The cult of Getting Things Done or GTD, that is:
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free ProductivityI'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.
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.
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
More Links:
43 Folders 43 Folders Getting Started tips
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