Steve Pavlina's challenging people to do something different for 30 days (kind of a "new month resolution" sort of thing). When I first read his post, I thought "Naah, not for me." But the idea's been poking at me for a couple of days and I've changed my mind [Thanks, Steve!].
Since I'm currently embroiled in a GTD tune-up, I've chosen a 30-day challenge to: end each day with an empty inbox (physical and virtual), and do weekly reviews every week.
Before I start the 30 day timer, I've decided that this weekend I'll take a radical step (radical for me, at least): I will scrap most of my current lists and start fresh.
Why? As I look over my someday / maybe list, projects, and other lists I've come to realize that there is a big difference in the quality of definition, thought, and specificity in things I've added to my lists in the last week vs. those I added last summer. I also think there is value in taking a clean-slate look over what I'm doing - a lot has changed in the last year.
That means I'll miss the "official" window of Steve's challenge (which ends May 20), but it's my life, right?
Read Moreintr.v. slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams
- To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.
I'm doing a bit of slipstreaming myself as I go through my homemade GTD refresher course. I've looked through some of my old bookmarks of Getting Things Done articles, and rediscovered some gems about the joys and challenges of GTD. In case you are on the same sort of quest, I thought I'd share a few:
Anyway, these are a few of the sorts of links that have kept me moving on the "just one more click before I go to bed" routine for the past couple of hours. Hope you get something out of them. And when you've used these links up, if you want more good stuff, click around on my link list over there on the right. Some smart folks in there.
Read MoreSpring is in the air, and I'm up to some spring cleaning. Earlier this week, I mentioned that I felt the need to re-ground my self in the basics of GTD. I'm still listening to the Getting Things Fast audio and it's still helping.
As I emerge from my Stuck Place in the quicksand, I wanted to share a blinding flash I've had.
It seems that my kung fu has gotten rusty. I've drifted away from defining next actions crisply enough, and have been defining a bunch of near-actions instead. I'm now calling them 'next inactions' for lack of a better descriptor.
I'm sharing this because you may have some too.
What's a next inaction? An example from my list is "Make dentist appointment." Sounds remarkably 'next action-like' doesn't it? But, it wasn't on my @calls list, didn't have the phone number associated with it in any way, etc.
I've found quite a few of those. Along with ambiguous things like "John comp" - what am I supposed to do there?
The solution is easy, and once upon a time I did it pretty consistently. Just answer the questions:
- What's the successful outcome?
- What the physical next action with no dependencies?
Nothing to it, right? ... Back on the horse.
Read MoreI decided it's time for a refresher on GTD, since I've found myself letting the piles in my inbox get a bit taller lately, I've tended to only empty them partway, etc. - in other words, I feel like some of my old, bad habits are encroaching.
So, I started listening to David Allen's Getting Things Done Fast audio program again last night. It's helping - after listening for the first half hour or so, it was a tangible shift. I went from, "Man, I have so much to do..." to "OK, I can do this - I've done it before - it's not that hard."
By the way - my trigger point was that I realized I was starting to look for yet another organizational tool. Been down that road before - realized I was compromising my process, and it wasn't really a tool issue. And, lo and behold, a few tracks in David says that "the price of all this is eternal vigilance" or something to that effect. No kidding.
If you feel like you're getting a bit 'loosey goosey' on GTD, dust off your copy of GTD Fast and re-ground yourself - it just might help.
Update:
Further commentary on this - I mentioned I got a Planner Pad a few posts back. Looking at making the transition to paper is what made me realize I was looking for a silver bullet. While it is a fabulous tool as a paper-based system, I am an electronic kind of guy due to the information I deal with all the time. I'm going to try to incorporate some of the "funnel" concepts into my routine, but I'm sticking with Outlook, the GTD Add-In, Goodlink, and KeySuite as the core of my system.
Read MoreCall me obsessive, but I've been tracking stats around my inbox, number of items in my various lists, etc. as part of my weekly review (although it's been more like an "every few weekly review" unfortunately). I put the counts in Excel and create a simple graph to look at is as a kind of dashboard.
The graph shows me my inbox is very cyclical (the big, dark blue line), and the peaks are when I slack on my weekly reviews. My dashboard has been useful for figuring out things like whether my "@waiting for" list is getting too long, which might indicate I'm falling behind on follow-up of delegated items.
The dashboard approach is helpful, but doesn't help me with one of the bigger recurring challenges I've had - how do I create better focus on the items contained in all these lists?
As a result, I'm experimenting with creating a "cockpit" (or maybe 'weekly flight plan' is a better analogy) to help me create a narrower subset of the lists to focus on each week. I ordered and just received my PlannerPad (www.plannerpads.com) and am going to give it a whirl for this project.
Why and what am I doing? I do so much stuff electronically now that it's easy to accumulate lots of things in my trusted system. It can, however, be overwhelming. What I'll do for this experiment is, as part of my weekly review, to decide what short list I want to work on during the coming week and write that stuff in my PlannerPad - that will serve as the flight plan for the week.
I'll let you know how it works. If you have any better ideas, come on with 'em.
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