As a note, this article is not for those who do not all ready know Getting Things Done. I make several assumptions about how much you all ready know.
After finally getting myself back in order for this semester, I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain my personal workflow and process for GTD. First you must understand my current situation.
I am a computer science undergrad stundent at Virgina Polytechnic Institute and State University. I have several classes to attend each day, and I live in an apartment off campus. The off campus style of living brings a much more "home vs work" style atmosphere, and it much easier mentally seperate where you are. So I have two main locations that I visit at a minimum of once a day. This leads to a very divided style of work. I must know what I want to do on campus, and what I want to do at my apartment, so that way I can prepare before going to either.
I spend a lot of time on the computer, being a computer science student and a very active member of the Open Source community ( yay archlinux ! ). This led me to first try many different computer based GTD solutions. None of them seemed to work for me. Something about needing my laptop with me at all times to be organized seemed off for me. I had to try something more analog, that I could carry with me and use without a power adapter. I first just tried using a spiral notebook, using different pages for different contexts. This was too large, and generally not something I'd carry around with me. The first semester this year I attempted to use the Hipster PDA. This worked, sorta. It was difficult to flip between contexts, and your projects list was always awkwardly on the otherside, or something. I never got the hipster fully figured out. I then tried the moleskine memo pocket (accordion file folder) with the same note cards I was using for the hPDA. It kinda worked, kinda didn't. I generally didn't like it, and thus avoided using it as opposed to putting my life into it.
Then at the beginning of this semester, I purchased a pocket moleskine. It was the plus side of having the bound book like I had with the spiral notebook, and the small size of the hipster pda. I haven't turned back since.
Now for my #1 problem in acting out GTD. I was barely using my projects list. Either I would have the project listed as a next action, or just the "next action possible" of a project on my next actions list. No matter what you try to say, this is not how GTD will really get working. The reason I was missing out on my project list is that I wasn't processing anything before it went into my next actions list. When I was on the go, I had no inbox. So instead of focusing on making sure my inbox was empty and making sure everything got processed, I was just making sure everything was getting onto my next actions list. Huge realization for me :)
So what have I done to fix this habit? I've taken some of the note cards I bought for the Hipster PDA and put them in the front of my moleskin. They are now my inbox.
The key mental separation here is that you need to have an inbox. I have a physical inbox at my apartment, but I can't carry it with me. So by taking these note cards, everytime I get back to my apartment, I dump the note cards into the inbox, and process them. And during this processing is when I can actually figure out what is a process and what isn't. As a general rule, if it will take more than 3 actions, I consider it to be a project. You create a lot more projects, but as David Allen says, "The project list is king."
Congratulations on reading all of that. I know I'm proud!
1 year, 1 month ago
Interesting. I've come to similar realizations myself. Though I took a different approach. My approach takes a bit of a turn off the GTD route. That is, I find it easier for me to do a bit of pre-processing.
I carry a moleskine with me (yeah yeah it's the fad now, isn't it). However, I also have a separate 'cahier' notebook. That's the small one that comes in a pack of 3. Using the elastic band on the main notebook holds them together nicely, so I don't lose anything.
This is where the pre-processing comes in. Whenever I get the "ah, better right that down", it's very easy to go "can I word this into something actionable?" or "is this just data?". The cahier holds my random notes and non-actionable stuff. The notebook holds everything actionable.
Now I also process things on-the-fly, in a way. Keeping a project list seemed like a big pain to me. So I merged both the trigger list and project lists. It seemed most of my "projects" were those that technically never ended, so this made sense. While "pay taxes" has a finite set of actions, it's also hard-landscape, whereas "pacman development" really doesn't have a finite end point (besides software perfection, but I digress). So, whenever I'm in an on-the-fly processing mode (on the bus, waiting for something, etc - generally in a non-action-taking place), I run through the items listed in my todo list. Sometimes I move things around, sometimes I split things into multiple actions ("I wrote that one down poorly, let me fix it"), and sometimes I run through my project/trigger list to see if there's anything else to add.
On a side note, I've been beginning to partition a lot of stuff more and more. Computer-specific stuff tends to take place with gmail 'stars', but there's a problem there that I can't easily annotate things.... it's something I need to figure out, but I've been trying to use RememberTheMilk more and more.
In the future, I will write my own GTD blog entry (hey, another fad!).
1 year, 1 month ago
Ah yes, support materials vs. actions.
So basically we are doing the same thing, but I have note cards, and you have these other mini moleskines. Also you have no project list.
Obviously something like pacman development is going to be very different than a usual project per se, but don't you have too many large next actions? To me a next action needs to be something small enough that you can think of everything you need to do to complete it in a second. If you can't, then it's something on your mind, weighing you down. To me the most important part about GTD is that I'm recording my responsibilities so I'm not responsible for remembering them :) So howe are you handling these larger next actions that you are creating by not having a project list to track them?
I'm curious if you are still using the "Write more next actions {moar na's!}" format, or how you are triggering more next actions without a project list.
1 year ago
Well the whole NA thing seems unnatural to me in a lot of situations. Running with the pacman thing - at any given point in time, there might be 5 small things I want to do, 3 quick bug fixes and 2 documentation updates. None of these are linear in nature, and predetermining which one I will do next doesn't work right. It's almost tree-based instead of a linear list.
I've started to use todoist.com for all my computer related stuff and it seems to be working quite well.
Comments are enabled
Comments must be approved by the administrator before they will be shown. Please be curteous, and write carefully, you have a whole preview page just to check up on it.
Post a comment