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February 27, 2008

Getting the Gunk Out

About half of the clients I work with fall into the category of people who have implemented the practices of GTD on their own, using Getting Things Done, by David Allen as their guide, but have realized that its not yet quite working as smoothly or as effortlessly as they would like. They've likely already had big breakthroughs in some area of productivity, but still have some key missing links to get to the next level. Most of my work as a coach in these situations is to uncover where the "gunk" is in my clients' systems. Usually, somewhere somehow there are elements of their GTD practice that are misfiring and dragging down the positive effects of the rest of their system.

Here are my top ten examples of gunk, with the most pernicious last, which when ungunked tend to unlock the power of David Allen's GTD:

10. No Trusted Place for Reference
For those of you who seem to always have piles and piles of stuff covering all of the surfaces of your office, pay heed. Sometimes the biggest impediment to seeing the surface of your desk is that you just plain don't have a simple, trusted landing place to put papers, documents and materials that qualify as reference. Make sure you've got at least a couple of filing cabinets with ample room for the reference materials you haven't yet filed. Clean out the old files about once a year to keep your files fresh and clear of junk. Try to make it as easy as physically possible to create a new file and get it into into your reference system.

9. Too Many or Not Enough Due Dates
The rule of thumb here is to be selective about which actions and projects actually deserve due dates and which don't. If you give everything a due date, you may not be clear while reviewing your system which ones where the hard due dates and which were just "wanna due" dates. If you give nothing a due date, you may be missing the boat on some critical work. Find the right balance for yourself.

8. Not Enough Doing Time
Often I see folks who are ravenous about defining their work and processing their stuff, but they have a difficult time actually getting their important work done when it really needs to get done. If this sounds familiar, take control of your own calendared commitments and set aside regular blocks of DOING time. It isn't going to happen on it's own.

7. Mixing up Reference with Action
Make sure to keep your action lists about just that and only that - Action. I see so many lists that are basically a mix between reference, notes, and actions. If you're committed to taking an action, great! Put it on an action list. If what you've got is information that is interesting and may be useful down the line, organize it with other similar reference and keep it from gunking-up your action lists. For instance, if you're on Outlook, use the Notes part of the software for your reference. If you're on Lotus Notes, pull up the Personal Journal database and do the same.

6. Doing GTD Half-Way
I often see GTD systems that are essentially used as backup to-do lists. In other words, if you find yourself keeping the really important next actions in your head, or you carry around that set of 4-5 post-it note reminders and refuse to actually process them into your main lists, you suffer from this form of gunk. You don't yet fully trust your GTD lists, so you use other means to track the real meaty stuff. As David so appropriately puts it, "the bad news is that GTD is fundamentally an all or nothing game." Either everything is in there and your trust it, or its not and you don't.

5. Not Enough Processing Time
The refrain I often hear from folks who fall into this category is that "I don't have time to do all that processing." Remember, defining your work IS work too - maybe the most important work. You're going to have to eventually decide what to do about that stack of papers or those 120 emails, why not make the time to process and decide about it earlier rather than later so that you can do it with grace and ease, not when it's blowing up in your face.

4. The "Everything is Important" Syndrome
You cannot do everything. Period. Learning when and how to say no with clarity and certainty is a competence that happens on the way to GTD blackbelt. In order to do so, it's very helpful to clarify and regularly review all of the higher horizons of focus within which you have agreements with yourself and other people. For example, if you are really clear what your job description is and isn't, you'll have a much easier time gracefully declining all of those "interesting but not relevant" opportunities that come up. Get clear about your higher-level agreements and learn to say no to things that aren't aligned.

3. Next Actions That Aren't Physical and Visible
This type of gunk is hard to see if you're in it. An action like, "fix kitchen cabinet" may seem really clear and actionable to you. But if the actual physical next action to get that done is actually "go to hardware store to pick out new hardware for cabinet," than I dare say you'll probably be rather unsuccessful at fixing it unless you have a stroke of amazing intuition next time you're driving past the hardware store. The point here is to always make sure that the actions on your list are clear, unambiguous, doable, next physical, visible actions. When defining your next actions, keep asking yourself "how?" until you identify the real physical next action. If your lists are filled with actual next actions, your poor psyche won't have to essentially reprocess everything every time you review your lists. All you'll have to do is choose.

2. No Project List
Even if you're great at identifying and organizing next actions, if you don't have a robust and working project list you will likely drop some big balls along the way. The project list is meant to be the place where you track all of those outcomes to which you are committed which will take more than one next action to accomplish. Every project should have at least one next action or calendared action - or else it's not in motion. And the weekly review is the time to review and take care of the project list.

1. Non-Existent Weekly Reviews
This is the gunkiest gunk of them all. So gunky that the less you do your weekly reviews, the more gunky your system gets. If you have found that your weekly reviews are turning into monthly or quarterly reviews, get back on that wagon and revive this healthy habit. Give yourself the gift of a regular, holistic review of all of your commitments, projects, and actions. There's no better way to keep yourself in control and in perspective. And the kicker is that if you actually do them about once a week, you can zip through them much more quickly and painlessly than if you wait weeks and weeks.

What's your experience of "gunk" in your own practices of GTD? What breakthroughs have you had in ungunking your system? What did I miss? Please join in the conversation. The more, the merrier.

Posted by mdolan at 02:46 PM | Comments (7)

February 03, 2008

Weekly Review - new product

As a follow-up to my last post, I wanted to let you know about our new 3-CD-set called "GTD - Weekly Review." I was just on a long cross-country plane ride and listened to the entire thing - and I can enthusiastically recommend it for anyone who wants to take their weekly review to the next level (or for that matter, to any level!).

In the three CDs, David Allen leads a great conversation of how-to's, perspectives, and real-life stories about the weekly review with Marian Bateman, our VP of Business Development, and Meg Edwards, our Director of TeleCoaching Business Development.

We're very excited about this product. If you end up buying it I'd love to hear any feedback you have.

Posted by mdolan at 07:43 PM | Comments (2)