.

• It's bottom up. David Allen, the author, bluntly states that human beings are just great at prioritizing and setting goals, its being organized about doing it that they have problems with.

The best example of practical advice that I've been giving my friends is that of filing. The book says:

• File Alphabetically
• Dump the hanging files
• Buy a Labelmaker

Now normally, I would immediately resist those two items. But the book clearly pointed out reasons why its way is best.

Filing Alphabetically Most people try to implement their filing system like its some sort of project management system. Don't do that, your project management system is for that, your filing system is for filing. If you file alphabetically:

• You don't have to think about the filing process, so you'll be more likely to do it.
• When you need to find something, you can find it quickly. Even if its in one of 4 places, that's only 4 places to look.

Dump the Hanging Files It's true, having those hanging files adds friction to filing, and its unnecessary. It's much easier to just put the files directly into the file drawer.

Labelmaker My first thought to this was thoughts of Monica from Friends. But David Allen pointed out that having a label maker reduces friction. Somehow, for whatever reason, having to write on a file label makes me less likely to file. Having a label maker gives me nicely marked files, and makes it kind of fun, so I do it and get all the crap off my desk.

Having a clean desk brings me to a central theme of the book: Mind Like Water. The book argues that once you can start capturing the stuff in your life into a trusted system, that frees your mind for the task at hand.

That's interesting, because in my Martial Arts/Qi Gong studies we have this concept of calm/stillness that's related. When doing Qi Gong drills to try to gain stillness by clearing my mind, I've been constantly stuck by how many to-do things I have floating around my head. It's distracting; it's like trying to think with someone screaming “GET SOME MILK AT THE STORE” in your head. Releasing that stuff in Qi Gong was always relaxing, but being able to release the “get the milk” thought because I know I've written it down is even better.

For me, the first thing I tried doing this for was email. I had an inbox with 40,000 messages in it, most of which were just archive. I was spending lots of time reading the same email over and over, marking messages “unread” so I'd read them again, etc. So per the book, I made several mailboxes: @Action, @Archives, @Read, @Reference, @Someday, @WaitingFor. Now when I get an email, I sort it into one of the above categories, or delete it.

My inbox is empty. Its strange, but it hugely reduces my stress to not have 40,000 emails to look at. It reduced the friction in my life, because I look at my emails once mostly and if I need to look at them again, they're in a specific place.

The book makes some other key points.

1. Most people's “To-Do” lists are actually projects. Don't do that. A to-do item is the next physical, visible action you can do to move a project forward. By writing what the next action is for a project into your to-do list, you physically and mentally relax. It's true. It also focuses you immensely to think about goals as what can I actually do about this item. Even if the next action is brainstorm about XXXX, that's enough so I can let it go when I'm doing something else.

2. A complete to-do list for a person might have 200 items on it. That's ok, that's just life. The insight David Allen has to make that managable is that to-dos have contexts. For instance, “@errands” is a typical context; you can't accomplish the item until you're running errands. Similarly, you might have context relating to a person “@person”, because you can't accomplish the to-do item until you're with that person. So by annotating your to-do items with the context, you bring your list of actions you can do at any one moment down to 10-20, which is actually manageable.

Of course, I'm bringing some of my own insights to GTD. For one thing, the Taoists have this concept of the “success well”. The idea is that whenever you completely a task successfully, it puts a little bit in the success well. Failure on the other hand, draws out of that well. You're only willing to attempt something you might fail at if the failure is of equivalent size to whatever you have stored in your success well. This generalizes to other emotions too: your happiness well lets you withstand sadness or other stress etc.

So some of this GTD stuff I see as filling various wells. Even if a project itself is daunting, by breaking it down into a series of next actions, the size of the failure is reduced, while my success well is filled.

So I've been doing GTD for a week now, and:

• My Desk is clean
• I have a complete to-do list.
• I have less stress
• I'm getting more stuff done
• I have stacks of 3 x 5 index cards around the house held together with binder clips.
• My physical inbox is empty
• My email inbox is empty

Join the Cult

More Links:

43 Folders 43 Folders Getting Started tips

Technorati Tags: GTD

One of my wife's complaints about me has always been that even though I'm really smart, I never seemed to apply that to getting my shit done.

What could I say? It was true.

But one thing I got from GTD was how to think about it. It's all very well to be a top UI designer, but now I think about all this in terms of reducing friction.

So on that note, I'm off to buy some Fisher Space Pens, because one of my GTD techniques has been to make my own note pads of index cards plus binder clips. I have some in strategic locations in the house, and I carry some with me so I can make notes. But it's annoying to have to carry the pen. Some of the other GTD folks made the point that Fisher Space pens are compact when closed, and can write in any position, etc.

Plus they're not really that expensive.

But the insight I had today is that I'm quite capable of figuring out how to reduce the friction in my life, once I think about it that way.

Technorati Tags: GTD

Whenever I cancel a reservation, I always get a number I just ignore.

Today, I wrote it in a 3x5 card and filed it under “Travel”.

The reservation I've always printed out, which then sat on my desk until I was ready to go. Next time I think I'll file it in a folder based on the name of the trip. In this case “Xmas Trip”.

Technorati Tags: GTD

These are the tools I'm using on MacOSX.

For my to-do list, I'm using OmniOutliner with Kinkless GTD. The nice thing about this system is that I can hierarchically organize my projects/tasks, then easily switch to just seeing the appropriate context.

For email, I'm using a set of things. First I'm using Act-On a plugin for Apple Mail. I have the standard GTD folders in mail: @Action, @Archives, @Read, @Reference, @Someday, @WaitingFor. I've set Act-On so that if I hit the space bar and then another key, that it shoves the email into that folder. Act-On's default setting was the ` key, but that was too hard to use. I've made one tweak, as a friend of mine gave me this AppleScript which I put in ~/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts. What this does is store emails in folders by year/month. So I have that wired to the “archive” action in Act-On. That makes my archive folders a little more manageable. One addition that's unique to me is that I have a “Registration” folder where I file usernames/passwords from websites.

This morning I added a new AppleScript to mail, found here. I then added an action to iCal to run this script every morning. This lets me do email ticklers, which is something I was trying to figure out how to do. Annoyingly, it puts it in a folder named @INBOX instead of my main inbox, and I haven't figured out how to fix that. So now I can send emails to myself in the future. Write an email: save it, which puts it in “Drafts”, then drag it to the appropriate ticker folder.

Other things I've figured out: For capturing things, I've scattered a stacks of 3x5 cards with a mini-binder clip throughout the house, and I carry one. When a thought occurs to me (and with the whole Mind Like Water thing it happens a lot now), I scribble it on the card and dump it in my inbox, which is a physical tray. The next day I collect them all when doing my daily review and enter them into kGTD.

This is where there's some synergy between Qi Gong and GTD. When I'm doing Qi Gong, I often get “mindplay”, usually relating to projects/tasks. Now I write them down on a 3x5 card and I can forget about them. This turns out to be a good way to empty my mind into my collection basket, because my mind can get bored doing Qi Gong, and will dredge up anything I still have floating around. You don't have to learn Qi Gong to do this. Try counting your exhales up to 100. As things occur to you, write them down on a 3x5 card, then start over. If you can get to 100 (you'll find this is amazingly hard), your mind is empty.

For those “@home” items, I've made two contexts. One is called “Morning” and the other “Evening”. That's how I'm dealing with the issue most people have where GTD for work is easy, but more of a problem for @home stuff.

Things I haven't figured out yet: How to do a weekly review. I have to re-read that section of the book as I actually either haven't done one yet, or have been doing it every 2 days...

One of the things that's helped me in all this is reading:

FIRST THINGS FIRST

before I read GTD, which helped me realize that I needed to do Important items before Urgent items. That helped when I had my own consulting business, and Franklin Covey organizers worked well for me then. When I became a worker bee for Marketocracy, it didn't help so much because I had a long list of things to do, rather then a list of things I needed to do on a certain date. That is, 90% of what you have to do involves doing a certain thing on a certain date, organizers are great because they're like a 12-month ticker file. When what you have to do every day is “work on my giant to-do list”, organizers don't help so much.

Of course, Covey would argue that once/week you schedule some of your to-do items into various days of the week, but that doesn't work for programming tasks that are “work on this until its done”. You end up just forwarding the to-do forward day after day, picking up others as you go. That's the problem with iCal too...

Technorati Tags: GTD, MacOSX

I've used up the sample spool of label tape that came with my labelmaker.

Even worse, I used it up labeling the file cabinets in the garage where my wife “filed” the big tools like the drills and the saws because I was tired of having to search through each drawer to find stuff.

So I've gone from never making a label in my life to labeling stuff my wife does (who's generally more organized then me, she needs First Things First not Getting Things Done ).

Speaking of which, I got another friend of mine to join the cult. As he put it: "I've never felt so good about spending $200 on office supplies."

Technorati Tags: GTD

For $19.95 if you buy the Chamois color. Good for you hipster PDA guys like me who are starting to think that carrying both a wallet and all these 3x5 cards is getting silly.

See it here

Hmmm... That was quick, Chamois seems to no longer be available...

Might be worth calling: 800-357-9991

Pierce

Technorati Tags: GTD

Get it here

Basically, this is a clone of Kinkless.

It's missing a lot of features of Kinkless, and its buggy (save often). This is a very early release, its just barely useable.

But basically it does 3 things well:

1. The Projects/Next Actions are separate windows that update live.
2. Prioritization is built in, as is sorting by various criteria.
3. No syncing necessary.

I'm planning lots more features, but I've been trying to get it useable enough for me to replace Kinkless, since the whole AppleScript thing is starting to bug me. It's not quite there yet, because I use a lot of notes, and I haven't written that stuff yet. But its almost there:

Quick Tutorial:

Context View: This shows you your existing contexts. Click “Add” to make a new blank context, which then you can edit. You get started with 4, but you'll need more.

Projects View:

The Projects view is your basic hierarchical to-do list. Drag to rearrange items, the “New” button makes a new sibling, the “NewC” makes a new child.

1. Start the app.
2. Switch to the Projects window.
3. Double-click to edit the action name, etc.
4. Click New to make a new action.
5. Click NewC to make a new child Action.
6. Drag-Drop to rearrange.
7. Delete to delete, but SAVE FIRST. (Known Bug)

Actions View: Next Actions View shows you only the leaf nodes of the Projects view, or in GTD terms, “the next action”. They're sorted by Context initially, but you can change that. Type in the search field to limit things you see.

Archive View: This shows you completed items by date, which I use during my Weekly Review process. Eventually you'll be able to view this in a project hierarchy, but that's not working at the moment.

Technorati Tags: GTD, MacOSX

Quite a lot of improvements. It's basically good enough that I can use it now.

Latest version here

Docs are included describing the concepts which is sort of a gentle introduction to GTD, at least from the to-do list point of view.

Technorati Tags: GTD

You can get the latest here. It's now called “Execute”, since I wrote it so I could “execute better”.

Still crashes occasionally on adds/deletes, so save early and often.

Docs are updated with release notes.

For you upgraders:

• Open your previous file with the old one.

• Save it as XML.

• Now open with the new one.

In fact, ALWAYS SAVE AS XML. I found out the hard way that “binary” files don't upgrade across model changes. The SQL ones might, but why bother? XML is perfectly fine for this kind of thing.

Eventually this is moving away from my blog and over to www.twinforces.com, as soon as Sandvox will let me actually publish there. :-)

Technorati Tags: GTD, lifehacks, MacOSX

1. It's now called Frictionless

2. It's now over here

3. It now imports OPML files from Kinkless.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: GTD, lifehacks

Well, I got Frictionless 2.0 (My GTD app for the mac) done enough to be useable.

So I released it out into the world today.

You can read about it here

I’m pretty happy with the new UI design although I’m not finished. It still has some rough edges compared to some of the other GTD apps out there, but I think its more useable on the day to day basis then any of those other GTD apps out there.

NSTreeController still sucks eggs though.