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April 28, 2006
Power of the Natural Planning Model
I was in NYC this week doing a two-day seminar for a financial services company on Wall St. On the second day, we dove into the Natural Planning Model, which is David's five step model for project planning (starts on page 56 of the GTD book). What I love about this model is that it really "demystifies" project planning and gives people some structure--starting with "what's the purpose?" down to identifying clear next actions. One participant shared with me that he's had a project stuck on his plate for about 4 months. Spending ten minutes running his project through the Natural Planning Model gave him a clear plan and steps to move forward.
I've run all sorts of projects (and problems) through this model, including healing my elbow. Some of you know I've had an elbow injury for about two years. It finally occurred to me to treat it like a project. So I broke it down into pieces with the NPM and saw solutions and ways to go about healing it that I had not seen before. A participant in the seminar yesterday ran the situation of "what will my son do this summer?!" through the model. He was so excited because he saw more options and opportunities than he realized and had some do-able next actions for moving forward.
Waiting for my flight out last night at Newark Airport, I caught this shot on my Treo:
Posted by Kelly at 09:24 AM | Comments (1)
April 12, 2006
Send & File
One great feature I use in Lotus Notes is the "Send & File" option when sending email. It saves the extra step of having to cc: myself or dig through Sent mail to grab emails I want to file.
Outlook doesn't have a Send & File option but I just figured out another way to do this that may be easier and faster. This may be old news to some of you! Before sending an email, choose Ctrl+Shift+Y. This will bring up your folders list to select where to save a copy of the email you are about to send.
Posted by Kelly at 04:25 AM | Comments (10)
April 04, 2006
Getting email to zero
Many people consider that Black Belt with GTD is to get to zero emails in the Inbox on a regular basis. Why? Because it takes less effort, attention and energy to work from a place of zero than to keep things in the Inbox where some part of your brain has to refigure out what you've already figured out. Consider this: How many times have you opened an email, closed it, maybe even marked it as unread, then gone on to the next one. Then at some point you see that email again, maybe even open it again and have to think, did I respond to this one? Is this new? One suggestion to get a handle on what's in the Inbox is to first handle the backlog sitting in In, starting with what can get deleted. Sorting by Date, Sender or Subject can make that easier. If you have a sense that you have some old emails that you need to keep for archival purposes, and it's unrealistic to go through hundreds or thousands of old emails, then create a folder called something like Backlog or To Process--call it whatever you want to give it a place other than In. Once backlog stops grabbing your attention you'll be freed up to process what's new. I find the 4D's to be a great model for processing email:
* Delete whatever I don't need
* Do those I can do in less than 2 minutes
* Delegate anything I can hand off to someone else
* Defer anything that will take longer than 2 minutes to some kind of action folder or Task list
A grad of one of my seminars last week wrote to me about her experience implementing GTD with her email:
A funny thing to share...I was one of the ones with 3,000+ E-mails in my Inbox, so I followed your suggestion [about backlog] and created 2 files...2006 Before GTD and 2005 Before GTD and moved things more than 2 weeks old into those folders. Then, I worked on deleting, or moving more recent E-mails to tasks, or other folders as appropriate. I finished all of this VERY LATE last night. This morning, I logged in and watched and watched my "Inbox"...but there seemed to be a problem. The viewing panes were empty and weren't showing me any mail. So, I moved over to tasks and scanned those to see what I could work on in the moment -- while waiting for my screen to refresh. I did a couple of things -- went BACK to my "Inbox" and the screens STILL weren't "refreshed". I tried to look for a "refresh button" to clear up the problem...and it finally occurred to me that this is what an empty "Inbox" looks like!! I'd never seen one before! I had to laugh...
Posted by Kelly at 07:12 PM | Comments (6)
April 02, 2006
Meeting with Oz
Someone asked me recently if we get much access to David Allen. It made me laugh, thinking of him behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz. Today the delivery staff met at David's house. Here he is as I know him best--the kind of guy who enjoys the finer things in life, like hanging out with his dog on a sunny afternoon:
Posted by Kelly at 07:08 PM | Comments (3)
