My GTD Odyssey - Part 3

Sorry for the delay between postings, but unplanned work has descended upon me this past week and I've been in the throes of contract negotiations that came with "drop everything" sorts of urgency. Anyway...

In my last post, I talked about how I discovered the leverage of ClearContext for getting my inbox emptied out. However, I was still just moving things out of sight without a method to go an retrieve them. The essence of my problem is the same phenomenon that I see in the IT shops where I do process work:

This was not a "tool" issue - what I was lacking was a sound process (or at least a sound process that would work for me).

Searching the "next big thing"

At this point, I couldn't figure out a way to integrate GTD's "context" lists into my lifestyle and individual process, so I began to look for an alternative personal management system.

• For nostalgia, I dug out my old binders and revisited Franklin Covey. That only reminded me why I'd moved on from there in the first place.

• I read a lot of books ("Leave the Office Earlier," "Never Check Email in the Morning," "Take Back Your Life," and a bunch of other, similar tomes). While these are excellent books, they either didn't hit home with me at a visceral level, or felt like they had too much overlap with GTD.

Another email from Brad

One day, I got another email from Brad Meador telling me that ClearContext had begun working with Michael Linenberger, author of "Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management" (also known as TWC).

Furthermore, Brad told me they'd tweaked ClearContext to support the views and workflow outlined in the book. After finding out more and discovering that Marc Orchant wrote the introduction (Marc's one of my favorite work+life+technology bloggers), I ordered a copy of the book and installed the TWC-specific version of ClearContext.

I devoured the TWC book, and loved what I was reading. However, there were some aspects of TWC that didn't were too different from my GTD habits and didn't feel natural to me (more on that in a minute).

Jumping into TWC

TWC is a great process framework, particularly if you are just embarking on your journey for an Outlook-based personal management system. It integrates some aspects of many of the time management / life management systems to which I've been exposed.

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What I like about TWC

• TWC adopts GTD's technique of describing things in terms of next actions.
• TWC has a more prescriptive method for dealing with projects and "miniprojects."
• TWC's new Task views (chapter 3) and methods for dealing with Tasks in Outlook (chapter 5).
  • These provide a different workflow that actually pulls me back to my long lists of possible actions on a daily and weekly basis. I've found that this workflow recreates the "go here to get your next task" feel I missed from other systems. It has also kept my lists from going stale.
• TWC uses 3 distinct task lists
  
  • The TaskPad Task List (I call this my "Today" list):
    
    • These are the next actions you want to work on today (not just those that are due today - see below for more)
    • This list is configured to show only those tasks that you wanted to see on or before Today.
    • You monitor this list in a kind of "dashboard" view (like the image at right).
      
      • (There are instructions on creating this view in chapter 3, or you can let the ClearContext TWC edition create it for you)
  • The Daily Task List:
    
    • These are the next actions that have been assigned a date in the future (i.e. you've decided when you want them to show up on your "Today" list so you can consider looking at them)
  • The Master Task List:
    
    • These are all the rest of your undated tasks - the undated ones.
• TWC makes a distinction between a "due date" and a "start bugging me about this" date
  
  • In TWC, you use Outlook's due date to determine when a given next action will start showing up on your TaskPad Task list - I think of this as the "start bugging me" date
  • If you have a firm due date, you actually include that in the subject of the task. For example, you may have "Complete online renewal process at oregonzoo.com - DUE: 10/31/06" as a task name. If you want it to start showing up on your "Today" list 3 days earlier, you simply set the tasks Outlook due date to 10/28/06, and this task will start appearing on your "Today" list beginning 10/28.
    
    • Note - this may sound complicated the way I describe it, so I suggest you read the book where this is covered much more clearly.

The most dramatic shift I noticed from using TWC is that it helped me get into the habit of daily and weekly reviews (sometimes more than once a week, if you can imagine!) and it really gave me a workflow that helped me work my lists.

What I didn't like about TWC

• TWC doesn't really use "Contexts" like GTD - instead, it uses Outlook "Categories" to segment and organize email
  
  • I find Outlook's Categories to be very clunky use (lots of extra steps), so I quickly abandoned this aspect of TWC.
• The TWC inbox management workflow outlined in Chapter 6 didn't feel natural to me.
  
  • I find ClearContext's methods to be much smoother and use its functions instead.
• TWC doesn't embrace "Topic-based filing" like GTD - rather, you file everything in big, general purpose buckets, then filter those buckets using categories.
  
  • I'm firmly immersed in GTD's approach toward topic-based filing, and I like the advantages of this approach. Furthermore, if you use ClearContext's "Topics" you can click a button and automagically file messages in the correct Topic folder using ClearContext. Very powerful.
  • I also do a lot of email management on my PDA. My PDA doesn't support assigning Categories to email messages so it was a big pain to manage things in my inbox while traveling. By using Topic folders, I can file messages from my PDA and easily find them later.

To sum up TWC, I believe it is a phenomenal methodology and, in many ways, it works better for my work style than TWC. If I were starting from scratch today, TWC would probably work just fine for me. In fact, I recommended it to a friend of mine and he is already off to the races and using it productively two weeks later.

However, it still wasn't the "all things to Dwayne" process I was seeking. What to do?...

GTD: The siren's song returns

During my evaluation of TWC, some CD's started showing up in my mailbox from David Allen's company. I'm a charter member of David's GTD Connect program (not cheap, but I'm getting my money's worth -- so far). They start sending me CD's with interviews with various professionals and GTD practicioners to share experiences. Think of them as podcasts by mail.

As I listened to these interviews and began to hear about others' journey with GTD and some of the tweaks they'd made to the system, I began to feel a renewed sense of excitement about the GTD - and a new sense of opportunity.

This led me to implement my own hybrid approach, combining the best of GTD with the best of TWC. I continue to tweak, but I am feeling more in charge of my days than I have in quite some time.

In my next post, I'll describe my hybrid approach and share some other interesting resources I've found, as well.

>>Continue to part 4

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Related items:

• Wrestling with GTD - but now I feel like I'm winning... (10/9/2006)
• My GTD Odyssey - Part 1 (10/10/2006)
• My GTD Odyssey - Part 2 (10/13/2006)

Comments

[Marc Orchant]

Dwayne - thanks for the kind words and for the incredible posts about your GTD Odyssey - great reading! Like you, Michael's work resonated with me in a way nothing else has except David Allen's approach. I've managed to assemble my own idiosyncratic hybrid of David's guiding principles and Michael's Outlook recipes to produce a very high performance environment that works well for me.

Sadly, I am unable to take advantage of ClearContext because my company uses an IMAP server and CC doesn't yet support that environment (I've asked - repeatedly - and Brad and Deva assure me they will continue trying to work with Microsoft to figure out how to do this). It is a fantastic tool to get the Inbox properly organized for efficient processing, especially for high-volume mail folks.

Keep the posts coming and thanks again!

[Alessandro M. Gasparini]

I've the same problem with IMAP mail.

I just solve the problem forwarding all my email on IMAP server to gmail account.

SOLVED!