Getting Things Done Part 1: The Basics

This is part one of my Getting Things Done series. You may want to check out my article stepping the 43 Folders system as it will be referred to during this series.

Think for a moment of all the things you would do if you just had the time. Would you read more? Would you travel or learn a foreign language? I definitely spend more time with a paintbrush in my hand. Do you like art? Doesn’t a Thursday evening trip to a new art exhibit sound wonderful?

But you don’t have the time for that, right? What if it turned out that you did, you were just using it from the wrong activities? No, I’m not telling you to stop daydreaming or take a shorter shower. What I’m saying is that if you organize your time successfully, you will find minutes - hours, even - that you didn’t know you had.

Some people are just naturally organized and able to stay on-task. These people float easily from one context to the next, always knowing exactly what needs to be accomplished and having no problem accomplishing it. I’m sure you know people like this. Maybe you are even one yourself. Or maybe, like me, you just aren’t.

I started out as a Type A personality, I think. I graduated high school with a 3.9 GPA, never skipped class, scholarshipped half my private university education. But between my junior and senior years of college I lost my mother to cancer and slipped quietly into the land of the Type B. Most of the time I like it here. It allows me to enjoy life (way too short!) and do the things that I want without beating myself up if I don’t accomplish absolutely everything on the day’s to-do list.


My roommate of the last three years also helped me with this transition into being more laid back. When I would stress about a sinkfull, she would remind me that the dishes would be there tomorrow. While this works great in my personal life, it doesn’t work at all for my professional endeavors. So I started doing a bit of research for some life hacks that would help me remain laid back, but still be able to excel on the business side of things.

As you know if you read this blog regularly, I have a 9 to 5 and quite a few different gigs going on online. I needed a plan to get things organized so that I wouldn’t have to choose between painting and blogging or writing and, well, more fun writing. It suddenly seemed like there weren’t enough hours in the day and I didn’t want to give up the occasional nap either. Luckily, that’s when I discovered Getting Things Done.

When I first started reading about GTD it seemed so obvious. I almost brushed it off as pointless because it seemed all so common sense. But the more I read about it, the more I realized that, despite it being common sense, there were many things that could make my life a lot easier. And I just wasn’t doing them. More importantly, when I did choose to attempt something new to help myself get organized, I didn’t stick with it and it was very really part of a system. The first point was obvious, of course I would need to stick with something to be successful with it. But the idea that what I needed was a full system was a new one.

I can have a to-do list shoved in each pocket, but if I don’t know when or why to pull them out then they are useless. In the same vein, I can have project lists for each context, but if I don’t know what my very next action should be they aren’t really helping me at all. What I am working to develop is a full-fledged GTD system that will take me seamlessly through my day. It should be extremely easy to use, intuitively designed and any physical objects needed (pen, PDA, whatever) needs to be entirely mobile.


In this series, I am going to take you with my on my journey to set up the perfect GTD system. You should find the process very helpful if you are looking to up your organization. I will be covering applications that can be used, basic principles of GTD and other resources that can help you get a stronger hold on your time. The point of all this is simple: We are all so busy that, more often than not, we don’t get time to do what we really want to do. By following a GTD plan, you can tame your time so that once you have a system in place, you will be able to make it roll over and give up an hour or two just for you.

The Basics

I started my research into GTD systems with the person credited as the originator: David Allen. The David Allen Company’s website has a ton of resources related to personal productivity. David sums GTD up simply: Capture, Clarify, Complete. Basically you write down absolutely everything you must get done. You organize it using a system that works for you. Then, once it’s organized, you will have a list of actionable items. At that point, all you need to do is get the stuff done. I think of the benefits as threefold:

1. You always know what’s coming next so you aren’t wasting time shuffling stuff around and making priority decisions.
2. You capture tasks as they are presented so nothing falls through the cracks.
3. You aren’t jumping around without direction because you know everything is all queued and ready to go.

The side effects of all this organization are that your stress levels are greatly reduced, you avoid poor decisions made in a rush and you are using your resources to their fullest. Instead of multitasking and feeling like you are always drowning in to-do items, you have a map for your time and are able to deal with surprises.

The Phases of Workflow

David Allen breaks the Getting Things Done system into five simple phases: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do.

1. Collect
   
   Write it all down to get it all out of your head. Your brain cannot be trusted to retain everything you need to accomplish. Choose any type of collection method (PDA, notebook, whatever), just be sure it is something you will use. Keep as few collectors as possible so you are sure to keep track of them all and remember to move everything into the system.
2. Process
   
   You want to get tasks routed into your system as quickly as possible. There are really two types of incoming tasks. (1)Non-Actionable Tasks: these can be tossed, moved into a tickler file or filed for reference. (2)Actionable Tasks: Decide immediately what the next action will be. You can do, delegate or defer it, but just do something. If an actionable task has many actions needed to complete it, then it is a project and should be treated as such.
3. Organize
   
   Your tasks will be in one of four categories. (1) Projects that you are committed to finish. (2) Calendar events or items due on a specific date and/or time. (3) Next actions that should be completed as soon as possible. (4) Tasks that you are waiting for someone else to finish or about which you have questions waiting to be answered.
4. Review
   
   I will discuss the necessity of a weekly review in an upcoming GTD article. For this article, I will say that you ought to review things regularly, as often as you need to. Obviously actionable items and calendar events will be reviewed more often than your long-term goals, but it is really up to you.
5. Do
   
   David Allen suggest a four step method for deciding what to do next: (1) Can you do it from where you are right now? (2) Do you have time? (3) Do you have the energy? (4) Is it a priority? Using this system and keeping yourself organized will, believe it or not, allow you to be more flexible with unexpected occurences and “surprise” projects.

My System

As I went about designing my own system, I suffered from a bit of information overload. There are so many great articles about GTD that you could easily spend weeks wading through them. In the end, I had to put a stop on the information-gathering phase before it went seriously out of control. Perhaps you have found this article during the same phase. If that’s the case, be sure to keep yourself in check. GTD is about Getting Things Done, not reading about how to get things done.

Once I recovered from my information overload, I made a list of the five elements I wanted to incorporate into my own GTD system and the applications or supplies that would be involved. Here is that list:

1. A To-Do List Application
   
   Given that I have a 9 to 5 and freelance on the side, I decided I wanted to use a web-based application to manage my to-do lists. I will discuss this more in the next article in this series, but basically I needed a solution that would allow multiple lists with hierarchically organized tasks.
2. Inbox Management
   
   One of the main principles of GTD is to completely eliminate inbox clutter. Because so many of us rely nearly completely upon our emails for work, this can be one of the hardest parts of implementing a system. I do a pretty good job of keeping my clutter down at work, but not so much at home where I belong to many, many email lists and newsletters. At work, I simply use a few Outlook folders to keep things in line. I use Outlook at home as well, but couldn’t seem to keep on top of things.
3. A Filing System
   
   I just needed a basic A-Z filing system to get papers onto my desk and organized so I know where they are when I need to reference them.
4. A Task-Capturing System
   
   One of the main ideas behind GTD is to process tasks into your system as fast as possible. For actionable tasks with a set deadline, I set up a 43 Folders task-capturing system. This keeps me from missing important events, meetings and due dates. It also lets me remove things from my head, freeing up the space for other stuff. Think of it as your very own pensieve.
5. A Customized Weekly Review
   
   At the 9 to 5, I am already required to turn in a weekly review. It is basically just a project list with updates and deadlines; not very organized. However, I only usually have 3-4 big projects there and the rest of my work is requests that come in on the fly.
   
   For my blogging and proofreading at home, there are a lot more tasks involved and I am still working on tweaking my weekly review so that it really delivers value. As I said, I have an article in the queue discussing the logistics and importance of a weekly review so I will leave it at that for now.

As you can see, I wasn’t asking for a lot. I just wanted to be sure that I was on top of everything.

There are tons of ideas for blog articles that run through my mind all the time and that was what I felt was most often falling through the cracks. I have a file on my PC at home where I keep these ideas, but I thought that I really needed to make it more mobile. As it turned out, I just needed to be sure I had a capturing system. I have a little notebook for when I’m out or at work. Then I hung a whiteboard in my home office directly behind me so I can just spin around and jot down the idea without losing track of the current tasks - usually.

And that will do it for the first part of the PJ Pro GTD series. Part Two will be posting tomorrow or the next day, so stay tuned.

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