What's the next action

What IS Getting Things Done?

01 12 04 - 18:49 - Bookmark this post

Since this weblog is dedicated to the noble art of Getting Things Done, I think it’s a good idea to first talk about what GTD actually is.
GTD can be best described as a disciplined process to manage your work, information and time more effectively and easy. The main thought around the process to have a “mind like water”. Because you have a trusted system with GTD where all you to do’s and actions are stored, you can have clear thoughts on your projects, your work and your life.
The system is based around a 5 word mantra:

• Collect
• Process
• Organize
• Review
• Do

First, you collect all open ends in a consistent way and in a trusted place, your “Inbox” This may be a virtual and/or a real Inbox. The collecting process makes you go through literally everything in your personal and professional life that has to be done. To give an example. After just 10 minutes of sitting down and writing my to do’s down, I made a list of about 75 items which were just hanging in my head. Keep in mind that this is just collecting. There is no need to actually do something with it.

Processing makes you ask one of the most important questions for every item in your Inbox: “What is it?”. Take the time to understand the essence of each item in your Inbox and decide the outcome that this information should lead to and the next step towards that outcome.
If you answers determine into which bucket the item goes. In the chart below you will find 8 buckets.

First up: If the next action takes less than two minutes to finish, do it immediately. Otherwise, the item goes into one of the following buckets:

• Project List: If there’s more than one action needed
• Projectplan: A list of the actions needed to finish a project
• Delegate: If the next action has to be done by someone else, you let him/her know and put a “waiting for” tracker in you system
• Defer: If the next action has to be done on a particular day or time, it goes on you calendar
• Next action: Otherwise it goes into you Next Actions List which is organized by context (at home, office, online, offline etc)
  For stuff that doesn’t directly need a Next Action we have three extra buckets:
• File: for information that might be usefull in the future
• Tickler File: for items that you like to do someday or items you might need on a particular day
• Trash: items you don;t need at all

So now you’ve got all your collected stuff organized in the appropriate bucket. Next up is Reviewing on a timely beasis, best is the Weekly Review to actually go through all the stuff on your lists and check to see what needs to be done. Allen suggests reviewing your calendar each morning, and the other buckets (plus any “stuff” you haven’t got around to processing, to clear your mind again) early each Friday afternoon, moving next actions between buckets as appropriate. Then whenever you have openings in your calendar, you select from the next actions based on (a) context (are you in the right place with the right tools to do this), (b) time available (be able to finish what you start), (c) energy available (right frame of mind) and (d) priority (relative importance). Then just do it.
Last but not least is actually doing your work. Because that’s why we started this right? To be able to just do your work and be in the knowledge that all the other stuff that needs to be done is in a trusted system.

There’s more to the system and the book than I just described here. He also talks about the phases of projectplanning, how to setup your system and how to use it effectively. If you are interested, please check out the book at Amazon. Next up I will talk about my setup and what software I use to implement GTD.

I’ve been reading over this blog and the system for a bit now and it’s philisophy is remarkably similar to what I’ve been doing a while now.

Globally I have two inboxes, my GMail inbox and my Firefox tabs (with SessionSaver). Anything there either is incubating or needs an action someday / somehow.
When the appropriate action is done, or the site is bookmarked or whatever I can close the tab or archive the e-mail.

For some stuff this is easy, but there also is a lot of stuff which hangs in there for a very long time. GTD made me aware I should find a resolution to those items. They are cluttering my inbox (but they’re there for a reason).

I do my day-to-day from my Palm which acts as agenda, dated ToDo-list, addressbook and notebook. Stuff gets promoted back and fro from inbox to my Palm as necessary.
This is pretty streamlined by now but eliminating that distinction and unifying my Palm and my Desktop would still be pretty cool.
Alper - 17 04 05 - 17:09

One of the projects I’m currently busy with is my studies and I was getting completely sick of the morass it has become.
With all kind of subprojects (courses), deadlines, lists and complex interdependencies with other information sources.

I was continuously balancing all this stuff in my head and partially on a couple of HTML pages and in my Palm ToDo but that wasn’t quite working.
That’s why I set up a ZWiki to keep track of everything study related. Wiki’s are ideal if you’re hypertext-oriented as I am (and accessible anywhere).

I feel better already.
Alper - 19 04 05 - 20:21