Getting Things Done

A few weeks ago I sort of reached the breaking point. Between work and school and the general insanity of life, my brain pretty much started to melt down trying to keep track of everything that was going on. I needed to take some action to get myself organized.

My good friend Mark (whom I’ve learned to trust recommendations from for pretty much everything besides movies) long ago recommended the organizational process of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. From what I’d heard about it from him and numerous other geek friends, I knew that the ideas were close enough to how I was already organizing my life that it wouldn’t be a major shift, but I had just never put aside the time to actually read the book and implement the process. So finally on a Friday morning I took it with me to the gym, started reading on the exercycle, and by the time I had gotten home from work on the BART that evening I had plowed through almost the entire thing.

The ideas really resonated with me, and I could see that this was no magical track, just some straightforward ideas to tie up all the loose ends running through my head. I know this sounds really ridiculous, but I was so excited that night I couldn’t help mentioning it to some friends we went to dinner with. They of course couldn’t resist making fun of my geekness (but see below for more…) That weekend I dragged Alexis around during some of our errand time and I bought a few minor supplies for the office (nothing extravagant; one of the things I really like about this whole thing), and I sat down on Sunday to watch a couple of brain-dead movies I had queued up and try to harness the insanity in my life.

Here are some of the main points of the system that really make sense to me, and why its better than what I was doing before:

• Get everything out of your head – If you’re juggling tons of different projects there’s usually a jumble of different tasks competing for attention in your head. GTD is really nothing more than a “system” that allows you to get all of these different tidbits out of your head, and into a storage mechanism that you trust implicitly. Once you get all of these pointless little details out of your head, you can free up brain cycles to concentrate on actual important work, that requires thinking. “Clearing the decks” as it were has really worked for me, especially as I’ve started to believe much more strongly that the human brain is good at multi-tasking for some things, but only uni-tasking for others (like creative production).
• Forget “To Dos”, define “Actions” – How many of us have long Todo lists that by the time we get around to looking at them we just don’t have the energy to take on any of the nebulous tasks. GTD stresses that you need to list “actions”, the actual next physical step that you need to take to move something forward. By listing “actions” on what used to be your Todo list, its very easy to move things forward, even when your brain isn’t feeling motivated to “define” the next thing…instead you just do it. (sic).
• Contexts – This is one of my favorite parts. I used to organize my lists by macro categories such as “Work”, “School”, and “Life”, and then I would pick and chose what was next based on the mood I was in. GTD suggests that you organize your “actions” by “contexts”, where you are and what resources you have. A great example is my “Home” context, which lists all of the things I’ll do when I’m next physically at my house (which is sometimes far away). Why worry about things to work on at home when you’re not there and can’t do them?!? My other contexts include things like “online” and “offline” (with my computer), “calls” (which I can do anywhere with a phone), and “errands” (which usually get taken care of in bulk on weekend days at home).

Mark gave me another excellent piece of advice, “don’t try to tweak the system and don’t invest in any fancy tools right off. Make it extremely simple and adapt it over time. Let me repeat this for all of my hacker friends out there, keep the system as simple as possible to start off with, don’t invest in a whole new slew of complex gadgets or software. This way you’ll truly find what works and what doesn’t, and you can adopt/adapt as you see a need going forward.

So how is it working? Well, I honestly think it has changed my life. Where I used to be constantly stressed out and operating in a always-frantic-no-net fashion, I very much feel like having things under control. I know what I’m doing, I know what I need to do, and almost most useful, I know what I’m not doing. I’m less frazzled, both outwardly and very much more inwardly, and my focus time/ability has greatly increased.

I may or may not blog about different things I’ve done with the system lately, but for now I’m going to focus on finishing up a number of open loops I have in my life, and trying (for once) to get ahead of the wave.

Oh, and those friends who were making fun of me before I started the whole routine…I loaned the book to one of them a couple of weeks ago and then last weekend I got a giant “THANK YOU” for the impact it had made (she even joked that she had put it on her action list).

I’ve added a longer explanation of my system here