Too many pages to look at

[clh]

I started out thinking that the tickler file wasn't a good tool for me. Now I'm finding it's the only one I'm consistently using.

I have been using a paper-based system for years, and I prefer it. I am used to having my organizer open to today's calendar page. My NA lists are tabbed at the end of the calendar pages. But I don't look at them. I hate flipping back and forth, and I hate flipping through my NA lists to decide what to do next. This past week, I was feeling overwhelmed, and so I wrote an "immediate NA" list on my Today page. I completed 8/10 NAs. It felt good.

Yet, I know those weren't ALL of my NAs, and there are other things I need to keep on my radar.

I don't even know what my question is. I know that GTD will work for me. Anyone have any tips on how you tweaked your system to work for you?

Thanks!

[pageta]

I'm a paper person as well. I have two suggestions:

First, I do a daily review first thing every morning where I read over all my next action lists and current project notes and I think about which ones I'd like to do today. Even if I never look at my lists over again, I seem to get a lot of those things done.

I also have my next actions in their own section with the page I refer to most in front. So if I was at work, I'd have my work next actions in front, so it would just be a matter of flipping back and forth between the two pages. No big deal. That's the beauty of paper - you aren't locked into alphabetical order for your next action cagetories...you can put them in whatever order you want. My work stuff is always first, errands are always in back (I find them easier that way) and everything else is in the middle.

[Jamie Elis]

It sounds like you have a real good intuitively developed method for staying focused. If it is not an impostion, I am wondering how long your daily paper-based review of projects and n/a takes you? Do you tweak your projects or just review them? How many projects do you have and are they separated by work and home or whatever , and do you just review work related projects on work days? I am not being nosey-I am just trying to work myself into processes that suport my work better.

[andersons]

The first few months of using GTD were like falling in love. The novelty of having everything organized felt great, and my productivity skyrocketed. However, after the novelty of being organized wore off, there were still hundreds of actions on my lists, some of which were difficult and many of which were unpleasant. Continuing to be productive over months and years of your life is like staying married after the "falling in love" phase, when you realize that your spouse is not absolutely perfect all the time.

For me, staying productive required more than just the organization of GTD. I had to learn more about my own motivation and change it. I described this on a thread about procrastination.

Beware of the GTD trap of believing that if you change the way you organize things, you will magically get more things done. Many times, just making a change -- any change -- temporarily increases motivation, but the motivation doesn't last. If you find yourself constantly tweaking your system, and each tweak improves your productivity for a short time but does not last, then you are like the person going from relationship to relationship because she wants that "falling in love" feeling all the time.

However, it is also true that sometimes you can change a tool or habit to solve a real problem. Prioritization on the fly, as advocated by DA, may not work well for you if your lists are too long and if you are typically indecisive. This was true for me, so I use a tool that prioritizes my ToDo list for me. I have over 100 actions on my @Home list right now, but the most important ones are at the top, so it's working fine for me: I like looking at the list, and I'm getting things on it done.

Lastly, remember that preferring something does not mean it actually works well for you. Lots of people who prefer to use paper and post on this forum have major problems actually getting things done. Simply liking your system and your tools can sometimes be helpful but is not always enough. The bottom line is, Does your system really work well for you?

If you don't like looking at your lists each day or don't like reviewing them even when you truly need to, then something is not working for you. You will have to figure out whether you need to change your system, your habits, or your motivation. Or maybe all three.

Why not keep making a daily list for a month or so and see if it continues to work well. If it's still helping you get things done for a solid month, then prioritization is a genuine problem in your system and you will have found one possible solution. If you are either not making the daily list or not getting the things on it done after awhile, then the problem is probably motivation, not organization.

[Desultory]

I'm finding that the things I put onto paper are the ones that get done. As much as possible, I do them FIFO. If I allow myself to pick and choose from a context, then the same items go unchosen forever.

I also limit the number of items on my plate. Things I can't possibly get to today are stashed away in the tickler. After all, what's the point of having a hundred NA's on your visible lists? You'll grow numb to them.

Since I spend way too much time at my desk, I took a cue from a previous post about Mindfulness and divided the desk context into Hi, Med, and Low Energy. That makes it a lot easier to pick something that I actually have the ability to address when I'm looking for the next thing to do.

By the way, Hi Energy is when I do my Cringe-busting.

[TesTeq]

There is an interesting set of GTD related articles by Michael Randall at http://pigpog.com/wiki/index.php/Productivity.

At the beginning he developed his own Palm-PDA-based GTD implementation and now switched to Moleskine-reporter-notebook-based PigPogPDA implementation of "Doing GTD Without Doing GTD".

[andersons]

I'm finding that the things I put onto paper are the ones that get done. As much as possible, I do them FIFO. If I allow myself to pick and choose from a context, then the same items go unchosen forever.

FIFO would be a completely arbitrary order for me. I want to do the most important things first. It doesn't matter to me if less important things go unchosen for awhile.

Maybe I wasn't clear that my lists are prioritized by software. Yes, there are 100 things, but the top 10-20 are the ones I want or need to do today anyway.

I also limit the number of items on my plate. Things I can't possibly get to today are stashed away in the tickler. After all, what's the point of having a hundred NA's on your visible lists? You'll grow numb to them.

The point of having a hundred NAs is so that I don't have to keep moving them from tickler to active, active to tickler, etc. Using a tickler is a means of prioritizing in advance. I don't need to prioritize because the software does that for me, saving me lots of work. The list of 100 items is prioritized. The top 10 items I can see in one eyeful are my most important ones. If I don't want to see the hundred, I simply don't scroll. But I just save myself the trouble of frequent prioritizing via tickler.

Prioritizing via tickler and Someday/Maybe lists also absolutely requires frequent review to keep it working. This is organizational overhead. I have found that using a tool that prioritizes pretty well for me reduces this overhead and greatly reduces the need to review.

I do not go numb to my lists because
1) The most important are at the top anyway, so I know and trust that I don't have to read and re-read the list all day long to keep from missing something important.
2) If there are actions I don't like to see or may be going numb to, I delete them. If I know I "can't" delete them, I reconnect to my purpose for doing them.

[pageta]

It sounds like you have a real good intuitively developed method for staying focused. If it is not an impostion, I am wondering how long your daily paper-based review of projects and n/a takes you? Do you tweak your projects or just review them? How many projects do you have and are they separated by work and home or whatever , and do you just review work related projects on work days? I am not being nosey-I am just trying to work myself into processes that suport my work better.

I would say it takes 15 minutes or less. It's simply a review, with very little tweaking. I review only the lists and projects I know I can/will work on today. So if I'm not running errands, I don't review my errands list.

Basically, as I do this, I think through when and how I will get things done. I look at the hard outline of my day (appointments) and think about what I can get done between each one and kind of make a general outline of my day. There are certain things I do in the morning, the afternoon, and others that simply just need an opportunity regardless of the time of day.

If I'm conscious of things, I find time to do them. It's like the car analogy where you think about a certain car and then all of a sudden you see them all over the place.

I do go back to my list here and there during the day, but mainly it's to check things off or add things as I think of them. My subconsious mind works on the things I'm doing today, and everything else is safely written down so where I can come back to it.

To me, this is the difference between getting things done and not getting things done - that fifteen minutes can increase my productivity fourfold quite easily.

[clh]

Does paper-based really work for me? Yes. Definitely. I have tried both Outlook and a PDA. I get bored with electronic gadgets quickly. I am a tactile person. I love paper in general. I like the way it feels and smells. I love post-it notes. People buy me office supplies for Christmas. So, no paper isn't the problem.

Motivation on the other hand... maybe. I am definitely struggling in that area, and perhaps its coincidence that unmotivation and implementing GTD hit at the same time, so that it looks like GTD is the problem. I will be dealing with my motivation problem in the very near future, and then we'll see what happens.

[Skiptomylue11]

its probably a combination of motivation and just the fact that new things take practice. We all expect this wonderous system to immediately change everything, but it becomes a lot easier with consistently putting time aside using the system.

Fortunately when I started, I had this huge amount of energy excited about this new system that could organize my life. I faultered at times, and there were times where my inbox was not processed for a week, and my tickler was also a week un-used.