One of our challenges in implementing GTD across our organization was to change our people’s habit of keeping stuff in their heads and get them to start actually using an external tool for collection. As you might imagine, if there were leaks in “Collect” process we simply couldn’t go ahead with the other stages of Gaining Control. Of course change always happens slowly. So we continuously stressed the benefits of collecting in an external system at our Weekly GTD Training meetings and I would occasionally send motivational reminder emails, like the one below:

Hi everybody,

A reminder to all to collect 100%. Currently as I’m sitting at my
desk, I see John on the phone, Ram on the phone and & Steve
having a discussion with Omer, but NOBODY’s
collecting. Even if you feel, “oh C’mon, have we got to collect this too,
but this is nothing important”, please do so. Only if we over-collect, for the
sake of collecting only, shall it become a habit. Once it becomes a
habit then we’ll start collecting the really useful stuff.

Take care everybody & All the best,
Arif

I admit I was going through quite an over-enthusiastic GTD Phase and was highly motivated to have a team around me that was GTD ready. But I was confident that it was a change for the better that would appreciated by all once we get there.
Well, of all the measures we have taken to fire up everybody to collect, the one that was most appreciated was when we designed a personalized pocket-note-taking pad for ourselves. After all David Allen does say that one of the best way to charge yourself to implement GTD is to get some cool gear. If you really have to collect always, you’ve got to have the tools around you to do so. I had experimented with several note-taking pads, including the David Allen Official Note pad that comes with his Note-taker Wallet, but none of them seemed just right. For some either the size was too small, or it was not too easy to tear off a page once you had completed jotting down what you needed to, none of them had a cool snazzy design.
Our criteria of a good note-taker wallet was:

1. It had to look good. So good that it mad a style statement. The user’s gotta feel like keeping it with him always and whipping it out when it came time to collect something.

2. The size had to be small enough to carry in your pocket, yet large enough to fit a mind map in there if you needed to.

3. One should be able to rip the paper out really easily once he’s captured something. Most of the note-pads I had seen were either spiral bound or micro-perforated. I’ve experienced that the spiral bound notepads, don’t tear off really easily when there are too few pages left in the pad. And the micro-perforated ones need you to hold the upper section of the notepad in one hand so that you can left the bottom portion of the page and tear it off.

4. The pages should not be ruled. So if anybody wants to draw something e.g. a route-map, mind map or an engineering drawing (we are a Construction Company), it would be really simple to do so

So after very intensive R&D we arrived at our first prototype. Ta-da:

The Design is something that everyone appreciated, even Leslie Boyer Harradine (Official David Allen Trainer) complemented us on it when she was down here.

Well there you have it. We first thought we’d put these notepads up for sale to the GTD community, but then since that was not really priority, we said, let’s just have it for in-house use. Anyway, Feel free to copy any of these to make your own personalized Capture Tool. Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And if you do implement these, please do post what sort of reactions you have from the people using them. I eventually see this being like a trademark, that all Vakil Housing employees carry this particular brand and style of notepad with them.

This is the Second Installment in the series of Posts for Rolling out GTD at Vakil Housing. You can see, the first post in the series here.

Tags: Gear, Implementation, Inspiration //