By Ismael Ghalimi – community contributor

This article describes my attempt at implementing David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done (GTD) methods for personal organization, using a variety of Office 2.0 services. If you have not read David’s book, I respectfully suggest that you do so. If you have but need a quick refresher on the GTD’s terminology and processes, you can download a simple Workflow Diagram from the David Allen Company website.

Workflow Process

According to the GTD, the first decision point in one’s workflow process when receiving new “stuff” is to decide whether or not the item is actionable. This might be the most difficult part of any personal organization method, and there is no fancy tool to help you there, just good judgement based on experience and daily practice of the method.

If the item is not actionable, I trash it, store it as a long-term goal or attach a note to an object, both using Salesforce.com as data repository. Salesforce.com does not have any standard object for goals, therefore I created a custom one. A goal has a long-range timeframe attached to it, which can either be the current year, next year, within five years, within ten years, or within one’s lifetime. A goal with a five years timeframe could be the buying of a house for example. The decision to use a note rather than a goal is based on the fact that a note does not have a timeframe. It’s a simple piece of information that I want to make sure I will be able to retrieve when looking up the object it is attached to. Using Salesforce.com’s relational model, a note can be attached to any object, such as an account, a contact, or whatever custom object you might have built to store some specific piece of information.

If the item is actionable, three options are available:

If multiple steps are required, in a particular sequence, I use a full-blown project management extension to Salesforce.com called DreamTeam, which I featured in a past article. It gives me the ability to manage complex projects through Gantt charts, which is the best way I know to graphically depict complex multistep projects. The reason why goals are called ‘goals’ instead of ‘projects’ is that DreamTeam already uses the term ‘project’, and it is important to make a clear distinction between the two.

If multiple steps are required, but in no particular sequence, I create a goal (same as above) and attach multiple tasks to it. A goal usually has a long-range timeframe but tasks have precise deadlines, and the combination of both makes it easier to manage projects that should be completed within a certain timeframe but with no specific deadline. In other words, each step along the way has fixed deadlines in order to ensure steady progress, but the timeframe is kept open on purpose.

Finally, if only one action is required, I either do it, delegate it, or defer it. I use email to delegate tasks, but I make sure to send such emails from Salesforce.com instead of my regular email client, for two main reasons: first, it attaches a contextual trail to the object the task is related to; second, it allows me to create a follow-up task right after I click on the ‘Send’ button in order to remind me to later ping the person I delegated the task to, within a timeframe that
I can specify. This pretty much ensures that nothing falls off the cracks. When I decide to defer the task instead, I attach a task to the object it is related to, usually with a specific deadline in order to keep things moving.

Last but not least, in cases when I am not sitting in front of a computer equipped with an Internet connection and the item cannot be trashed, I defer the overall item by sending an email to myself through my BlackBerry device. That way, I ensure that nothing is forgotten and that I will process the item as soon as I get access to the Internet. One could use the mobile edition of Salesforce.com to achieve the same purpose, but it only gives access to a limited set of standard objects and no access at all to any custom objects or extensions such as DreamTeam, therefore cannot support the whole workflow process.

Buckets

Here is how I manage the seven primary types of things that the GTD helps you keep track of:

Projects List: Projects are listed in my DreamTeam projects and my goals stored in Salesforce.com. I usually have a lot more goals than projects, mainly for the reason that few projects actually require the precise sequencing of tasks.

Project Support Material: I attach a lot of documents to projects, goals and other objects they relate to such as a sales opportunity, a meeting, or a trip. For managing my traveling, I have created a ‘travel’ custom object in Salesforce.com where I store PDF copies of flight, hotel and car reservations made over the Internet and I use my personal weblog to record and publish reviews of hotels and restaurants. I also use Flickr to share pictures with friends. My ‘travel’ object in Salesforce.com includes departure and return dates, from which I automatically compute a custom link to the corresponding posts on the weblog. Also, the WordPress powered weblog integrates seamlessly with Flickr, therefore everything is connected together without any duplication of information and I can navigate from one application to the other seamlessly.

Calendared Actions and Information: I use Salesforce.com to manage all my events. No Microsoft Outlook, no PDA, just Salesforce.com. I tried to keep it synchronized with my BlackBerry device, but the inability to synchronize over Bluetooth convinced me that it was not worth the effort. When I cannot get access to Salesforce.com through a regular computer, I just connect to it through GPRS with my BlackBerry device. If I go to a place where no GPRS connection is likely to be found, I just email my appointments for the day to my Blackberry email address, so that I can carry a copy with me but no unnecessary email shows up in my regular email inbox.

Next Actions List: I use Salesforce.com’s Task List, which can display tasks within the following categories: ‘Overdue’, ‘Today’, ‘Today + Overdue’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Next 7 Days’, ‘Next 7 Days + Overdue’, ‘This Month’ and ‘All Open’. I spend most of my day using the ‘Today + Overdue’ category and switch to ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Next 7 Days’ toward the end of the day when most of today’s tasks have been completed. Needless to say, because documents can be attached to tasks and related to any object in Salesforce.com, I use the very same Task List as my tickler file.

Waiting For List: I use the same Task List in Salesforce.com as for my next actions.

Reference Material: For information available in digital form and contextually related to objects stored in Salesforce.com, my reference material is managed in the exact same way as my project support material. For information available in digital form but not easily related to objects, I tend to use Gmail as a file repository. I have described my use of Gmail in a previous article and find its searching abilities to be invaluable. For information not available in digital form and that cannot be easily scanned, I create references into Salesforce.com objects. For example, I have created a custom ‘book’ object in Salesforce.com where I store information about books I read and attach related PDF summaries that I get from Soundview. I also create custom links to Amazon, using the books ASIN and QID numbers, 0142000280 and 1116101749 respectively for the paperback edition of Getting Things Done. Finally, I link a book record in Salesforce.com to the review I might write about it on one of my weblogs. Same as for travels, all pieces get linked to each other without any duplication, making it very easy to manage and share relevant information through the right communication channels.

Someday/Maybe List: Goals custom object in Salesforce.com as described above.

Random Project Thinking

For random project thinking, I am starting to make extensive use of social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us or Diigo, as described in a previous article. After some practice, I actually believe that the networking thinking enabled by tags and bundles as defined by del.icio.us is more effective for brainstorming than the hierarchical thinking enabled by outlining tools such as Microsoft Word or OmniOutliner (for Mac users). Nevertheless, I really wish that a full fledged mind mapping tool such as Mindjet’s MindManager was available as a web application. I guess I will have to wait a little bit more for this.

Conclusion

My application of the Getting Things Done methodology through Office 2.0 services is only nine months old and I have a lot more to learn and experiment with. Nevertheless, I found David’s approach so effective that I really made it a way of work. That being said, for all the bells and whistles offered by web applications or other software tools, nothing will ever replace some key principles that David Allen never forget to emphasize: the power of the collection habit, the power of the next-action decision and the power of outcome focusing. So feel free to use some of my tricks and the tools that work best for you, but never lose sight of the end goal, which for me is to get more time to do all other important things in life, such as taking care of my loved ones. In fact, that’s what I’m going to do right now.

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David Allen recently spoke with the Christian Science Monitor as part of an article they’ve published about the continuing loss of productive time that executives face as digital demands and distractions pile on. The level of interruptions, distractions, and pressures is creating the human equivalent of something techies call “thrashing” which in computer speak is where you’ve asked a computer to do too many different tasks at the same time and as a result performance slows to a crawl as its use of the hard drive becomes very inefficient.

Executive Thrashing: For the harried executive trying to finish off an important proposal while emails ding on her desktop as they pile up one after the other, meanwhile, her DND light may be on but the visible voice mail count on the digital display of her office phone increases her stress level as she realizes she’s falling further and further behind. The cell phone vibrating to indicate the fifth new SMS message in the last 30 minutes isn’t helping any more than her administrative assistant who alternates between using the intercom and barging in her closed office door to keep her informed of things that he should handle without the executive’s oversight.

From the article, David Wertheimer, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California says that such intense distractions are proving seriously harmful to our productivity and effectiveness.

“I see the American worker becoming less and less productive,” says Mr. Wertheimer. “As workplaces get flooded with digital demands, such as constant e-mails and nonstop information, we are in danger of becoming a third-world-style economy, where much movement takes place but little actual effective work is being done.”

And you wonder why the quality of corporate communications is going into the toilet? People ask me why I’m such a night owl and appear to only sleep during the day. It’s simple, I’m a writer but that’s a job I can only do uninterrupted – I can’t manage to secure uninterrupted time except in the middle of the night.

David Allen is one of the few people that identified these issues early and developed tools and techniques to combat the concentration and creativity destroying chaos that threatens our very ability to do our jobs at our potential. It is for this reason that GTD has become so prominent in the high pressure world of Silicon Valley – particularly among many people who are, arguably, among the most effective in their respective positions.

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You’ve heard the old saying, “It’s who you know,” and probably the modern variant on it, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” I’m here to tell you it’s not that, either. A big address book or an even bigger fan base is worth next to nothing unless those people will do one thing: take action on your behalf.

It’s not your network itself that has value for you, it’s your ability to call your network into action.

That’s a pretty broad concept. What does it mean in practical terms?

Let’s take a simple example: how many people do you know who would loan you a dollar? $10? $100? $1,000? As the dollar amount goes up, the number goes down, of course, not just based on the ability of the people to take that action, but their willingness to do so based on the strength of their relationship with you. Simply put, how well do they have to know you in order to take a particular action on your behalf?

That point is the “action threshold”.

If you build a “network” of thousands of “friends” or “connections”, the vast majority of them are going to be very weak relationships. Frankly, you’re lucky if they even recognize your name. How likely do you think they are to take action on your behalf? In fact, with more and more “noise” being generated in the social media world – Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. – it becomes more and more difficult to even get people to take the most trivial of actions, like replying to a message on Twitter or commenting on a blog post. How much more difficult is it to get people to do something of real value?

Given a limited amount of time to spend building relationships, the more people you try to meet and maintain relationships with, the weaker they will be, on average. I’m not suggesting you should build just a small, close circle of friends, but that you consider whether going for raw numbers is really the most effective use of your time. If a relationship isn’t actionable, how valuable is it, really?

The easiest way to build stronger relationships – the kind of relationships that get things done – is by taking some of those “above the threshold” actions for others yourself, by helping others get things done. Here are some ideas on ways to create real value for people via social media:

• Instead of leaving a dozen or so blog comments, write one guest blog post for a friend.
• Instead of leaving just an opinion on several questions on LinkedIn, spend an hour with the person who needs help with a spreadsheet (I did this one last Sunday).
• Instead of posting on Twitter about what you had for lunch, post a review of a new book or product of one of your associates.
• Instead of browsing a couple of forums, spend half an hour calling one of your contacts and discussing with them.
• Instead of inviting a dozen more people to your network on LinkedIn, write a recommendation for someone already in it.

Social media is a powerful tool for building your network, and a powerful network can help you get all kinds of thing done in your business and your life. But don’t make the mistake of confusing activity with progress. Invest your time in relationships in a way that will yield real returns, not just the illusion of results.

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