Experiments in Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done is the title of a book by David Allen that teaches skills and systems for working through the long lists of things we all have to do in an ever-more chaotic world. In this post I’m going to talk through how the book and the ideas behind it are changing the way am organised, and what tools I am using and trying out.
If you are looking for a gentle introduction to Getting Things Done, have a listen to Richard Giles’ Gadget Show Podcast interview with David Allen.
This book is a good one. I haven’t read it all yet. So far I find it is sensible and practical and an easy read. It deals with people like you and me as real fallible people with scattered minds and gives concrete things to do to create stress-free productivity.
(Note: in Australia, the book is called the slightly different How To Get Things Done.)
Even before my copy arrived I discovered the rather wonderful weblog called 43 Folders. 43 Folders is named for the number of manila folders to make a 12 month tickler file system. It talks about tools and techniques for implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) systems on a Mac under OS X.
In GTD, it is really important to have a place to record the next actions (ToDo items) that you need to take in a reliable system. You don’t want to be relying on your memory, or on some system that you don’t trust. You want a way to record things that makes it very easy to put things in reliably, and makes it easy to get things out reliably. If you can trust that when you put things in they aren’t lost, and it is easy to put things in, you have the beginnings of a solid ToDo or next actions list.
I’ve adopted a pair of tools to handle this for me. My portable tool of choice is a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards held together with clip and a pen or pencil. This is known as a hipster PDA. It is a very flexible way of quickly writing down things that are easily lost. Once written down, these can be merged later into the master system, or just thrown away when things are done. It works best if you write one item per card. This is so cheap and easy and flexible beyond belief that it is hard to beat.
So that handles the mobile todo system. On the Powerbook I’m using a slight advance from a plain text file. I’m using Keith Martin’s PyGTD, a python script that works on a set of text project files and combines them into a todo.txt file. It uses dates, importance, and urgency among other things to calculate the order of todo items and allows modifications of the todo.txt file to feed back into the project files. Entry is very quick, being simply adding plain text into a project file. Modifications are the same. Very quick. Fast feedback. No mouse clicks.
To enjoy PyGTD you are going to want to be very comfortable in a text editor. I’m using BBEdit to edit the files and activate the PyGTD script via a single key-press, but BBEdit is expensive overkill for this task. Look for another text editor that can easily run scripts.
So that handles the ToDo list side of things. Once you’ve got a system like this running that you can trust, and you can chuck things in easily, you are halfway there. But, my email was getting out of control, so I’ve simplified that as well by adopting some email productivity tips from 43 Folders. The most important thing here is (I find) to turn off automatic email receiving, and only check your mail when you are prepared to process what is coming in. That stops the email mounting up in a discouraging pile automatically all by itself. I feel back in control of my email now.
I’ll report more on how I go here as I get these systems bedded down. So far it feels really good. Also, I’ll report on my list of favourite OS X productivity tools. There are some real gems out there.
To enjoy PyGTD you are going to want to be very comfortable in a text editor. I’m using BBEdit to edit the files and activate the PyGTD script via a single key-press, but BBEdit is expensive overkill for this task. Look for another text editor that can easily run scripts.
You could use TextWrangler.
:-)
Well, exactly. TextWrangler will do the job nicely. And it’s free.
But don’t worry, Rich, BBEdit will feature high on my list of Mac OS X productivity tools. I jusy about live in the thing.
Thanks for a great product, btw.