Mike Shea, 23 September 2006
Many of us live our entire careers with three main tools: a notebook for jotting down bulleted notes, a calendar to tell us where the hell we should be, and a daily to-do list written out every day and tossed aside about fifteen minutes later when the next crisis hits.
We have weird jobs these days as well. While our ancestors might have gone into work and attached bolts onto B-29s, we are what Peter Drucker called "Knowledge Workers", an evil Orwellian term if I ever heard one. Whatever it's called, our jobs are sometimes very fuzzy and very complicated.
"Get back to widgets" is a phrase David Allen, author of "Getting Things Done" spoke more than once at the day-long seminar I attended yesterday. Take all that fuzzy stuff your boss (or bosses) threw at you and turn it into small accomplishable tasks. With every new job, ask yourself two questions: "What will the objective look like when I am done" and "what is the very next thing I can do to move it forward".
There are a lot of these catch phrases, little rules and maxims for organizing our lives, thrown around in David's presentation and within his book. Wrapped around it is a clean and clear system for handling any new job that comes your way, whether it's acquiring a new company or painting a room in your house.
This article will go into the system itself, discuss why one would bother to do it, what the results are when it is used, the steps one must take, talk about the results of using the system, and talk about the tools one might use.
Why Would I do it?
Within the past four months, I started a new major project at work, I got married, I moved out of my nine year old apartment, and I bought a new house. Each of these major projects had possibly hundreds of sub projects. All of them had critical time-sensitive factors that led to their successes. My simple system of "write crap in notebook, write out to-do list, and check calendar" just wouldn't cut it anymore. I forgot things. I missed meetings. I missed deadlines. I felt out of control all the time. I wasn't in a state of panic - none of these things were exactly new to me - but I wanted to improve and I wanted to feel better about my job and my life.
That's another of those David Allen maxims: Get yourself organized, break your jobs down, rely on a trusted full-life system, and you will feel a lot better. That giant Katamari ball in your head full of crap you need to do that only seem to pop up when you are lying in bed - all of that can go away. When you know that everything - everything - is in your system, your mind frees up to do what you want to do instead of worrying.
Relax.
If you're reading this far and you don't feel like you always have that one last thing in your head you need to do but you can't remember it, you probably don't need this system. This isn't the only system out there for keeping stuff straight - there are a lot of others and it isn't like people never got things done for six thousand years until David Allen figured out how to do contextual to-do lists. If you have a system and it works, that's fine.
If you were like me, though, with a whole lot of stuff you had to do, a whole lot of stuff you wanted to do, lousy organizational tools, and a lot of stress about forgotten tasks - this system may be the answer. It's worked so far for me.
How did I do it?
There are five basic steps to the GTD system: Collect everything that you have to or want to do in your life - both work and home; process this stuff to determine what it is, what the outcome is, and what the next possible action is; organize this processed stuff into projects, next actions, waiting for items, calendar items, and other lists; review all of it once a week to ensure items no longer relevant are removed and new items are captured; and "do", go actually do what needs doing.
The first step in digging into this whole system is by far the hardest. It will take one to two days and it will give you a big headache. When you're done, however, you will feel like you have far better control over the things you need to do than you did before. It hurts and it takes a bit of time, but when it is done you will have a much better system.
There are three big steps that take place when you first start this system: First, collect all the crap you have to do from your drawers, stacks, notebooks, lists, and your own head (that's the hardest part) and put all of this into a huge inbox. Second, process each item to decide what it is and what needs to be done. Third, organize all of these items into lists: projects, action lists, calendars, waiting for lists, someday maybe lists, and recurring action lists (this is a new one for me). These lists become the system from which you work.
The initial dump is the hardest part. Gathering up all those items you tossed aside figuring your boss might come back to you later and especially sitting with your head in your hands and writing out every little thing you ever wanted to or had to do but never recorded - that stuff hurts. After that you will look at this enormous pile of papers and sticky notes and wonder how you will ever organize it all - you can and it isn't as bad as it looks. When you're done, you will look at all of the things you have to do and every one of them will be in its proper place - those items you really have no plan to do will still be available in case you change your mind, but you no longer have to worry about it until you WANT to.
The core of this system is a big pile of lists. The lists I maintain include the following:
The in-box: This is the big one. Any time anything comes at me from anywhere, it goes into the in-box. For a while I used note cards but when I burned through too many in a day, I switched to packs of sticky notes. Every single task I am given goes onto a sticky. Any physical item, like a mortgage bill, goes into a larger in-box in my brief case (more on this later). The in-box handles emails, phone calls, voice mails, tasks from bosses, peers, direct reports, and - biggest of all - things going on in my head. The last one is the big one - every time any thought comes into your head that you need to do something about, write it down and stick it in your inbox. I process my in-box about four times a day whenever I get a chance. It is very important to fully process everything in your inbox every 24 hours. Leave it too long and you'll just stop looking at it.
Projects: These are NOT to-do items; these are larger multi-step projects. Some people will map every one of them out to a large degree, but I'm happy just knowing the project, knowing the outcome, and knowing what my next action is. Anything that needs to be done and will require more than one step to do it goes on my project list. This project list is the core of my being.
A calendar: this is the most checked item I carry around, it tells me where I need to be and when.
Contextual action lists: @office, @site, @home, @car, @everquest, @phone, @anywhere. Each of these lists is based on where you are. Whatever our work is, if we're the CEO of Microsoft or an EQ junkie looking for a job, we all exist at some place in space and time - that is how our lists are organized. When I go home, I whip out my @home list and look for things I need to do at home. When I'm at my office, I look there. When I'm going out to my car, check the @car list. Context is everything in this system. Worry about what you need to worry about when and where you need to worry about it.
Waiting For List: This is a list of all the items I am waiting for, who I am waiting for, and when I expect to hear back. Anything delegated goes here. Any action that requires another event outside of my control goes here.
The Weekly Review
So you have your projects and your next actions. Any new stuff goes into your inbox. You process your inbox every day or even a few times a day. You know what actions you want to take and where you need to take them. The next big thing is the weekly review:
Every week, sit down with all of your lists and do the following:
Get Empty: Collect loose papers and materials; Empty your inbox; Empty your head.
Get Current: Review action lists; review past calendar; review upcoming calendar; review waiting-for lists; review project lists; review larger outcome and responsibility lists; review any other relevant checklists.
Get Creative: Dig into your mind for any projects that you always wanted to do but never did.
Some Quick Tips
This system is not easy and seems complicated enough that almost every person walking out of the seminar was not very likely to pick it up. There are a few easy tips, though, that can probably improve anyone's existing system. Here are my thoughts:
* Write out your to-do lists based on context.
* Make sure every item on your to-do list can be completed in 2 to 30 minutes. Anything shorter should be done immediately, anything longer should be broken up into smaller pieces when possible.
* Any item that you can do in two minutes or less, do it immediately the second it lands on your desk.
* Keep your project lists and your task lists separate.
* Keep one system for both your work and home life. One system will work better than two.
* Keep it simple. David Allen showed a 3 ring binder for one system and a lot of techies use 3x5 notecards. It doesn't have to be complicated.
* Make your system easy to use.
* Keep your system, or at least the inbox, with you all the time. Always have a way to capture, process, and organize incoming stuff.
* Take every new project and filter it through two questions: What is the final outcome? What is the next action?
* Get your life back to widgets.
I will write two more articles in the future: one on the reference and tickler file system and one on the tools one can use for Getting Things Done. Expect them in the next couple weeks.
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Please send comments or questions to mike@mikeshea.net.