Kelly has more than 15 years of experience working in the field of workflow and personal management systems. She has held key positions at Time/Design, Productivity Development Group, and Actioneer, and has extensive experience working closely with David Allen and the GTD methodology in a wide range of client environments and applications. She holds a degree in Business and lives with her husband John in Ojai, California.
Having a trusted reminder system is a critical success factor for GTD. Given GTD is really an approach that is tool agnostic, nearly any tool will work as long as you have the right ingredients.
I laughed when I read a blog recently where someone tried swiping at GTD saying that “GTD is for techies only.” David Allen’s roots in working this methodology, as well as my own, come from the paper planner world. You can’t get much more low-tech than that. In fact, some of the most elegant and accessible lists I’ve seen are paper ones. Sure, there’s the rewrite factor of paper, but electronic list managers have the “over-featured” trap to watch out for. There are pros and cons to both. I say, go with what works best for you.
Some of the most technically savvy people I know manage their lists on paper to shift their consciousness away from all of their electronic input. It’s a fantastic pattern interrupt to switch over to a paper list when you stand in front of a fire hose of email and the Internet all day long. There’s also almost a zero learning curve with a paper system. And, if you’re building it yourself from blank paper, you have a ton of flexibility on what it looks like.
So for any of you looking for a hard copy GTD system, with ingredients you can likely find around in your house or office, here’s what to do:
1. Go to your graveyard of old 3-ring binders (every company has one!) and find one you like.
2. Find some divider tabs (if you can’t find some, Post-it notes or flags will work to delineate each section.)
3. Grab a stack of blank paper from your copier or supply closet and hole punch it into the binder.
4. Download this free article on Setting up a Paper Organizer from the GTD store and assemble the sections.
5. Populate the lists with your complete inventory.
If you can’t find all those supplies at hand, even buying them from your local stationary supply store would only run about $6. Could you spend more than $6? Sure. You could really trick it out with a leather binder and high-quality paper. If you’re choosing one of the many web-based electronic systems out there, you’ll want to make it accessible from anywhere–especially when you’re offline. This kind of paper system would work well if you’re doing a hybrid of digital and paper. For example, electronic lists could be your home-base, but you print key lists to a binder for easy access and portability.
Next time you walk into a meeting, notice how many people have a paper lists or printed calendar with them. It’s more common than you think. If it’s your style to do things on paper, do yourself a favor and create a great hard copy system.
By Kelly Forrister
I know there are lots of great shared calendar solutions on the Web, but I still favor Palm Desktop over anything else. It’s free and easy to use. I recommend it to people all the time who are looking for a good, bullet-proof list manager for GTD, whether they use a Palm handheld or not. You can download a Mac or Windows version from http://www.palm.com/us/support/palmdesktop.html
An easy way my husband and I have found to share my Palm Desktop calendar (Windows version) is for me to send him the datebook files about once a week. Then, he has access to my full calendar on his laptop.
Here’s how to do this: [Read more →]
One of the perplexing things I run across in presenting GTD classes is people who want to defend their lack of system as taking less time and effort than the “work” it would take to maintain a system (GTD or otherwise). There are books out now about how organizing is a waste of time because it takes too much time. I do agree, to a point, that spending too much time organizing can be ineffective, but ANY system–and even lack of one–takes work and time. Why not go for the path of least resistance?
Leaving things undecided and stacked in amorphous blobs of stuff–because it would take too much time to decide a next action and put it in a trusted place–is a guarantee to have to reassess, reprocess and redecide what that thing means. I don’t get it. With so many people complaining that they are too busy to maintain things like action lists, how can they afford to NOT have one? If it’s coming in to you, you’re going to handle it at some point. Why not handle it with as little effort as possible when it first shows up?
Believe me, if I could get away with not managing lists and be as effective, I would do it in a heartbeat. Over the years I’ve tried to cut corners in whatever way I can so that the maintenance of all this doesn’t outweigh the benefit of doing. I’m inherently lazy. I don’t maintain lists because I love spending the time doing that. I maintain the lists because it’s faster and easier for me than not having any system at all.
If I can decide my action on an email when it first shows up, organize it in a place other than In, and put that action reminder in a place I know I’ll see, that’s about 10 times faster for me than leaving it undecided, and having it snap at my ankles every time I look at my Inbox–clamoring for my attention with the 200 other actions I also need to handle.
Why do people resist having a system? I’m curious to hear from the GTD community on this one.
