« A day of doing work as it appears | Main | Is GTD for anyone, but not everyone »

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 April 4, 2009 04:05 PM

Comments

Thanks Kelly! I am really enjoying this series!

Posted by: Jim at April 5, 2009 03:34 AM

Hi Kelly

I'm enjoying this series too - It's really helpful.

One thing, I'd like to see more posts from you (and others) about the real life benefits of GTD. I've posted myself on 4 Reasons You Should GTD but I know I'm only scratching the surface!

What do you think?

Posted by: Paul Gardner at April 7, 2009 08:07 PM

Kelly,

Thank you for this very helpful series. Do you feel that the intuitive approach you mention here is a crucial element of GTD? It's a very different from the approach taken by other 'authorities', who tend to teach priority setting of one kind or another. Relying on my in-the-moment judgment worries me-my procrastinating part might decide what NOT to do! Any tips on how to avoid this, please?

Posted by: Simon Potton at April 13, 2009 03:47 PM

Kelly,

I have a question here about choosing the context. Generally when I am in office, I have more than one context available to me - In office, I am always @COMPUTER, @WEB, @OFFICE, @OFFICE_NETWORK, @PHONE, @TEST_MACHINES. How do I choose context in this case? It happens that this is the repelling point where I get stopped. Please help me.

Dhamodharan.

Posted by: Dhamodharan at April 13, 2009 07:17 PM

Hello Simon,

Yes, the intuitive approach is core to GTD. It's the most natural way we make decisions anyway. The best way I know to avoid procrastination is to have the outcome mean something to me, and the next action to describe a successful step (e.g. make sure it's really your *next* action.)

Kelly

Posted by: Kelly at April 15, 2009 03:40 PM

Hello Dhamodharan,

You can be repelled by the number of lists you have, or what's on them. I'd get clear on that first to know how to make them more attractive to you (perhaps fewer lists, or clearer next actions.)

Hope that helps,
Kelly

Posted by: Kelly at April 15, 2009 03:43 PM