Kelly Forrister is a Senior Coach & Presenter. She also runs and regularly contributes to GTD Connect, the online learning center for the David Allen Company. She’s worked with David Allen for nearly 20 years and is a fluent geek with GTD and technology.
If you look back over the last month, what got in the way of you being more productive? What slowed you down when you were just hitting your stride? Interruptions? Others lack of planning? Untrusted systems?
What are your productivity speed bumps?
I was leading a GTD class recently, and one of the participants was asking me how to be better at delegating. In my experience, issues with delegation typically come down to some common factors:
My Agenda and Waiting For lists are often my longest lists. I have Agendas for all of the key people I meet with or report to on a regular basis. My Waiting For list (currently 68 items) tracks anything and everything I may want to rein back in at some point. To me, these lists are like fishing lines off a boat and I just need trusted and easy ways to reel things back in when I need them.
How well do you handle delegation? Do you ever hesitate to delegate something to others? If so, why?
Kelly Forrister is a senior coach and presenter with the David Allen Company
One of the things that helps me stay current with my GTD system and not have the Weekly Review feel like a major renovation, is that I review my Next Actions lists whenever I feel like it and as often as I can. Whenever I coach people who have slipped out of regular reviews (call it daily quick scans and weekly thorough reviews) I see them start to triage all of the “important stuff” onto their Calendar, which they know they will look at. Then the calendar becomes an fuzzy merge of the stuff that really belongs on the calendar (time-specific and day-specific) with the “stuff-I-put-on-the-calendar-so-it-doesn’t-get-lost-on-a-list.” Inevitably, they find themselves carrying things over from day to day just to keep it alive.
Do you need to review every list every day? Of course not. But use those weird windows of time that show up in your day to pop over to a list for a little visit. You might start to find it’s like meeting up with a good friend who is happy to see you.
One of the most common questions we hear from GTDers is which list manager they should use. You’ve heard from us on this in loads of webinars, podcasts, articles and blog posts. We thought we would pass along a fellow GTDers comment to someone on our Forums, which we thought was great advice, especially for someone new to GTD:
Buy the new GTD Implementation Guide in PDF, and David’s first book. Read them carefully and use paper for a few weeks. You will become a far-better informed shopper for any digital solution for managing lists. - rdgeorge
David’s first book, Getting Things Done
Coach Kelly Forrister’s article on How to Choose a GTD System
We are pleased to announce the release of a resource that many of you have been asking for: a GTD & BlackBerry Guide. A few of us are now on BlackBerry as our portable solution and we put together a Guide on the best GTD tips, tricks, and practices for making your BlackBerry rock for GTD.
It’s chock-full of 45 pages of coaching advice on getting the most out of shortcuts, Email, Tasks, the Calendar and MemoPad using the built-in features of a BlackBerry (which means you won’t find any requirements of any 3rd-party software to buy to apply what’s in the Guide.)
Buy the Guide now (only $10 for a PDF)
So…the next question that’s been pouring into our customer service department today: What about a GTD Guide for iPhone users? [Read more →]
Question: I listened to your Webinar on Procrastination (you can find this Webinar on GTD Connect, our online learning center) and have found that I have trouble starting to “do” anything when I know there is a lot of unprocessed stuff. I have the type of job whereby e-mails, paper, and other things accumulate rapidly so I am often “stuck” with the inability to start on the action list if my Inbox (both paper and electronic) are filling up with unprocessed items. I would be interested in any comments you may have.
I replied: I would say that I am similar. It’s natural actually to want to get In to zero before feeling free and confident in the Doing. You won’t intuitively trust that the choice you are making is the best one if there are things lurking in the inbox that might be a better choice. However, as you get better and better at GTD and collecting/processing/organizing, a trust factor comes in to know you WILL get back to it when you can. David Allen often says that the more you trust you have a process, you will be more comfortable letting it get out of control.
Ryan Norbauer wrote an interesting article on what he calls, “The Psychology of OmniFocus: How to Wrap your Head Around the Finest (and Most Perplexing) GTD App on the Market.” We know many of you are OmniFocus fans out there (we are too) and I thought this was an interesting read. I particularly liked:
“If you’re just borrowing ideas from GTD here and there, like the idea of grouping your to-do lists by context, you’re missing almost everything GTD has to offer, which is a terrible shame.”
This article is worth a read on tapping into the full power of GTD + OmniFocus. Read more…
A GTDer asked: I am using the GTD Outlook Add-In software. Should I create subprojects?
Coach Kelly: I personally don’t use the subproject feature of software. For me, everything is just a Project. But if you do decide to use it, it can be a nice way to sort major components of a large project. For example, let’s say you are getting married. You could have “Get married” as the project that you track, however, there would be many, many
steps that would fall under that. Some people would choose to create subprojects for each of the major components, such as:
Project =
Get Married
Subprojects =
Rehearsal Dinner
Ceremony
Reception
Honeymoon
I’d say it’s an optional feature in the Add-In, not required. Only use it if it helps you. Don’t use that feature if it seems confusing or more complicated than you need. [Addendum: this is my universal feedback for people on creating your system. Use as many features as you need, but as few as you can get by with.]
A few months ago, a new GTDer named Michael started sending me his experiences of reading Getting Things Done. He read a chapter a week and would recap what he learned. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading these, as it’s been fun to see GTD through a newcomer’s eyes. He just finished the book and sent his final summary. I thought you might all enjoy this.
Over the past few months, I’ve gone through Getting Things Done (GTD) with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, reviewing one chapter each week. During this time, I’ve completed a second draft of a novella and moved into a new apartment.
At the very least, GTD prepared me to fully complete these two tasks and any other task that I might happen upon. The novella is a complete story, beginning to end. I’ve organized my new apartment into a livable space, and I’m completely unpacked. Learning how to identify a task and follow it to completion has been a key element of my GTD learning experience. [Read more →]
Thanks to all who participated in the Guided GTD “Tweekly Review” I did this morning. If you want a refresher, or missed it and want to follow along yourself, here’s the path.
Some of the other great resources for the GTD Weekly Review:
Cheers! Kelly
