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October 22, 2008

Best & Worst Practices of Collect

Merriam-Webster defines Collect as: to bring together into one body or place. In GTD terms, it's the point of entry where all of your "stuff" lands in your trusted Inboxes, to be processed.

As with all of the five phases of GTD: Mastering Workflow (Collect>Process>Organize>Review>Do), Collect has best practices and worst practices:

Best practices: out of your head, into leak-proof locations, clean edges between collect and organize
Worst practices: in your head, spread all around, blended with reference and what's already been decided (collect is not organize!)

Tips & tricks for Collect:
- Create a trusted Inbox for your desk to capture hard copy stuff. Even if you think you're paperless, you're not.
- Create an "In" folder for when you're on the go between home and office, away from your desk in meetings, traveling, etc.
- If people try to hand you something, redirect them to the Inbox (your chair is not an Inbox!)
- Keep your Inboxes reserved for new incoming stuff only--it's too easy to go numb to your Inboxes when it's an amorphous blend of new stuff, reference, waiting for's and next actions items.
- Use your Inbox yourself. It can be a fantastic way to bookmark your own brain when you get interrupted.
- Have as few Inboxes as you can get by with, but as many as you need
- Get an Inbox for each person in your house (creates clean edges for who owns what and handles the mundane "business" of personal workflow)
- Get an Inbox for each person on your team, in your department....in your company
- Walk around with a collection tool wherever you go, so that when something pops into your head that has your attention, you've got a way to collect it other than in your head

Believe it or not, Collect is often where people have the biggest improvement opportunity. In my experience, people often don't even have a trusted Inbox, or if they do have an Inbox, they never process it. Or, people collect in so many places, it's like a scavenger hunt to find where they left it and process becomes a daunting task, leading people to handle latest and loudest instead because it's often simply easier to find. Or, one of the most common ones I see is blending collection with the stuff they've already processed and organized. If people really got how much time that wastes, because it causes them to re-look at what they've already decided, they would never blend them again.

Next up...best & worst practices of Process.

Posted by Kelly at 08:40 AM | Comments (9)

October 18, 2008

Using GTD with Palm Desktop

For the past 12 years, I have used Palm Desktop for my GTD system. It's one of those bullet-proof, no-brainer kind of software programs that just works for me. It comes free with Palm handhelds. It is also available for download from Palm's website. By the way, the Mac and Windows versions are entirely different, and my experience in coaching people on the Mac version is that it's not nearly as intuitive and easy to use as the Windows one. I've always used the PC versions and synched them to whatever version of Palm I'm using at the time.

Palm Desktop is where I store all of my Calendar, Contacts, Action & Memo lists. Per Tim's request, I am happy to share how I use it in more detail.

Calendar: this is my master personal and work calendar. We have a shared company calendar on Lotus Notes, but that is primarily for other people to know only major details of where I am (like which city I'm presenting a class or major client meetings.)

Contacts: my entire personal address book. All professional contacts are stored in a database in Lotus Notes.

Tasks: This stores all of my GTD lists: Projects, Actions and Waiting For. I use the category function as list names and Palm allows 15 of these.

Memos: This is where I keep all non-actionable reference lists, including Someday/Maybe and Checklists etc.

All four of these sections all sync to my Palm Centro. I do not do email on my Palm, even though I could. Palm Desktop is one of the first applications I open each morning and I am scanning my Calendar and Action lists throughout the day, as often as I can. If my laptop is closed, I can get to my lists on my Palm in about 5 seconds.

Palm Desktop is not for everyone. Because my email lives in Lotus Notes, I lose the ability to link an email to a task. That's a deal-breaker for some. I also have some double-entry from our shared group calendar into my Palm calendar. If that ever becomes unwieldy or too time-consuming, I would likely switch to Notes for my lists so it's all in one place.

Are there sexier and more feature-rich list managers out there? Absolutely. But the fact that I don't have to "think" about my system anymore far outweighs any of that, for now.

Posted by Kelly at 10:23 AM | Comments (14)