There’s a reason why millions of people around the world swear that Getting Things Done changed their lives. While strict GTD isn’t for everyone, you’re bound to pick up a habit or two that will help you worry less and do more. Everyone interested in being less stressed and more productive should try it at least once. This way, when you’re ready to start the task or project, you’ll have all of the information you need close at hand. Your inbox is only used to collect the chaos of your thoughts in order to get them off your mind. Some very specific but seemingly mundane behaviors, when applied, produce the capacity to exist in a kind of sophisticated spontaneity, which, in my experience, is a key element to a successful life.
- An outline lets you break complex tasks or projects into smaller, more manageable bits and see all the moving parts easily.
- If you’ve answered YES to all these questions, then you should complete the task immediately.
- While strict GTD isn’t for everyone, you’re bound to pick up a habit or two that will help you worry less and do more.
- It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze, and improve.
- Perhaps the most crucial aspect of any productivity technique is the precise step between think and do.
Other contexts you could use include the time you have available, how much energy you have, or what priority an item has. Most of us are not our own bosses, and therefore lack the ability to drastically overhaul the structure of our work obligations, but in Mann’s current setup there’s a glimpse of what might help. A way, that is, to preserve Drucker’s essential autonomy while sidestepping the uncontrollable overload that this autonomy can accidentally trigger. This vision is appealing, but it cannot be realized by individual actions alone.
Do an initial mind sweep
One approach that has consistently worked for me is the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology by David Allen. When you first start using GTD, you should do a brain dump of all the things that are on your mind or scattered around your life. Write down everything you need to or want to do, anything that’s been on your mind over the last few days or weeks.
For example, if you need to finish writing a blog post but are waiting on your editor to get you feedback on your last draft. Identify these tasks by tagging them with the label “@waiting_for”. Keep @waiting_for gtd system tasks organized inside the projects their related to, or inside the One-Off Tasks project if they’re unrelated to other tasks. Add as much information as you can to save you time puzzling over it later.
The first thing to ask is ‘Is it actionable?’
Any tasks with a date prior to today are considered “expired.” Each morning, go through the expired tasks and either delete them if they’re no longer relevant, or migrate them. When you migrate a task, it gets a new due date of one week from today. (See where the name comes from now?) You can only ever migrate tasks to the date one week from today.
With your project lists in place and your tasks sorted, you’re now ready to tackle contexts. In GTD, contexts identify tools, places, or people that you require to complete a given task. In other words, contexts allow you to focus on what you can actually get completed given your current circumstances. For example, if you are at your office, you don’t want to waste time sorting out all the next actions you have at home. As part of this series of articles, I’m going to clarify some of these non-obvious aspects by answering common questions about GTD and discussing how different applications implement the methodology. We will cover important topics such as Tickler File, contexts (action lists), the concept of “Agenda” and the main problems users may encounter when using task management applications.