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)
December 19, 2007
Getting Back on the Wagon
If you've got a solid personal productivity management practice in place, like GTD, you probably engage in some sort of regular wholistic review of the stuff on your lists and in your system. Without doing this regularly it's hard to feel totally in control and in perspectice about your work and your life. At the David Allen Company, we recommend to do this weekly. Here's a link to a free PDF with information about the recommended steps of the weekly review.
And.. I've got something terrible to admit...
The other day, it took me pretty much a whole day to do my weekly review, because I hadn't done one for over three weeks!!
"What!?" you say, "A David Allen workflow coach missed TWO of his own weekly reviews? Heresy!!"
Yes indeed. It's true. Even a DavidAllen coach can be rather human when it comes to occasionally missing a weekly review. And you know what? The experience of falling off the weekly review wagon and finally getting back on was actually a big eye-opener for me. When I actually caught up and finished the weekly review my mood shifted, my peace-of-mind increased, and even my body felt more vibrant. But only through experiencing that post-weekly-review glow could I really see just how out of sorts I'd been the couple of weeks prior. It's as if I just got a new prescription for eyeglasses and I suddenly realize just how fuzzy everything was without them. The experience also made me realize just how cranky I get if it's been too long since my last weekly review.
And so I encourage you: If you're a student of David Allen's GTD and you've fallen off the wagon of the weekly review, give yourself a break, set aside some time, and get back on the wagon. If you're like me, your holiday season might be a little more in control and a little less cranky.
Posted by mdolan at 07:11 PM | Comments (2)
December 12, 2007
Master of one's own domain
This week I'm coaching four members of a team who are all using Lotus Notes. For months before I arrived they had been experimenting with and using the "Assign to-do" feature which is part of Lotus Notes To-Do's, with which one can essentially create a To-Do and send it via email to land in someone else's email and To-Do list. (there is a similar function in Outlook Tasks as well). But not everyone in the group was loving how it was working out.
The head of the group was interested in using this feature so that he could essentially assign and track all of the requests he sends to his team members in the same step on his own To-Do lists. However, in the practices of GTD, we typically don't recommend using this feature because it essentially ends up adding tasks onto others' To-Do lists without giving them an easy way to fully process it for themselves.
In other words, if I had a task from my boss appear in my to-do list that sounded something like "please take care of the PDG report," that's probably not the way I would articulate my own next action about the PDG report. I would instead process that request into a specific project and/or next action for myself with the specifics of exactly HOW I'm going to take care of that request. My boss wouldn't really know what my actual next physical, visible action needs to be. Only I can define that.
It's much more helpful for me if all of the things on my own next actions and projects lists are created, worded and processed by me, in my own words - so that I'm the master of my own domain, so to speak.
If there are a lot of things on my own next actions lists that I didn't actually put there, my assumption is that I'll start to lose trust in my lists a bit and maybe even be confused when reviewing them.
I ended up recommending that they not use this feature of the software and instead just use other normal means of communication (like emails and conversations) to assign tasks and request actions.
I wonder if anyone out there has found any success using this assigning tasks feature of Outlook or Lotus Notes - and how that has worked with a GTD structure of processing if there was one in your environment.
Posted by mdolan at 06:50 PM | Comments (11)
December 08, 2007
Getting the Water Just Right: The Someday Maybe List
I've noticed a broad theme about GTD, both in my own practice and in the coaching I provide to others: Keeping your GTD system healthy is all about recalibration.
In my own approach, I notice that it helps to always keep one eye on the look-out for how well my system and approach is serving me. Over time, things change in and around me. So I've got to make sure that I regularly recalibrate the agreements I make with myself to fit the environment and situation I'm in.
My experience of it is like an ongoing fine-tuning of the temperature of a shower in a house that has inconsistent plumbing. I've got to recalibrate my system regularly so I don't either burn myself or chill out too much.
If you know anything about the practice of the weekly review, you know that there's a lot of recalibration built in. In my weekly review I not only collect and process all of the stuff I haven't yet processed, but I also take a fresh look at all of the agreements I've made in the past and give myself the chance to change my mind. The weekly review is like the macro-level recalibration - and it's essential to keep things running.
Someday Maybe
One specific example of recalibrating during the weekly review has to do with the Someday Maybe list. I always try to keep a healthy give-and-take between the things on the Someday Maybe list and my Actions and Project lists. The Someday Maybe list is like the release-valve of my commitments. If I'm doing a weekly review and I notice that I'm starting to reach capacity in terms of workload versus energy, it's time to recalibrate and shift some things that were once committed projects into Someday Maybe mode. I can always tell that I need to do this when my overall feeling of relaxed control starts to morph into the beginnings of a slight feeling of anxiety (Yes, even a DavidAllen coach feels anxiety sometimes). I can actually feel it in my body. And when I do, that's an important signal for me to start recalibrating and renegotiating those agreements.
Of course the opposite is true as well. When my schedule and bandwidth start opening up and my energy starts to be available for more commitments, one of the first things I do is hunt on my Someday Maybe list for some juicy bits for which I've been hoping to have time.
Have you ever noticed that when you don't have a lot to do, you do proportionally less with your time? Recalibration is about keeping your commitments at just the right level so that you're not swamping yourself and you're not succumbing to laziness.
Posted by mdolan at 02:10 PM | Comments (1)
