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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 In fact, if you know you have old, unclear, outdated, repelling things on your lists now, you will resist putting new stuff on to them--even if that new stuff is a clearly defined next action that makes you leap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)