The latest Productive Living newsletter included a great set of questions from David Allen on year end completions.  It’s a great exercise to go through for completing 2009 and setting your intentions and directions for creating 2010.  Here’s a sample of some of those questions:

Completing and remembering 2009

What was your biggest triumph in 2009?
What was the smartest decision you made in 2009?
What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience?
What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009?
What was the most loving service you performed in 2009?

Creating the new year

What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010?
What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010?
What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010?
What would you be most happy about completing in 2010?
What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010?
What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010?

Get more questions…

What do you do to complete the year?

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Your brain is a great place to have ideas, but a terrible place to manage them. -David Allen

A key principle within GTD is creating a system external to your mind–if you want the system to be seamless.  In fact, there’s a good chance if you’re trying to hold more than about 7 things in your mind at once, you’re dropping things all the time.  And guess what?  Your brain doesn’t care if what you dropped was important or not important, urgent or not urgent, about buying bread on the way home from work or solving world hunger.   If you’re trying to balance more than 7 things in there at any given time, something’s gonna drop. [Read more →]

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A computer programmer implementing GTD asked David Allen about projects:

I’m confused about (and I’m sure you are extremely bored with this question, but from the books I couldn’t work out the answer) – how do you size projects?  I’m continually having problems working out what is or isn’t a project – and getting lost in the confusion.

I’m a computer programmer.   I have to design systems and then build them.   A typical “task” of mine will last 6 months – and involve maybe 800 real hours of my own work.   There will be all sorts of things inside that that can be done simultaneously, things that I have to wait for and so on.  Is the whole thing a project?  Or do I break it into individual projects of do the first screen, do the second screen, do the back end?   [Read more →]

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Elle magazine chatted with David Allen. Read some of the timely tips for refreshing your systems.

One item that came up in my sweep was that for weeks I’ve been putting off answering a publicist’s e-mail asking if I’d write about one of his clients—my failure to reply is gnawing at me. My hunch is that the story won’t fly for timing reasons, but somehow I can’t just write back explaining this. Allen gets excited at my predicament: “Is there anything else you need to research or do before you send that e-mail?” Well, I could e-mail my editor to confirm my suspicion about the timing. “Gotcha!” Allen exclaims. “I bet the reason you’ve been avoiding it was that you didn’t fully understand what the next step was—you needed more data. So what do you need to do now?” Write the editor, I say sheepishly. How can something that now seems so obvious have been so weirdly obscure? Read more…

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If you are still struggling trying to get the GTD Weekly Review to become a habit, you’re not alone!  It’s why GTD Connect, David Allen’s online learning center, sends out a Weekly Review reminder email to our members.  It’s a dose of inspiration, sent once a week, looking at a common speed bumps for people with their GTD practice. Here’s a recent one:

Still procrastinating about a bunch of things on your action lists? There are usually one of two reasons for this: (1) they have slowly slipped in importance and interest to you or (2) they aren’t really next actions (so you don’t really know what to do, where, about it).   If (1) give yourself permission to move them to Someday/Maybe.   If (2) then gird your loins and get back to the granularity of real next actions on your lists – not small sub-projects about your stuff.

- David Allen

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This article is a community contribution by John Lewis.  Enjoy!

As a follower of GTD, I am fortunate to receive many things, including the Productive Living newsletter. This particular edition included some “food for thought” about decision making, which I found extremely nutritious!

Information and accuracy

It brought to mind two things that I have often thought, and perhaps there is a link between them.

Firstly, there is a feeling that if we gather enough information about something that the decision can often become obvious. We sometimes even say things like “the decision made itself”!

Secondly, if there is very little to separate two (or more) choices then we often have difficulty in accepting that the inaccuracy of our assessment of the benefit of any choice may be greater than the actual difference between them; as in the story of the donkey which starved because it was unable to decide between two equal sized piles of hay. In other words, either one will do; and next time it might be a good idea to pick the other one so that we learn more about both! [Read more →]

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David Allen answers the timeless question, “What are the first steps in getting organized?”

If by “getting organized” you mean getting relaxed and in control, it actually involves five steps, only one of which is actually the specific “organizing” component.  1) Collect the work. Corral everything that has potential meaning for you. 2) Process the collected work and associated notes. What specifically do they mean in terms of your commitments about them? What can you toss? What are the actions required on what you keep? 3) Organize the results of what you’ve collected and processed into retrievable lists and groupings. For instance, when you’re at a phone you should be able to see all the calls you need to make. 4) Keep things current—which involves a weekly review. What are your outstanding commitments and agreements? What new ones have emerged? 5) Decide what you want to do. Make a choice about how to allocate your resources, and feel comfortable about that decision.

Grab the free article or buy the laminated card set that summarizes these phases as well.

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A new GTD’er asked: Once collected, how do you learn to trust the integrity of the system and not spend a lot of time trying to remember whether you put something down?

David Allen’s reply: Trust comes with consistent use.  The Weekly Review, plus reviewing the appropriate action lists when you have any time that you might able to do any of those actions, are the key.  Even after all these years, I still need to check in every once in a while to ensure that something is on there.  In the early stages, you’re best off just putting it on the list if it occurs to you.  It’s much less psychic pain to insert it twice than to have it slip through the crack.

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Michael (who calls himself a GTDer for two years and counting), wrote to us with this question:

Curious if anyone has any tips/symbols or shortcuts for notetaking. I tend to write circles next to actionable items when I’m taking meeting notes and starring important items, but always looking for a better system.

Here is the tip I shared:

One tip I find useful is to create a separate page at the start of the meeting called “mindsweep” where I collect open items and next actions I create during the meeting.  I often have things on that too that have nothing to do with the meeting. Then, when I leave the meeting, processing the meeting notes is a separate item to handle from the mindsweep page.

Got a tip to share? We’d love to hear what works for you.  Leave a comment or email us at editor@gtdtimes.com.

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Tim, a high school administrator in Utah, sent us this letter about his experience with GTD:

Four years ago, I left a job at a University Research Center and took a job as a High School Administrator.  I went from a relatively relaxed job, to a high stress, high volume experience.  It has been the most challenging and rewarding job I have ever had.  However, I have been highly frustrated with my inability to get on top of things.  There always seemed to be 100 things to do, enough time to do 10 of them, and none of those well.   I really wasn’t getting to anything very important, like the students.  [Read more →]

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