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August 30, 2008

Are you smarter than a kindergartener?

If you know anything about practicing GTD you know that a part of the process involves creating various lists for yourself so that you can easily add to, review, and retrieve information about all of the commitments you've made in your world. In his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen recommends creating various action lists, a "waiting for" list and a project list.

Here's a simple but useful trick that I often share with my clients: When you're in the midst of processing your inbox, defining your actions and projects, pretend that you're writing them for a kindergartener. In other words define them so clearly that a 5-year-old could understand what you mean. Include all the meaning you need to include so that later on - a week or a month later - you don't have to spend any mental energy decoding your own list.

This may seem like overkill to some. But you'd be surprised how many clients I've seen add actions to their lists like "draft memo for meeting" only to be completely befuddled a few days later when they have to try to remember "what meeting? what memo?" as they review that task among a list of 60 other similarly-worded actions.

I've also seen another form of this lack of clarity occur when a client assumes that, in service of efficiency, they should only define an action using keywords without context or action verbs. For instance, "Memo - department meeting - code 902." This, of course, can be equally befuddling later on when reviewing the list.

This omission of clarity happens because in the moment of processing your stuff it can seem totally obvious what the next action is, so the temptation of leaving out meaningful context or explanation is quite strong, especially if you're moving quickly. Just remember that you're not that smart. You can't remember everything. In a way, that's the point of GTD: get it out of your head into your trusted system.

So, for instance, that vague "memo" action above might be better articulated as "draft policy memo for Aug 1st staff meeting," and might further include a few keywords in the notes area of the task (in Outlook, for example) to remind you about topics that you want to include in that memo.

Remember, the reason you keep lists is to capture your thinking so that you don't have to think so much later. Just slow down a little bit while you're processing so that you can speed up when you're reviewing and choosing things to do from your lists.

Posted by mdolan at 10:24 AM | Comments (2)

August 18, 2008

The inbox: your loading dock of raw materials

If you are somewhat new to GTD and you are interested in implementing the principles in Getting Things Done, make sure that you actually get and use a magical little device called the inbox.

If you've read the book or been to a seminar, you know that the first phase of successfully managing your workflow is to collect whatever you've got your attention on. The basic principle of collecting is that you'll have a heck of an easier time managing an action or project to completion if you get it out of your head and into an objective trusted system outside of yourself. Otherwise, the thought or promise or commitment will just keep spinning inside your psyche, yelling for attention and draining your energy. If you've ever watched a GTD aficionado in action you've probably noticed them jotting occasional notes to themselves in the middle of meetings or in the middle of nowhere. Then, when they have the chance they spend some time to process what those notes really mean and determine what actions, if any, they are now committed to regarding what they've collected.

Think about GTD as an approach for successfully managing all of the agreements you have with yourself and others. In this approach, collecting and processing are the steps in which the agreements get manufactured. When you process something you've collected and actually define a new commitment, you literally create something out of nothing. You now have a future outcome where before there was nothing. Think about your actual physical inbox as one of the key loading docks for the raw materials that may become your commitments. If you don't actually use an inbox in this way, essentially your whole office, home, and/or psyche will become your inbox - and that can get awfully messy.

In the trenches of today's knowledge workers I've seen many variations on the concept of the in-box. For some, the in-box is a place where other people drop things off - like memos, reports, and mail. For others an inbox is where they keep all of their work-in-progress until they have time to do it. Still others have no idea why they'd even want to have a box called In anywhere near their desk.

Yes, the email and voice-mail inbox IS automatically filling up for us every day - so those are difficult collection places to miss. But remember that your physical inbox (or in-folder while you're traveling) can actually be one of the most important parts of your GTD system. Yes, it's a place for others to drop stuff for you. But more importantly, it's a place for you to drop all your own meeting notes, notes to self, and random stuff you haven't quite figured out until you've got a bit of processing time to make sense of it all and make some new agreements.

I'm curious: what's your favorite collection tool and how exactly do you use it?

Posted by mdolan at 02:28 PM | Comments (7)