“Hello, my name is Canyon and I’m a Disorganized Mess.”
Saying that “the first step is admitting you have a problem and are powerless over it” may sound familiar to many. I feel I had to go further than that to accept that I needed help with my personal organization. I was drowning in “Stuff” and the cracks that stuff were slipping through had become gaping holes. I eventually found GTD and it saved me from my self inflicted chaos. For this first post I want to give an overview of the GTD system. Next post I’ll cover my own implementation and some of the key realizations I’ve had about the GTD methodology.
GTD overview:
Getting Things Done, or GTD, if you aren’t already aware, is the personal organization system created by David Allen. It has become very popular with geeks in the technology community. While there are many other explanations of GTD available, I will try to sum it up for the uninitiated.
The basic philosophy of GTD is that your brain is wonderful at evaluating data and making decisions but terrible at remembering the things you have committed to do. These commitments, either to yourself or someone else, take mental energy to remember. Your brain tries to be helpful and remind of everything you have committed to, it’s just really bad at organizing this stuff. It’s also really bad about picking the right time to remind you of something. As David Allen says “You never remember that you need toilet paper when you are at the store.”
GTD helps you create a “Trusted System”. This gives you a way to capture and store these commitments outside your head. Trusted means that once you put something in to the system, you will come back to it at the right time. If your brain doesn’t trust that you will see it again then it still tries to hold on to all that stuff. When your brain lets it all go, it frees up that energy for doing the creative stuff that your brain is good at. David calls this “Mind Like Water”. If all of the little reminders stop going off you can focus on doing the things you need to do. This system holds all of these commitments and the steps needed to complete them.
GTD has 5 stages.
- Collect all your stuff, but not in your head.
- Decide what commitment this stuff represents and what the next action is.
- Organize those commitments and actions into a trusted system.
- Review everything at least weekly.
- Do the tasks.
Collecting all your stuff, from the many different inputs you have, helps ensure every commitment gets processed. Processing allows you to make decisions and form plans from the pile of stuff you have collected. Organizing those decisions and plans in a structured way streamlines retrieving the info when you need it. Reviewing the whole system keeps it current and helps your brain trust it. Then you can do the things you have committed to, confident that you are doing exactly what you should be.
Collecting is all about not trusting your brain to remember tomorrow, or 5 minutes from now, the thought it just had. You must capture all of these thoughts and your commitments as they happen. An important piece is being able to capture anywhere, anytime. GTD calls this “Ubiquitous Capture”. This usually takes the form of a Notebook, PDA, or Voice Recorder. As you collect stuff, it lands in a series of inboxes. This can include your email inbox, voice mail inbox, a physical inbox on your desk, or a note pad you carry in your pocket. As stuff collects in this series of inboxes, you process the stuff as often as you need to keep it off your mind. Then, once a week, you commit time on your calendar to process all of the inboxes till they are empty. Then you know that everything from all your inboxes ends up in your system. This is a key to trusting your system, processing everything.
Processing is evaluating everything in you inboxes and deciding if it is actionable, and if so, what commitment it represents. These commitments then can be recorded, usually as projects. First, can this thing be accomplished in less than 2 minutes? If so, then just do it now, while you are processing. David calls this the 2 minute rule, but beware underestimating the time required for something. You will be amazed how many things end up in your inboxes that can be done in only 2 minutes. If this two minute act was only the first step of a project, remember to capture the next action for processing. If something takes only 1 step, but longer than 2 minutes or can’t be done now, then it can be stored with your next actions.
Anything that takes more than 1 step to do is a project. Once you have these projects you have to decide a few things about them. First you have to decide what the outcome is. One way to ask this is “What does wild success look like?” Next you decide what action, or series of actions, will move the project to this outcome. These can be recorded in a project plan. It is important to focus on the next action, which is the next, physical act, that will move the project forward. These actions should be doable without any preparation or additional planning. If any is needed, then that preparation is the next action. Anything that isn’t actionable is either reference material, something that might be actionable in future, or trash. Each of these find their own place in the organization system.
The Organization system has four components:
- Project lists and materials
- Lists of Next Actions
- Your calendar
- A reference file
You need three separate lists for your projects: Active Projects, Someday/Maybe, and Waiting For. The Someday/Maybe list acts as a master list that holds all the things you have committed to but aren’t currently working on. The things that you are working on go on your Active Projects list. The Waiting For list stores reminders of things that others have committed to, so you can follow up with them. The last part of the project system is the project support files. These are planning and reference materials for all of your projects. Out of these project plans you can extract your next actions.
The Next Action lists are separated into “contexts”. These contexts are based on the location or resources that you need to complete your actions. Standard examples include “At Computer” for actions you need a computer to complete, or “At Work” for things that can only be done at your workplace. This way you can filter your actions to only those that you can do given your current contexts. You can also have context lists for people, David calls them “Agendas”, where you can record the things you need to discuss with that person.
Your calendar finds it’s place in GTD as, what David calls, the “Hard Landscape”. This reserves the calendar for only the items that need to happen on a certain time and day. This is what calendars are supposed to be for but many people also use them as daily task lists or reminders for things that need to be done, but not on a specific day or time. So your meeting on Tuesday, at 4 P.M. would be on the calendar, but running to the car wash wouldn’t unless you have an appointment. For many this detaches your calendar as the center of personal organization. Removing these semi-scheduled items from your calendar elevates it to a sacred decree. These are things that have to be done at the prescribed time. Therefore everything not on your calendar can be done at anytime you are in the appropriate context.
Finally you need a reference file for all of the non-actionable Stuff you have collected. This reference file is often a set of Drawers with a single, Alphabetic filing system. It is important to optimize this system for ease of filing not retrieving. The harder it is to file something or the more you have to think about it then the less likely you are to actually file things immediately. You then end up with a pile labeled “To be Filed” and it becomes another project. If it’s not something that relates to what you are actively working on then it should be filed. As long as you are consistent in your filing methods, you should be able to retrieve things quickly.
The Review, in GTD, takes two forms. There is the constant “mini-Reviews” that you do throughout the day. These can be scanning your Next Action lists, Processing a few items from an inbox, or extracting commitments from meeting notes. The Weekly Review is the big review, scheduled on your calendar for once a week, where you Process every inbox until it is empty and then review all your lists. David suggests scheduling this for a time when you can minimize distractions. One of the big goals of the Weekly Review, in addition to emptying inboxes, is deciding if anything from your Someday/Maybe list can to be moved onto your Projects list. Finally you can review all your projects and see that all the possible next actions are on the appropriate context lists. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Weekly Review in the success of your GTD system. It is the focal point that keeps the rest of the system working smoothly and builds your trust in it.
After all that work, we can finally start doing things. Many things, at this point, will have already been completed in 2 minutes, deferred to be revisited next week, or thrown out entirely. First you can start with your calendar. What are the things on your hard landscape that you have coming up. If you find you have time before your next appointment, you go to the lists for the contexts you are in. The goal is to have already done all of the thinking during your reviews. Now doing tasks should be as simple, as David puts it, as “Cranking Widgets”. As you crank widgets and mark things off your Next Actions lists, you continue to collect input. When you complete an action you don’t have to write down the next step in that project if you are moving on to it immediately. Only when you stop one string of actions for a new one, possibly because of a distraction, do you need to collect the next outstanding action. In this way next actions act as bookmarks, reminding you what step you were on and what is needed to pick up where you left off.
I hope this overview is helpful as an introduction to GTD. For those interested in more, pick up your own copy of GTD. Then look for my next post which will lay out the details of my own GTD system and some of the important lessons I have learned in the three years I have been using GTD.
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