Refining your GTD Process
blogProblem: How can I have a good GTD system when my work and home life are so separate?
Earlier this month I began to feel incredibly overwhelmed. I had a load of projects on the go, I was buying a house, learning to drive, trying to keep a social life and generally feeling incredibly ineffective. My GTD system, on Tracks, was full of stale items and it was taking me too much time to update. Something had to be done – if I was ever going to get something done. I decided that I’d have to start again and put my system back together bit by bit.
Since I have been working 9-5 in an office, my system has been ruptured down the middle – work on one side, home on the other. All my project support material was on my Voodoopad (VP) at home, completely inaccessible to my work PC. It became clear to me that if I was going to have a completely water-tight system I would have to join the system together, it was costing me too much mental ram cursing at myself for not being able to look at my VP.
Thankfully, online apps are rapidly maturing. The Google suite was my first stop and is the perfect place for collaborative documents, but it doesn’t have wiki functionality and I can’t wait for jotspot. So I turned to Zoho, whose wiki is pretty good. You can set it to be private – which is essential for me – and fairly quickly link between pages (though, alas, no VP-style auto-linking).
Tracks — or at least my version — currently lacks support for ticklers, it is a pain to edit/create projects, no inbox, and the interface is somewhat overwhelming. Far better, in my opinion, is Vitalist, which is where I’ve moved all my next actions and ticklers.
This kind of technological assistance is all very well, but it is worthless if you don’t also review your principles and processes — your project management requirements, your daily processes and your daily/weekly reviews. For me, this meant having a long hard think about the nature of life.
Life is made up of projects and processes. Projects are finite, processes carry on indefinitely. Processes include: doing GTD, weekly shopping, cleaning, keeping on top of finances, going to work, setting targets and such like. For all of these things, GTD has the weekly review. The weekly review identifies anything that needs to be done in these areas on a weekly basis. Used in combination with a calendar (which allows for regular items like the review and cleaning and shopping to be placed on your hard landscape), you can more or less get away without thinking about them at all!
Projects are self-contained entities. They are begun for a purpose and they have a specific outcome. They can be as small as a few actions or as big as a hundred sub-projects. Indeed, reducing project size is one major way of increasing the amount of things that one gets done. Allowing for clarity and focus. In Project Management terms, projects are constrained by time, scope and money. I wish I had know about all this when I was working freelance.
To keep on top of projects, it helps to have natural processes of reviewing that will allow you do keep on top of things. For me, this means to make sure that before leaving work I do a daily review. A fast mindsweep, making sure there are next actions for each active project and that I have processed all inbox/notebook items. This should take a maximum of 1/2 hour, but the benefits are massive. Without daily processing, the mental crud can soon build up. Sure, you don’t want to be spending all your time updating the system, but if the system is lagging and belching out problems, this half an hour is nothing. Without clear goals and next actions you are susceptible to procrastination and bad habit. It will save time in the long run.
Even more important in the weekly review is where I identify the projects that are active for the forthcoming week. Put everything else into folders, check everything, make sure that the next actions are correctly worded, with proper verbs etc. Doing my checklist:
* Clear mind of nagging thoughts
* Ensure that goals are up to date
* Review each active Project:
* Project still has value?
* Project still on course?
* Are next actions defined?
* Review pending projects list: does anything need to become active for next week?
* make sure there are outcomes listed
* Check that filing folder is in order and up to date
* Check that calendar is up to date (check last week)
* Process all email
* Go through the List for things coming up this week
* Are there any calls/letters etc to make?
* Update finances
* Process all notes and pieces of paper
* Update Computer
* Are there any errands I need to make?
* Make out shopping list
* Check that current actions are up to date
Once that’s done, one is absolutely raring to go. No entropy, no procrastination, just pure productivity.