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March 21, 2009

A day of doing work as it appears

Despite the impression some of you might have of black belt GTDers like me, I am not always a next action machine. I relish my downtime. Today, for example, I have NOTHING on my calendar. Ahhh....the possibilties!

So if we consider my latest post on the Three Fold Nature of Work and Doing, my day looks like this so far:

1. I've scanned my pre-defined work (just the calendar--nothing there--moving on to #2)
2. I've defined any new input by processing my inboxes (email and some others--nothing to handle there other than decide--moving on to doing work as it appears)
3. I looked at what I feel like doing (my husband and I started negotiations about which movie to see)

Are my lists at zero in order to feel free to do whatever shows up? Far from it. They've never been longer. But they are completely current and my inboxes are at zero. I know that nothing on those lists has my attention right now. I may scan one or two action lists today, especially my "Out & About" list since I'll be heading to the Big City for a movie and will want to handle anything we can while we're there. But otherwise, it's a free day to do whatever shows up.

If you see us each going into a different movie, you'll know how the negotiations went.

Posted by Kelly at 09:10 AM | Comments (4)

March 17, 2009

Hopping into the Twitter river

David Allen's Twitter follower count is proliferating like mosquitoes at a nudist camp, with over 100,000 people tracking him and it's growing by the hour.

It's an interesting look on how fast the world is moving, or how little our attention spans are willing to absorb, that a quirky little service like Twitter seems to be luring so many of us in.

Not familiar with Twitter? Well, have you ever been to one of those Lazy Rivers at a resort hotel? The kind where you hop in and out as you please? And around it goes, whether you're in the river or not. That's the best description I've heard of Twitter.

One of the intriguing things about Twitter is that quantity seems to rule over quality. There is little expectation that every post needs to be useful or even grammatically correct, unlike email. If you've got the time, and bandwidth to take in yet one more piece of input, it's an interesting place to hang out. If you are interested in GTD-related posts, you can also follow me or do a Twitter Search on "#gtd" to hop into the conversation with other GTDers.

Posted by Kelly at 01:42 PM | Comments (5)

March 12, 2009

GTD Summit

Hey, have you heard we have this thing going on called the GTD Summit? Very cool stuff. I'm having a great time getting to meet a huge range of GTD'ers from across the world from every industry imaginable. Nearly 400 people here. Participants are Twittering like crazy (#gtdsummit is the tag) if you want to follow some live feeds.

Here's a photo I grabbed at the opening session this morning. David Allen and Guy Kawasaki kicked it off.

Posted by Kelly at 07:58 PM | Comments (2)

March 09, 2009

More on GTD & iPhone

Well, my previous GTD & iPhone post was by far the most popular post in the history of my blog. What...my previous 4 years of crafting pithy posts, witty GTDisms and David Allen inner-circle wisdoms didn't do it for ya?? It was the iPhone that pulled you out of your caves to share. Thank you. Nice to hear from so many of you!

Overwhelmingly, OmniFocus by OmniGroup leads the pack for Mac users as the most popular application. It deserves to. It's a solid application, with a smart team behind it that has worked hard to make it true to the GTD logic.

Things by Cultured Code, for the Mac, also seemed to be a fan favorite. It seems to have the core components to make it work as a GTD list manager.

For those of you who favor web-based applications, RememberTheMilk.com and Nozbe are your top choices.

And for Outlook users, whose choices are few and far between, KeyTasks by Chapuraand Toodledo are in the lead for Outlook integration. There don't seem to be many developers clamoring to figure out the iPhone to Outlook sync, from what I could find.

Since that post, I have moved my entire system out of Outlook and into Lotus Notes. I was using KeyTasks synching to Outlook 2007. But given that my David Allen Company email and dozens of collaborative databases live in Lotus Notes, and the KeyTasks synching server was MIA for a period of time, I decided to jump ship and move my entire system over to Lotus Notes. Eric Mack's eProductivity template finally made Notes To Do's functional for me. As for iPhone synching, that's now a new project to figure out. I have a couple of leads, but nothing synching yet. So I am relegated to printing my lists for the short term.

Posted by Kelly at 08:43 PM | Comments (15)

March 05, 2009

Best & Worst Practices of Doing - Part One

By the time you get to Doing, you have already decided what you are going to Do. Now it's a choice of which you are choosing to Do.

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

The Three-Fold Nature of Work - How to spend your time and energy:

- Doing Pre-Defined Work - picking from your existing work on lists and calendar
- Doing Work as it Appears - choosing to act on what shows up (Doing an email, rather than processing an email)
- Defining Work - processing your Inboxes (most people need at least an hour a day just for processing)

There is a unique balance for each of these 3 that will be different for every person. We all need time in each. For example, someone in a client-facing role would naturally need to be ready to "Work as it Appears." A project manager might need to spend more time doing "Pre-defined Work" to keep the project moving forward. It's a balance.

Universally, I can tell you that the majority of people we work with spend far more time Doing Work as it Appears than they think they should (latest & loudest), and not nearly enough time Defining Work as they know they should (hence, bloated Inboxes and feeling buried.)

Next up, I'll talk about Criteria for Choosing.

Posted by Kelly at 10:54 AM | Comments (1)