Back to the quest for greater productivity

There’s been so much writ­ten about David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done that it seems sil­ly to try to retell it.

This book is dense and full of prag­mat­ic advice. I doubt that a sin­gle read-through gives me any­thing like a com­plete under­stand­ing of the GTD method, but a lit­tle prac­tice has made a big dif­fer­ence. Chang­ing habits is not easy, so I’m try­ing to make the changes incre­men­tal and make them stick.

I’ve pur­chased Things, soft­ware for the Mac that tracks to-do items and orga­nizes them into projects and areas. It’s got exten­sive tag­ging capa­bil­i­ties which I haven’t tak­en full advan­tage of, but tags can be used to han­dle the cat­e­go­riza­tion of tasks into con­texts, loca­tions, pri­or­i­ti­za­tion and so on. And I’m keep­ing my task lists in Things. I refer to these lists when I’m look­ing at what I need to get done over the course of the day or even over the course of a few minutes.

The advan­tage of keep­ing these things in lists is two-fold. I don’t have to keep this infor­ma­tion in my con­scious­ness. There’s no ener­gy spent remem­ber­ing to do some­thing impor­tant, because it’s writ­ten down already. The corol­lary to this is that I don’t have to keep phys­i­cal reminders of the things I need to do around me. Instead of leav­ing a bill on my desk so that I’ll see it and remem­ber to pay, I can put it on my list of things to do and file the actu­al bill. The to-do list item in Things can con­tain a note describ­ing where I filed the bill, or can con­tain oth­er use­ful infor­ma­tion like nec­es­sary account num­bers and bal­ances so that I can sim­ply shred the phys­i­cal paper of the bill and remove it from my aware­ness until such time as its appear­ance on my list prompts me to take care of it.

I’ve already writ­ten and tak­en pho­tos to show the progress I’ve made with my phys­i­cal space. See The Ad Hoc To-Do List and Cel­e­brat­ing Inde­pen­dence From Clut­ter for the com­par­i­son pho­tos tak­en about a month apart. I still have an in-box with too many things in it, but even those things are in their place. It’s a pile of things I haven’t processed, but it’s a sin­gle pile. Oth­er than that the things I have on my desk are either tools for me to use (pens, note­books) or sen­ti­men­tal (pho­tos). There’s room for the coast­er on which I put my glass or mug, and room for me to put down my wal­let and oth­er things from my pock­et at the end of the day. It’s not tidy, but remov­ing the oppres­sive lay­er of unman­age­able clut­ter has made my desk a place for me to be pro­duc­tive again.

The book itself can be dif­fi­cult to read. It makes sug­ges­tions that sound like actu­al work. Set­ting up a sys­tem for keep­ing impor­tant things is work. My best sug­ges­tion for using this book is to read it through once and not do any of what it says until you’ve fin­ished the book cov­er to cov­er. Then go back and put the sys­tem into action. That may seem con­trary to the approach I’ve tak­en, to take on pieces of the GTD sys­tem a lit­tle at a time, but decid­ing not to do it until I’d fin­ished the book gave me the free­dom to exper­i­ment with what felt right and get some pieces in place with­out hav­ing the pres­sure of doing the parts that I knew I would resist. As a result I’m in a bet­ter posi­tion to revis­it those parts now and see what will happen.