I’m a fourth of the way through Getting Things Done, and it’s good stuff. For the past five or six years (perhaps longer — I can’t really remember) I’ve carried a 3×5″ notebook around with me everywhere I go, to jot down ideas and notes and things to write in my journal about. It’s my catch-all bucket, so to speak, and it works very well in that regard. In reading GTD, I’ve found that my problem is that I don’t process those notes into well-organized places (I either write about them in my journal — in which case they’re pretty much lost, since I never go back and re-read through it — or write them in a to-do text file on my computer, which I’ve stopped doing because I didn’t review it frequently enough for things to happen). For example, I go through my notebook when I write in my journal (this is how I keep a daily journal even when I’m two weeks behind :)), but at the moment I’m a week or so behind, which means I haven’t processed any of the to-do items in my notebook since I last wrote in my journal a week ago. Not good. What I need is a daily routine where I process the items and sort them into their appropriate areas (next actions, “tickler” folder, etc.). Then even if I can’t make time to write in my journal, I’ll still have processed the notes and be on top of things.
Another interesting item from the book is that we should have enough “buckets” so that nothing gets lost, but no more than that. For the past few months I’ve been carrying around a folded-in-half 4×6″ index card each day, to store my to-do list (this is in addition to the notebook). It’s nice, and I used to write my daily schedule on it, but now it competes with the other notebook for to-do entries and it creates an additional place to have to review. Not good. My aim with implementing GTD (and one of my goals for my life in general) is to simplify, simplify, simplify. The simpler, the better.
Oh, another failure in my current system is my sticky notes. I use them for urgent to-do items and other notes, and they get cluttered all over my desk and before long there are so many of them that I don’t even pay attention to them, thus defeating the purpose. This is what happens when you don’t have set places for things to go…
Anyway, I’m really liking the GTD ideas so far and can tell that they’ll work well for me. Why? Because I’m already doing parts of it, and the GTD system fixes the problems with my own system. I’m excited.
[tags]GTD[/tags]
Throw in your two cents