What triggers you to act on your action items?

[Conejo23]

How do you know when you need to take action on something?

After several readings of GTD and RFA, it seems to me that in an ideal/pure GTD implementation, few if any tasks would actually have dates attached to them, and that the call to action is either reviewing a project and seeing next actions, or examining a context. Neither of these really work for me.

a quick note: I use OmniFocus as my task management system and I'm pretty happy with it, for the most part.

A good portion of my tasks are date driven. Call someone on a certain date, replace the air filter on a certain date, prepare payroll or a monthly royalty report on a certain date, etc...So I give those completion due dates and have a defined view (perspective) that shows me what is due now/overdue/coming soon (next few days).

Then I use the flag indicator to mark urgencies. So if I only have time to get a few things done that day, the ones with flags are the ones that MUST be accomplished. I have a separate view to show me flagged items by due date.

Another big chunk of tasks for me is responding to clients. When clients email or call me with a request for info or a question, I have a separate project called ‘Clients’, I add the task to that project and don’t bother with a due date and have a separate view to just see those tasks in a focused way.

And then there’s everything else, and that’s the category of stuff I feel like I don’t have a good handle on. The more items I put due dates on, the less I feel like there’s stuff floating in my system that I'm not on top of. But that means I'm now putting dates on things that don’t organically need them, so they’re getting arbitrary ones. And that means when that respective date rolls around, I like at what’s due now and see a mix of things that truly are due now combined with things I could really do whenever I felt like it, that’s kind of confusing. Intuitively, I feel like there’s a better way to handle this.

I’d love to hear if anyone else has had a similar issue in their workflow, and if they’ve successfully addressed it in a way that works for them, what that was.

Thanks.

[Cpu_Modern]

I tried tons of stuff to solve that problem, here's waht works for me:

1. I schedule projects. I always have a Most Important Project, each working day begins with working for a solid block of time on that project.

2. I dedicate blocks of time to contexts. For instance on many saturday mornings I am working solely on home improvement tasks.

3. On my endlessly long @computer list I do "mark" a bunch of NAs. These have to get done first. It doesn't matter if I work longer on each involved project (google this forum for "bookmark method") or if I do "unmarked" NAs. The point is the rythm, mark a few NAs, focus on them, complete them. Define the next bunch. I usually need half a week to complete the marked NAs.

Let me add two thing: a GTD-system will not magically induce self-discipline. That has to come from somewhere else. I found out that bigger clarity on the higher levels motivates me to do the work. You have to "own" your work. A bad job doesn't turn into a good one just because you are doing GTD.

The other thing is this: even if everything is awesome, you have to overcome a certain inertia. That's just physics and I found out you can overcome this quite literally with physiological tricks. For instance I sometimes shout out loud my NA-list like a drill-sergeant. Or I do some push-ups while screaming at me to go the f#*% to work now. I also have a flag in my office which shows me visually if I am "at work" or at 'home.

Sometimes just not doing your work is a message from the sub-consciouss that something is wrong. You are not commited fully because deep inside you know that your plan is crapp.

Hope this helps

[malisa]

Thanks to the OP for the question and to the poster above for some good ideas.

I like the 'Most Important Project' and 'blocks of time' ideas. I will also google the forum for the bookmark method. I know that I need a smaller list because when I look at my big context lists, they seem insurmountable. I've been pulling out a few actions that I feel I can knock out at a time and putting those on a list on the front of my binder. I've thought about highlighting things on my context lists, but then if I didn't finish them and they became less important than other things, I'd be tempted to re-copy my list to 'unhighlight' something. Maybe the bookmark method will be something to help me with this.

[malisa]

The only things coming up when I google "bookmark method" for this forum are our two posts.

[kewms]

Are you doing regular weekly reviews? The purpose of the weekly review is to help you stay on top of things and do this kind of prioritization.

Katherine

[cameron]

How do you know when you need to take action on something?

After several readings of GTD and RFA, it seems to me that in an ideal/pure GTD implementation, few if any tasks would actually have dates attached to them, and that the call to action is either reviewing a project and seeing next actions, or examining a context. Neither of these really work for me.

a quick note: I use OmniFocus as my task management system and I'm pretty happy with it, for the most part.

A good portion of my tasks are date driven. Call someone on a certain date, replace the air filter on a certain date, prepare payroll or a monthly royalty report on a certain date, etc...So I give those completion due dates and have a defined view (perspective) that shows me what is due now/overdue/coming soon (next few days).

Then I use the flag indicator to mark urgencies. So if I only have time to get a few things done that day, the ones with flags are the ones that MUST be accomplished. I have a separate view to show me flagged items by due date.

Another big chunk of tasks for me is responding to clients. When clients email or call me with a request for info or a question, I have a separate project called ‘Clients’, I add the task to that project and don’t bother with a due date and have a separate view to just see those tasks in a focused way.

And then there’s everything else, and that’s the category of stuff I feel like I don’t have a good handle on. The more items I put due dates on, the less I feel like there’s stuff floating in my system that I'm not on top of. But that means I'm now putting dates on things that don’t organically need them, so they’re getting arbitrary ones. And that means when that respective date rolls around, I like at what’s due now and see a mix of things that truly are due now combined with things I could really do whenever I felt like it, that’s kind of confusing. Intuitively, I feel like there’s a better way to handle this.

I’d love to hear if anyone else has had a similar issue in their workflow, and if they’ve successfully addressed it in a way that works for them, what that was.

Thanks.

The calendar is used for all date specific actions

[Cpu_Modern]

Some posts explaining NAs as "bookmarks":
http://www.davidco.com/forum/showpos...71&postcount=9
http://www.davidco.com/forum/showpos...76&postcount=3
http://www.davidco.com/forum/showpos...84&postcount=2

[Conejo23]

Cameron....i disagree that the calendar is used for all date specific actions. For my workflow, a calendar is a place to record events, not tasks. Lunch will Bob on Tuesday, teeth cleaning on Thursday, taking family to the game Saturday night, meeting Monday morning.

Tasks go into my task list. Some have a date dependency, some don’t, but my tasks do not and will not be going into my calendar. So the question, again, is how to manage a task that where some are date driven and some aren’t.

Katherine.....the review is an area where I need to get better. I do periodic reviews, but even then the problem persists. I do the review, I see that I have a few projects with outstanding tasks that deserve and require some attention, and then I engage my day and what I remember from what I just reviewed basically goes out the window. I find I'm not getting much from my review sessions other than to see “yep, those tasks belong to those projects are still there, gotta get to those.”

I’ve developed process so that my needed client responses or urgencies or due now tasks don’t fall through the cracks and they are on my radar in a way I can easily find them, but I have yet to find a process for the rest of it that feels comfortable and will work.

I appreciate the first response to my post, and while those techniques may work for some, they haven’t for me. Although I do love the suggestion that perhaps I have tasks associated with projects that are not staying on my radar for a reason, that I'm not fully committed to the project itself or am resistant to it in some fashion so that I subconsciously instruct myself not to put attention there. That’s entirely possible.

The most important thing I can do for our business is to take exceptional care of our clients and encourage the others in our very small office to do the same. It’s like THAT is my biggest project and it does indeed get proper attention. Then I have a bunch of others that need to get done and we’ll benefit from getting them done but I'm about as enthusiastic about the work of doing them as going to the dentist, things like “finish writing copy for customer referral kit”, or add webpage discussing how we differ from physical therapy. Conceptually, I love those things. Pragmatically, I'm already working 60 hours a week and for me to do them requires giving something else up, usually family/personal time or sleep.

Gonna think on this one some more.

[Conejo23]

just read this at one of the ‘bookmark’ links provided above:

Now, if a next action is just hanging around for weeks... like 'clean the bedroom closet'... In this case, I know I can complete the whole thing in one sitting and in one context, but it's a cringe task. I just don't want to start. So, it gets promoted to a project, and the next action becomes something very, very small; something like 'throw out the dry cleaning bags that are still on clothes that I picked up from the cleaners last week'. It's a two minute task--one I won't mind doing--and it moves things forward. It may even get the juices flowing to the point that I'll actually complete the whole 'clean closet' project.

I love the description of a “cringe task” or project. It’s something I need to do, and it’s a result I want to obtain, but I just am not excited about the DOING of it. Even more, I like the idea of finding some really small thing I can to on that to break inertia and generate at least a little momentum.

Good stuff.

[humblepie]

Cameron....i disagree that the calendar is used for all date specific actions. For my workflow, a calendar is a place to record events, not tasks. Lunch will Bob on Tuesday, teeth cleaning on Thursday, taking family to the game Saturday night, meeting Monday morning.

Tasks go into my task list. Some have a date dependency, some don’t, but my tasks do not and will not be going into my calendar. So the question, again, is how to manage a task that where some are date driven and some aren’t.

Katherine.....the review is an area where I need to get better. I do periodic reviews, but even then the problem persists. I do the review, I see that I have a few projects with outstanding tasks that deserve and require some attention, and then I engage my day and what I remember from what I just reviewed basically goes out the window. I find I'm not getting much from my review sessions other than to see “yep, those tasks belong to those projects are still there, gotta get to those.”

I’ve developed process so that my needed client responses or urgencies or due now tasks don’t fall through the cracks and they are on my radar in a way I can easily find them, but I have yet to find a process for the rest of it that feels comfortable and will work.

I appreciate the first response to my post, and while those techniques may work for some, they haven’t for me. Although I do love the suggestion that perhaps I have tasks associated with projects that are not staying on my radar for a reason, that I'm not fully committed to the project itself or am resistant to it in some fashion so that I subconsciously instruct myself not to put attention there. That’s entirely possible.

The most important thing I can do for our business is to take exceptional care of our clients and encourage the others in our very small office to do the same. It’s like THAT is my biggest project and it does indeed get proper attention. Then I have a bunch of others that need to get done and we’ll benefit from getting them done but I'm about as enthusiastic about the work of doing them as going to the dentist, things like “finish writing copy for customer referral kit”, or add webpage discussing how we differ from physical therapy. Conceptually, I love those things. Pragmatically, I'm already working 60 hours a week and for me to do them requires giving something else up, usually family/personal time or sleep.

Gonna think on this one some more.

i do kept my calendar for time driven events as well. but the main baby is still the task list.