Getting Things Done when you don’t have much time
August 5th, 2012 GTD Times Team - Staff ContributorsCategories | Getting Started | Getting Things Done | GTD Toolbox | Implementation | Inspiration
Peter Drucker said that “most of the tasks of the executive require, for minimum effectiveness, a fairly large quantum of time.” That’s from the Know Thy Time chaper in The Effective Executive, published almost half a century ago.
Sure, every knowledge worker could benefit from having large blocks of time for doing pre-defined work. But the practical reality is that most workers have schedules that are more fragmented than what Drucker might have imagined. When he wrote that book, the workers he was addressing didn’t have cell phones and laptops. They didn’t use air travel for mass transit they way workers do today. They didn’t have Skype meetings with overseas clients outside the 9-5 workday.
GTD to the rescue! If you’ve organized your next actions into contexts that work for you, you’ll find that you can take advantage of small chunks of time to plow through lots of tasks. By organizing with your busy schedule in mind, you’ll be able to use those few minutes here and there to get things done that you would need to get done anyway, at some time. This is not to say you can neglect to schedule those large blocks of time for doing executive tasks. Just be smart by planning for how you’ll use the small windows of time as well.
What can you do with 15 minutes, before your meeting at 11:30?
Exactly. By spending time to decide what is of substance, the inner voice (Jimmy Cricket?) will navigate you from iceflake to iceflake, and you still keep the course.
GTD can be an indespensible luxury to put your mind at ease, but as a toy it’ll just use up time. Think it through, decide and then do.
How I enjoyed the tape. It left me with such a feeling of being empowered, a shift in paradigmes that hasn’t changed.
I very much disagree with this vision it should be necessary to fill up every minute of free time. STOP this nonsense ! Look at people passing by in the streets. Gaze at the sky. Listen to music or a podcast of some cultural station. Don’t let your life be this frantic thing that makes you look like a computer with legs. GTD can be used in what i beleive is the wrong way : to do still more and more and more until you die. And then it can be used to understand what really matters, and to do LESS (David Allen has talked about this more than once), so you have time for all the rest : reading, doing your hobby, spending time with family, in other words, to do “useless” things.