June 26, 2009

iPhone to Outlook - one less choice

For those of you who have followed by journey with GTD & iPhone, at one time I tried and mentioned KeyTasks by Chapura for synching to Outlook. They just discontinued it. So pull back your horses on that one, it's dead.

As best I can tell, Toodledo seems to be the only option for iPhone>Outlook synching, unless the new iPhone 3.0 OS has brought something new to the table around all that.

Posted by Kelly at 08:24 AM | Comments (2)

June 20, 2009

The Nuances of Inbox Zero

I had an "ah-ha" moment yesterday, I think. The GTD workflow diagram, walks through a few key questions. The very first one is "What is it?" Before you even get to asking if it's actionable (yes or no) and then what you're going to about it (delete/do/delegate/defer), you need to figure out what it even is. Sounds simple and obvious enough, but I think skipping over that one question is what has so many people fusterclupped (my technical term for being confused and stuck) about getting In to zero. They skip that step, leave the email in the Inbox assuming there's some kind of action, but in reality, they haven't even given themselves time to assess the nature of the input, much less decide what to do about it.

That "What is it?" question is the assessment before the decision. That's the time where I'm giving myself the time to actually give some careful thought and consideration to what I'm dealing with, such as:
- What is this email asking me to do?
- Is this even part of my job?
- Am I in the To: field or CC:?

People ask me all of the time how I get my Inboxes to zero every day (or nearly every day.) Here's what works for me:
- I give myself enough processing time
- I've gotten really fast at the "assessment" step
- I have a simple clear model to know what to do with something after I assess what it is
- I'm really clear about my current 20,000 areas of focus to know whether something is my job or not
- I'm really current with my projects & actions to know if I can/should say no or yes

I'm going to do a webinar this summer on GTD Connect showing real examples of this with my email. In the meantime, I hope this helps to bring light to some of the nuances with processing.

Posted by Kelly at 09:44 AM | Comments (3)

June 04, 2009

New iPhone feature for Lotus Notes?

As many of you who have followed my blog know, I switched from my beloved Palm to iPhone about 6 months ago. I am still giddy and overjoyed with my iPhone--EXCEPT--for it's lack of synching to Lotus Notes where all of my lists live now.

So to bring y'all up to speed, here's what went down since I wrote these two posts:

GTD & iPhone
More on GTD & iPhone

November 2008 - I drove off the lot, drunk on entertainment features, with my new 8GB iPhone, even though I knew there was no secure iPhone>Lotus Notes (LN) sync that my IT group would approve. I kept my lists in Palm Desktop, where they happily lived for over 10+ years, for the time being.

January 2009 - Fed up with having email in LN and lists in Palm Desktop that weren't synching to anything anymore, I searched high and low and found KeyTasks for Chapura, which could sync lists on the iPhone to Outlook on my PC. I wasn't necessarily wanting to move to Outlook, but it was better than nothing. That lasted about a month before my setup with Chapura just became too frustrating. I had duplicates, their server was sometimes down (required for synching) and Outlook kept crashing. And, my job shifted such that meeting requests started coming in like a fire hydrant into Lotus Notes. It didn't work to keep Calendar data in 2 places, or even copy and paste like I used to into Palm Desktop.

February 2009 - I moved everything into Lotus Notes--lists, calendar, contacts, memos--all of it. I was never a fan of the ultra-unsexy Lotus Notes To Do's, but the eProductivity boost for Notes made it palatable (and actually fun.) Alas, still no synching option from iPhone>Notes. I recall Tweeting about my dismay with this lack of synching option and an IBM'er (who actually might have something to do with the project?) took pity on me and Tweeted back, "Coming soon." My hopes were raised for a little longer. For the last few months I've resurrected my old Palm and have been synching Palm>Lotus Notes and using my iPhone for everything else. Yes, I now have TWO handhelds. How did this happen? Ahhh...I needed to have an iPhone before the business solutions were there.

So you can imagine my glee when I saw an article today that showed "Notes Synching" as a future feature of the new iPhone.

...but something tells me they mean the Notes pad, not Lotus Notes.

Overall, I am still thrilled with the iPhone as an entertainment device. I think Palm still does an exceptional job as a productivity device. Well, I am productive on my iPhone, if bowling and Twittering count, but not in terms of my GTD workflow management. Yet.

Posted by Kelly at 04:53 PM | Comments (9)

May 28, 2009

Best & Worst Practices of Doing - Final

This is the last post in my series on the Best & Worst Practices of GTD's Five Phases of Mastering Workflow. Hope this has been useful for you all. If you're just joining this thread, here is what we've covered so far:

Best & Worst Practices of Collect
Best & Worst Practices of Process
Best & Worst Practices of Organize
Best & Worst Practices of Review
Best & Worst Practices of Do - Part One
Best & Worst Practices of Do - Part Two

In part three of Doing, I'll talk about the Horizons of Focus. In my experience, this is one of the parts of the GTD approach that can take a little time for people to get their arms around. This is where priorities and perspective live. Whereas traditional time management approaches attempted to give people an ABC type coding system for defining their priorities, David Allen's approach has always been that priority codes are too simple for the complexity of most people's changing lives, as the only measure of what to do. For example, assigning an "A" priority to something (or flagging is the popular method in email programs these days) could change with the next new piece of input you get. Plus, in my experience, people tend to get lazy with that code or flag without really deciding the next action. A flag, or #1, or lighting the email on fire still doesn't tell you what your next action is. So is David saying to never use those? Of course not. Just be sure that what you are marking as high priority has a a clearly defined next action and be willing to change that priority the moment your world changes--which it will.

What David Allen does encourage people to do is trust their gut/butt/hunch/intuition about what to do. A clearly defined set of projects and actions, with any relevant information captured for your longer term goals, vision and direction will be your best coach when deciding your priorities. GTD helps define your priorities through 6 Horizons of Focus:

50,000 - Life Purpose
40,000 - 3-5 year Visions and Strategy
30,000 - 1-2 year Goals and Direction
20,000 - Areas of Focus and Responsibilities
10,000 - Current Projects
Runway - Current Actions

The best way I know of to work with these 6 levels is to go with where my attention is. I don't find it often works to assign myself to go map those out perfectly, especially 30-50,000 levels. They will get subtler the higher you go up in your focus, but they will all help in choosing what to do.

Will knowing your 50,000 tell you exactly which email to read or meeting to go to? Probably not. But it will probably bring to the surface if you're in the job you want. Play around with them. See where your attention goes. David's new book Making It All Work goes into lots more detail on Horizons of Focus and seems to have cleared up some of the mystery around that for people who read and implemented GTD.

Hope this helps,
Kelly

Posted by Kelly at 05:32 PM | Comments (1)

May 04, 2009

Building a GTD House

There was a great discussion on GTD Connect about how to setup a new GTD system. I offered some tips on what I would consider when building a system.

I look at a GTD system as being like a house. You need 5 basic rooms in that house for your Projects and Actions (10k and runway). For most people, their Calendar already lives somewhere. If that works for you, keep it there. If not, find somewhere else for it that does work for a complete personal/professional view of calendar stuff. For the other 4 rooms, you just need something that will allow you to create lists that can sort by context/category, allow due date (but not force it) and allow a field to capture additional notes on the entry (when needed). So that house might look like:

Ground floor (where you'll spend most of your time):
Next Actions list(s) (these are context lists tracking your next actions)
Calendar
Waiting For list(s)

Second floor (good overview, looking down on the ground floor):
Projects list(s)

Attic (place to keep the 'seasonal', not yet needed stuff):
Someday/Maybe list(s)

You want this house to live somewhere that is:
- a place you like (don't underestimate this one)
- a place you can access the information easily (too slow will fustrate you)
- somewhere you feel free putting things into (not everyone wants "get legs waxed" on their work computer)
- portable, if needed (printing works, if not handheld sync)
- something you would feel like maintaining if you were sick in bed (don't get sucked into complicated is better)
- it is scalable for your personal and professional work (give yourself room to capture it all and continue to grow)

Out in the backyard, in a tool shed you can get to easily, you'll also want a place for your non-actionable stuff (checklists, reference lists and reference files.) And, please, get a good filing cabinet!

By the way, this is not in the GTD book--just my way of explaining this after years of doing seminars and looking for the easiest way to demystify "lists" for people.

Hope it helps.

Posted by Kelly at 02:28 PM | Comments (4)

April 29, 2009

Are you repelled or attracted to your lists?

You won't trust your system if you are repelled by your lists. In fact, if you know you have old, unclear, outdated, repelling things on your lists now, you will resist putting new stuff on to them--even if that new stuff is a clearly defined next action that makes you leap for joy at the thought of doing it. Don't believe me? Think about the last time you went grocery shopping and were putting away the food in your fridge. Find anything funky and weird in the fridge? I bet you did some clean up (whether you planned on it or not) to get rid of the old stuff, before you wanted to put the new stuff in.

I had a friend come to me recently asking how to work with his lists. His job changed entirely, within the same company, and he was having a hard time putting new items onto old lists, but still needed to go through those old lists one last time to see if there were any nuggets to pass along to the team he left. I suggested he move that old stuff to "un-categorized" to process as new or just move it all to a new category called "To Review " and treat going through those as a next action. Or, I said he could just declare them complete and archive them. (BTW, I am not a fan of purging/deleting for the sake of completion. That can often create even more stress for people. You're better of at least archiving them for the safety net of being able to retrieve them at some point.)

You know how often I update my lists? As often as I can. Any chance I get I am marking things complete, moving things around and adding new items, so that my lists stay fresh, current and appealing. If you wait to only do that during your Weekly Review, there's a good chance something will spoil before you get there.

Posted by Kelly at 05:24 PM | Comments (7)

April 21, 2009

Ready for change

When I'm at my worst, my system needs to be at its best. When stress/change/conflict/challenge is upon me, I don't want to be thinking about my system. More than ever, those are the times when my system needs to be rock solid, leak-proof and absolutely clear about my next actions and outcomes if I want to stay productive. I want to have a place to drop stuff into and get stuff out with as little effort and thinking as possible.

I've said it before, and it's worth repeating: if you want a GTD system that will actually stick, don't create a list manager for yourself that you would only feel like maintaining when you are at your best. A simple system, as long as it matches the sophistication of what you need to track, will shine. Time and time again, over the years, I have seen people create elaborate list managers and GTD systems that require so much thinking, detail, criteria and cross referencing, that they can't maintain it as soon as stress or change hits them.

These past two months have been some of the most stressful times in my life. My job was completely redefined (although bigger and better) and a family member passed away. Through it all, a few things from GTD kept me sane:

- Weekly Reviews every few days, especially if I was going to need to unhook and hand-off at a moment's notice
- Daily mind sweeps
- A projects list to drop in new problems and challenges that included outcomes such as "Resolve", "Look into", "...Up & Running"
- Extremely hard edges on the calendar so I knew exactly what had to get done on any day and quickly renegotiate as needed
- Checklists to remind me of the obvious when my brain wasn't always firing (like a travel checklist when I had 4-hours notice to buy a plane ticket and get to the airport)

Almost no one likes change done to them. Almost everyone likes change done by them. - Carol Kinsey Goman

Posted by Kelly at 11:07 AM | Comments (3)

April 09, 2009

Is GTD for anyone, but not everyone

Is GTD better for men? For women? For techies? For organizers? For ENFJ's, but not INTP's? For Americans, but not for Brits? The debates are endless and the opinions are plentiful.

Honestly, in my experience, it's for anyone but not for everyone. In my 15+ years of working with this and David Allen, I've seen people "get" GTD from every walk of life: men, women, young, old, techie to luddite. So what does it really mean to "get" GTD?

GTD is about finding and using the most energy-efficient, effective, and least stressful ways of getting things done. It has nothing to do with someone's personality or lifestyle. Sometimes "organized" people are too structured to get what they really want done, so they need to loosen up. Some people need to tighten up. They're both GTD. It's an approach, not a system. If someone's system gets in the way, it's not GTD. If it's creating freedom and expansion and results, it is. Simple as that.

- David Allen

Posted by Kelly at 01:52 PM | Comments (3)

April 04, 2009

Best & Worst Practices of Doing - Part Two

I'm nearing the end of my series on the Best & Worst Practices of GTD's Five Phases of Mastering Workflow. Hope this has been useful for you all. If you're just joining this thread, here is what we've covered so far:

Best & Worst Practices of Collect
Best & Worst Practices of Process
Best & Worst Practices of Organize
Best & Worst Practices of Review
Best & Worst Practices of Do - Part One

In part two of Doing, I want to talk about GTD's Criteria for Choosing. Let's say you're staring at a big list of next actions. Hopefully they attract more than repel you. So, how to choose?

Best practices: Making balanced, trusted, intuitive choices about which to do
Worst practices: Driven by latest & loudest and emergency scanning

Here are some guidelines for choosing:

Context - if you are not in the right place, near the required tool, or have access to the person you need, you can't take that action. That will narrow down your choices.

Time available - How much time do you have right in this moment? If you only have 10 minutes before you bounce to your next meeting, that's a different choice than the times where you've got a large chunk of time to choose what to do. I'd say due date will play a factor here too sometimes (just be sure to watch out for the syndrome of ignoring the "undated masses").

Resources - what's your energy like? Brain toast or high-performance brain? Is it Friday afternoon and you're fried or just getting fired up? Intuitively, the choice will be different based on how you know you'll use your time the best.

After those three limiting factors, then you're going to factor in Priority. What?? Priority is last? How can that be? Think about it. Context has to be the first limitation. It doesn't matter if something is "high priority" if you are not in the context to do it (unless you get yourself in that context). You also can't make time appear out of nowhere, unless you start renegotiating. And, if you won't intuitively want to choose something that you know you won't have the brain space to tackle.

So how do I know my priorities? Ah, the golden question. Only you know your priorities. GTD helps you define where your attention is with the Horizons of Focus. But ultimately, no system will tell you what to do. Only YOU know what to do based on how you have captured what has your attention, made decisions on all that, organized those answers in a place you trust and then reviewed them on some kind of regular basis so you trust they are current based on what's important to you personally and professionally. Then, doing becomes a matter of trusting your hard-wired intuitive judgment. If you do it any other way, it cannot be sustained. If intuition is too fluffy of a word for you, call it something else: your knowing, your heart, your gut, your instinct. It's that part of you that just KNOWS that you're making the best choice and just does it.

Next up, more on the Horizons of Focus.

Posted by Kelly at 04:05 PM | Comments (6)