Chuck The Geek.com

My GTD system

August 4th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

All right, I’ll give. I’m going to share how I implement the Getting Things Done methodology. Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, explains five separate phases of managing one’s workflow. He says that everyone who has to make decisions about what to do has to manage their work by moving through these five stages, although the specifics may differ considerably from situation to situation:

1. Collect. In this stage, a person collects input. This may be from an email, a letter, a note, a conversation, meeting notes, an idea, or some nagging thought.
2. Process. This involves making decisions about all of the things collected. The questions are “What does this mean to me?” and “What do I need to do about it?” If it is an actionable item, other questions include “Is this a multi-step project?,” “What does the outcome look like?,” and “What’s the very next physical action to take about this?”
3. Organize. Once decisions are made, the stuff is dealt with. It can be trashed, filed, delegated, incubated, deferred, or done. This is when things get parked in the organizing system, including action (to-do) lists and calendars.
4. Review. Once decisions have been made and the stuff organized, the system must be reviewed regularly enough to keep it current and to make good action decisions. One of the pieces to this is Allen’s somewhat famous Weekly Review concept.
5. Do. This is the part that ultimately matters. This is the getting things done part.

Allen lays out the principles, but the implementation of a system that utilizes this methodology can vary significantly from person to person. I’ve tried several schemes over the last four years, but here’s the system that’s been working well for me for over a year now.

Workstation

• I have a dedicated desk at home and at work.
• Each desk has a phone to the left, a pad of paper and pen to the right, stickies lying about, a stapler, several stacked in-box style baskets, a standing file holder for active project files, and a Brother’s labeler.
• I have a computer at each desk with roughly the same set of software, and synchronized files between them.

Inboxes & Collection

• I almost always have my Space Pen and Moleskine Cahier pocket notebook with me to jot notes. When I can’t write, I call Jott from my cell phone and leave a to-be-transcribed message.
• I have a work email account and a personal Gmail account. These are kept separate. I have an “– Active –” folder in my work email that contains all in-process emails. This lets me keep my inbox empty when I process it. I follow a similar pattern with Gmail, except I star items that are in-process.
• I have desk 4-5 in-baskets on my work and home desks. The top is for my inbox - everything gets collected there. The other baskets has different uses at home and work.

Organizer & Lists

• I use MS Outlook for my organizer software. I tweaked Outlook to better fit my workflow style, and it functions quite well for my needs.
• I keep my address book, action and project lists in the tasks area, and my incubated someday/maybe lists, checklists, and many other notes and reference in the Notes app (which I must say is usable, but just barely).
• All of this gets sync’d to my Palm TX. I would much prefer a Treo, or possibly a Blackberry, but this is fine, and costs half of what a Treo costs. The TX is a fine Palm, in any case, and the PalmOS handles lists, calendar, contacts, and memos (notes) in a very fast, simple, and intuitive manner.
• Allen talks about a tickler system, which involves a set of folders that get cycled through, one a day, that hold reminders and materials needed that day. Since my current job isn’t as operational with many daily repeated tasks or day-specific actions, the tickler file didn’t really work well for me (although it was essential when I was scheduling daily and special computer jobs and reports at a VAX operator job a few years back). Instead, I use non-timed appointments on my Outlook calendar (the ones without times at the top of the day) with the word “TICKLER:” or “URGENT:” in front.
• I have a separate next-action list for each physical context (where I’m at). I have separate personal and work project lists to remind me of all my commitments. I also have a “Someday-soon” list to park things that I don’t  want to see on a daily basis. I trust that I will review those items weekly during my weekly review. Finally, my Waiting-For list tracks things that I’m waiting on from others, or outside of my ability to act (a shipment, a project deliverable, an email response, a person to come back from vacation that’s needed for the next project step, etc).

Filing & Reference

• I have a filing cabinet at home and office. These hold their respective files, which are all plain manilla folders with Brothers white labels on them. Not a single one has a penned-in label. The files are labeled alphabetically. This is actually a project on my someday list, because my files could be organized much better and more intuitively. For what it is though, the system works very well.
• Outlook/Palm hold many notes/memos on various reference items. I hold a lot of Someday/Maybe lists there for books, music, videos, restaurants, and other longer-term goals and things I want to do. I have several checklists for reminders, travel, etc. I keep gift idea lists for certain people. There are reference memos with model numbers and refill number for much of our stuff (the numbers I always wish I had when I’m at Home Depot, for example). I also have several other little work and personal reference notes.
• My PC files hold the biggest bulk of my filing system, and that setup is explained in this post.

Reviewing

• I look at my lists daily. As my wife will tell you, that doesn’t mean I always actually get to much on them.
• About once a week (every 6-12 days, as I can/feel like), I’ll do some form of weekly review, which I’ll talk about in another post. Basically, it includes reviewing all of my lists and updating them, making sure that every project and commitment is processed into my system.
• I try to create some form of perspective focus tool every week. This is usually a mindmap or one-page word document that includes higher level goals I want to be reminded of, as well as weekly objectives and urgent items to make high priority. This gets looked at most days.

Other notes

• I use Mind Manager religiously to track projects, plan, brainstorm, and think.
• I tried to link projects to actions in my lists for the first couple of years. This proved to be really cumbersome, and I couldn’t keep my system current. So, now I rely on the weekly review to keep those linked. If I have a high priority project that needs more attention than once a week, I’ll put it in front of my face somehow.
• I use Jott reminders to send me one-time text messages at certain times if I need to remember something (don’t forget to buy X, meeting in 5, etc).
• I keep a lot of information in the notes section of projects and contacts. In projects, I’ll often include brief plans, milestones, objectives, and other support. In contacts, I’ll put as much information about that person as I can - directions to them, facts about them, etc.
• Every project on my project describes an outcome and starts with a verb: “Baby-proof the house,” “Deploy monitoring server,” “R&D DNS system architecture,” “Finalize vacation plans.”
• Every Waiting-For item follows the same format: “wf <DATE PUT INTO SYSTEM: MM-DD> <WHO> <WHAT>”. For example: “wf 7-14 Amazon books shipped.”
• Every item on the @Errands list starts with the location name for sorting purposes (”target:”, “parents:”, “bank:”).
• All the next-actions are really next actions. So I don’t say “buy mom birthday gift” — that’s a project outcome. I’d say “brainstorm several ideas of things mom has liked in the past.”

Entry Filed under: Personal, Productivity