By Sebastian Stadil

Editors Note: This work is by Sebastian Stadil. He attended Ismael Ghalimi’s “Extreme Productivity” Seminar several weeks ago and was kind enough to pen this post comparing the system that Ismael uses with the system that he has been refining for himself. I think it’s fascinating how many iterations people have developed for their personal trusted systems.

Do you have a novel “Trusted System” of your own? Care to share it with GTD’ers everywhere? Write me “editor at GTDtimes dot com” and I’ll post it for the world to see. In fact - I’ll even give a prize to the system that the DavidCo GTD Coaches think is “most creative while still being functional “ I will collect entries for 30 days from today to give folks a chance to write this up. So hurry and send your “most creative while still functional trusted system” write-up in soon.

Last Friday I attended Ismael’s Extreme Productivity Seminar.

I know Ismael somewhat, and I know he always takes the things he does to extremes. He applies David Allen’s GTD quasi religiously, and is very disciplined and organized. I was curious as to his GTD setup, using Salesforce over the specialized tools. No code, and a relational model make for a good framework to work with, I learned.

I read David Allen’s book eight months ago or so, but didn’t apply it. Two weeks ago I gave it another go, and this time used GTD Inbox, a GTD tool based around Gmail. The reasoning behind this is that most tasks (or ‘interrupts’) come from email, and centers around it. Gmail’s threads generally correspond to tasks, and infinite storage coupled with labeling capabilities make Gmail a good framework for tracking tasks and projects.

So I came to Ismael’s Seminar with the intention of comparing his setup with mine.

The comparison made apparent some of the ways in which my setup was lacking: it does not track time or deadlines. Ismael tracks every task that takes him over 2 minutes to complete into his Salesforce GTD framework. Every task has a creation date, and a deadline. These deadlines show up on his calendar. If he is not able to meet a deadline, he changes the due date and the system keeps track of these changes. My setup only labels the attributes Project, Context, Reference, and Status. No time dimension other than the email’s date. I cannot create deadlines other than by duplicating information in my Google Calendar.

However, I have found that there really aren’t that many tasks or projects in my life that have a deadline. To deal with those that do, I can afford to create a date in my calendar for them, or do them straight away.

My setup does have some advantages though. It is much less demanding for life logging: less overhead. Life logging is the process of logging all events in your life into a trusted system. Writing a journal is part of life logging (A complete life log would include minute details on your activities. At what time you sent what email, and to whom; each revision to a document you are preparing; the sites you browsed, and the time you spent on them. Of course, this must reside in a trusted system).

For me, emails become tasks, part a project, in a few clicks (1, plus 1 per label). Creating a new task in Salesforce takes a little more time, and unfortunately passes the threshold where it breaks my concentration. This is a bigger deal than you would think.

GTD Inbox is also free (well, until I donated $50 to the author, Andy Mitchell, who’s a model for responsiveness) and so is Gmail; Salesforce however is quite expensive.

As a result of the seminar I filed a feature request to add deadlines to tasks. I will also improve my dashboard and reports by using Gmail’s RESTful urls: every resource in Gmail is mapped to a url, be it an email, a label, or the result of a search. By using this feature, you can save any view by bookmarking its url. This view shows all emails received from John: https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/from:John. This view shows all automated interrupts (newsletters, friend requests, etc.), which I filter, Label “Review at Night” and archive so they don’t interrupt me. I check this view before going to bed: https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/Review+at+night.

[BIO]
Sebastian Stadil’s LinkedIn profile

*A note about the image: This image comes from Sean Johnson’s blog, The End of the Long Tail

Tags: Getting Things Done, Implementation, Novel Uses of GTD, Training //