I've been working on putting the time management principles in Getting Things Done (author David Allen) to work, just using very simple folders in Lotus Notes. What I've concluded is that investing in a tool might make a few things easier, but it won't automate the hardest part of implementing Getting Things Done. The hardest part is having the discipline to keep all work items in a trusted place, and to review them regularly!
I created a number of folders, such as the -phone and -online folders David Allen suggested. After a couple of months I find there are really only three that I use: -action, -toread, -waiting.
Five things have been hard for me:
1) remembering to make sure everything I need to work on is in -action. No more yellow stickee notes, or random pieces of paper. If I need to do it, I need to email myself a reminder. On emails where I need to take a next action, I flag the email with a follow up flag, with text on what the next action is, with appropriate priority.. Sometimes I set a timed follow up on the emails in -action. I should use the timed reminders more often than I do. .
2) Anything that goes into -waiting should have a follow up timer on it. I only have about a 50% hit rate on this so far.
3) Moving to-do items out of my inbox, and into -action. In the rush of a busy day, this often falls by the wayside. Just like keeping my kitchen island uncluttered, I find that I have to take the time to clean out my inbox.
4) Remembering to take time to review and plan! I had been attempting to do these every Friday afternoon. I'm concluding I need a little more energy and brainpower than I typically have by the time Friday afternoon rolls around. Plus, meetings inevitably arise to conflict with my scheduled review time. My next tweak is to move my review and plan time to Monday mornings, see if that goes better.
5) My action folder only has about a screen full in it, but that's big enough that I'm having trouble picking out which items are associated with which projects. I'm going to try a variation on this one: I've created subfolders in -action for my 4 major projects, plus one misc folder. Everything must move into one of the subfolders. That way when I decide it's time to focus on my Transformation project, I have one place to look to see what the next action should be on Transformation.
Remarkably, I have NO trouble looking at items that have aged in my -action folder, and deciding I don't need to do them after all. I know that's often a sticking point for people.
In short, the experiment is working well enough that I'm going to keep it running longer.
Beth Benoit | 15 January 2010 05:14:17 PM ET | | Comments (7)
