How I GTD

Update Dec 3, 2007: I have recently switched over to OmniFocus for managing all of my projects and actions. It actually took me a couple of tries to get into the groove, and at first there were things that infuriated me. Now, I use OF for the majority of my day-to-day actions, but I still maintain a freakish amount of checklists and other notes in my old OmniOutliner file. I still definitely hold to my recommendation below that you begin GTD in a tool-agnostic way and use something simple to start for you: text files, OmniOutliner, OneNote, whatever…but maintain the flexibility to customize your system so that when you decide to switch whole-hog into a “professional” tool you’ll have a good idea of what features you really need, and don’t end up tweaking your system to match the tool.

GTD has been a tremendous boon to me in managing the insane number of responsibilities I’ve been juggling between work, school, and home over the past six months. Only now during the relative calm of summer break have I sat back to look at the major change its had for even those non-panic’d times of my life. I’ve recommended the book to a number of people, and while some have dabbled, its sometimes hard for them to take some of the first steps. One of the most helpful things to really get me started was some pointers by my friend Mark as well as him letting me poke around in his personal organization system so that I could get an idea of what a “real-world” solution that works for someone looks like. When Mark later came to me and asked about the system I developed and said that was helpful to him, I realized it was time to get around to acting on one of my deferred actions and put together this article.

First of all, don’t use this article as a substitute for the book. Go and order it Probably the easiest way to organize this is based roughly on the four pillars of GTD itself, so here goes.

Collection

GTD is all about taking stock of everything you have to do, no matter how small, organizing it, doing it, and having a regular review of your priorities. What I find most useful to my own sense of calm is the idea that you shouldn’t be keeping anything in your head that you can write down. Basically, the more minutia you’re spending brain power on trying to remember, the less free cycles you have to apply to actually what you need to do. The part that is a bit extreme for some people at first is this applies to everything you think you need to do, no matter how small or how big. Once you get all these little things out of your head and into an organized system then you’re much better prepared to focus on your task at hand or be able to handle a new hot item that comes out of nowhere.

My standard place to collect ideas is into a Hipster PDA. This is very simply a stack of index cards and a compact pen that I carry with me everywhere. Every little notion that pops into my head goes onto these cards so I don’t have to remember (or worry about forgetting) it. Right now I have several very different sized things written down:

• A reminder to mail a co-worker about a presentation I need him to post
• A note about a specific place I want to look up some project related information
• A strawman set of goals for what I want to complete in July for a big work initiative
• Notes on baby furniture pricing that Alexis and I were looking at the other day
• Etc, etc, etc…

As you can see, nothing is to big or two small, and this becomes a great general-purpose notepad for day-to-day use. I carry this thing with me everywhere now because it’s almost discomforting when I come up with something new to remember and I can’t immediately write it down. I even take a couple of cards and the pen with me at the gym in case I come up with some new idea, because if I don’t write it down I won’t be able to relax and enjoy myself. Its gotten to the point that Alexis and other close associates make fun of me every time I whip out my stack, but I don’t care, it works well for me.

New Rule: Only write new actions on Hipster cards or somewhere you are sure to process. Mixing actions with reference notes is a sure way to forget to follow-up on something you said you’d do in a meeting.

Hipster cards, new mail, documents I receive and want to review, pretty much everything physical I need to deal with at some point will make it into one of the two physical inboxes I have. These are simple wire baskets I have at home and at work, and its very freeing to know that if I can’t deal with something right now but I know I’ll want to then I can throw it into an inbox and get to it at some point. If something is to big to go into the inbox I’ll write a note about it on a slip of paper and put that in the inbox. Almost everything I do goes through these boxes. I process them every couple of days or at least once a week to determine what to do with everything, but that’s a separate step.

I also of course have electronic inboxes: my email accounts at work and for personal use. These get processed more frequently than the physical inboxes, but I make sure to process them down to zero and make an action out of any message that would take more than two minutes to respond to while processing. Yes, believe it or not, my email inboxes are most often empty.

New Rule: Maximize the number of places you can collect data (Hipster PDA, notepads around the house, emails to yourself, etc), but minimize the number of actual inboxes you have (empty your hipster into an inbox very often). Its easy to park stuff in limbo in a box you don’t check frequently, so you want to make sure that any collection of things to attend to is out in plain site so much so that you get an itch every time it appears to overflow.

Processing

OK, now you’ve got huge piles of things to attend to, how do you get them organized? This is the Processing step, where you go through each item in each of your inboxes and make a mental decision to discard, file, do, delegate, or defer. You’ll have to read GTD to understand how this process works, but its something I follow to the letter. Note that I go into “processing” mode several times a day, basically every time I open up my email program. My goal when doing email is to get in, get organized, and get out. Believe it or not, I maintain my Inbox at 0 in both of my email accounts.

New Rule: I process everything in stack/”Last In First Out” order. As I’ve gotten busier and busier in my life I’ve found that some things just aren’t going to get done, and usually the longer they’ve waited at the bottom of the pile, the lower priority they are. In email there is the added bonus that very often an older thread may have resolved itself by the time you get around to it.

Actions

This is the truly valuable part of GTD for me, because my action list helps me prioritize what I need to do and to maintain focus on what I actually can get done. I use a great Mac Program called OmniOutliner to manage my whole system. What makes OmniOutliner so useful is that I can organize many categories of GTD information in a hierarchical format, I can hide and show different pieces that I care about, and I can easily drag and drop items between categories. I’m sure that any good outlining tool will work for you, I even have a friend using Excel, several people are successful with simple text files, etc. This is what I use and it works great for me right now.

Actions are organized by “context”, or literally by either where you are or what resources you have. For example, why would you bother looking through the raft of things you have to take care of at home when you’re at work, and can’t touch anything in the garage. This screenshot shows my typical Action view when I’m working at home at my desk:

My contexts include:

• Home Office – Things to do at my desk at home (usually late at night after everyone’s gone to bed)
• Home – Random (noisy) projects around the house
• Yard – A summer context to look at when I’m spending weekend terraforming
• Alexis – Things to do when I have the attention of my lovely wife
• Office – Things to do at work
• Online – Things to do when I have net
• Offline – Things to do when I don’t
• Errands – Things I can buy pretty much anywhere (I do a majority of my clothes shopping away from home oddly)
• Berkeley – Things to do when I’m running around town
• Cities – Sub-contexts for several cities that I know I’m going to in the near future

What’s nice about OmniOutliner is that I can expand and collapse these contexts as appropriate to where I am (at home, at the office), or I can zoom in on one specific context if I am, for example, on BART:

New Rules: Actions should all be physical, and they should each begin with a verb (not think). Avoid listing actions that may take more than 30 minutes, as they are very often projects and should be planned out accordingly. If needed, break one super long action into segments like “Draft first 5 pages of report”, “Draft last 5 pages of report”, “Review report draft”. I find that if I have an action that will take more than an hour I’ll usually skip over it unless I’ve allocated time specifically for that action.

Other GTD Categories

So that’s actually pretty simple, and while the Action list is the heart of my GTD system, there are a lot of supporting lists that I track in my little OO file:

• Agendas – Things to review with people in regular meetings (I find it much more efficient to batch up little questions for my boss rather than peppering him with tens of emails each week).
• Waiting – Reminders about things I’m depending on other people to deliver to me. These get reviewed on a regular basis to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, including a “Loaned” category to track everything I’ve given to people in the past.
• Projects – A macro category to collect details about multi-action things I’m doing (Note: I’m not very happy with maintaining Projects here, but I haven’t found the perfect replacement yet)
• Ticklers – My electronic version of the “43 Folders” concept, where I park things I don’t need to worry about just yet. I check this every morning and drag each action to its specific context.
• Want To – Beyond the usual litany of interesting ideas, there are usually some things grouped together for prioritization, such as a “Buy”, “Read”, and “House” list. There’s also a “Deferred” (not going to do) and a “Some Day” (may do really far out), as well as a hideable “Work” list.
• Checklists – These are pre-collected lists of actions I perform for certain big events. The obvious one is my GTD weekly review so I don’t forget any steps (its seriously a full screen high). There are also periodic checklists of things to do at the end of each month and the end of each year, travel checklists for packing, and random checklists like “things to check on the in-laws computers when I go to visit”.
• Reminders – Things I look over every week to remind myself of, like diet guidelines to follow, specific reminders for maintaining sanity at work and school, and self-referentially, reminders about my Getting Things Done habit.

Review

The fourth pillar of GTD is a regular review of your system. I literally have an hour blocked out in my calendar every Friday to sit down and start this process at work, and then it usually carries over into my BART ride home and then finished up in my home office over the weekend.

I follow the standard review procedure, but I have listed every single step on a checklist that I’ll start on fresh each week to make sure I complete every item in the process:

New Rule: Partial reviews are OK if you’re tight for time, but try not to go more than a month for a full review or you’ll really pay the price.

Other Useful Points

You must trust your system. You have to know that you put everything to keep track of into your lists, and that you will get to them at the right time and review them regularly. Make prodigious use of ticklers, collection points, checklists, etc. I find now that if I have even one open loop in my head it will severely distract from whatever task I’m trying to accomplish. A good example is a new-found appreciation of a simple alarm clock, so that if I’m working on a project I can even keep worry about when to wrap up out of my head, because “the system” will take care of those details and I just focus on being productive.

• Yak Shaving and the “Mini-Review” – Exactly as described on 43Folders, no matter how much you think you have things under control, there are always going to be those days where everything goes insane and you’ll find yourself lost and unsure what to do next. In these cases its useful to pause for a moment, forget about the 50 emails that have piled up and the phone messages that need responding and look at what you really have to do today. Realize that its just one of those days where some things are going to have to wait (or may get deferred), but in order to make sure that critically important things stay on track, step back and remind yourself of what really is important to be doing right now. Sometimes it even helps to put together a list called “Today” to make sure you focus only on what you have to. FIND LINK
• Low Priority and Deferred – Almost all of my contexts have a “Low Priority” list at the bottom of them (usually hidden). Within the Low Priority section is a further sub-section, “Deferred”. Low Priority is where I put actions that have gotten stale and really aren’t urgent and that I may get to some time in the future. Deferred is where I put Low Priority actions that I’ve decided I just won’t do. Items that get banished to Low Priority have a 50-50 chance of getting done, anything that goes to Deferred has only a 1 in 10. SO what’s the point of these extra hiding places? Low Priority is pretty obvious, as it allows me to hide off items that aren’t critical right now. Deferred is a little odd though, but for some reason it makes me feel better to have a place to park things I’ve decided I’ll never do. For some reason, keeping them listed in a form of a “Never” pile helps keep them off my mind. Note that I specifically do not move “Deferred” items to a “Some Day” list because by this point they’ve gone through at least two rounds of deferment, and I highly doubt there’s any reason they’d suddenly get more popular in the future.
• Block out unnecessary distractions – A theme from the above two points has to do with being able to focus only on things you care about at a certain time, and ignoring (not even seeing) things you don’t care about or can’t do anything about. I highly recommend that you use some kind of tool that lets you hide off actions for contexts that you just can’t do anything with, to allow you to focus on choosing the right thing to do right now with what you have.
• Don’t get fancy with the tools – Mark had great advice when I started, “don’t delay your adoption of the system by getting mired in the details of a complicated toolkit, start simple and keep it simple til you’ve used the system for a while.” Mark uses nothing but text files (a popular option). I opted for a simple OmniOutliner document (which has become my version of the venerable text file). This has persisted for a long time now, and even though I recently tried a couple of new wrinkles such as kGTD, I find that the “time saving” features of any additional software would just limit my availability to adapt my system to my most productive work style.
• Review and adapt – And along those lines, just as a weekly review is critical to keeping your system organized, you should always be thinking about small ways in which you may improve the system itself. Don’t stick to the book’s rules, don’t stick to my rules; create your own rules, and be flexible enough to change them when it suits your needs.

Summary

I know that all of this sounds heavyweight, but it really isn’t, and the amount of freedom that it affords you truly is worth the minimal beuracracy, so I highly recommend