Below is a copy of a fun article that just ran in the New York Times that heavily references David Allen and GTD. I thought GTDtimes readers might enjoy the piece and since the NYT website sometimes makes you log in to view articles I thought I’d save everyone the trouble and post it here for your enjoyment:
May 22, 2008
CYBERFAMILIAS
Organize: It’s Your Civic Duty
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
THE jury summons said to go the courthouse the day I was supposed to drive the French horn car pool, write a 1,000-word column, take the dog to the vet and fax some supplementary tax records to my accountant (if I could find the slip of paper on which I wrote the fax number).
The summons said to report to Room 244.
“Don’t go,” my husband said. “What are they going to do, arrest you?”
Lucky for him, my husband was out of town the day the certified letter arrived, threatening to lock me up and fine me $1,500 if I didn’t serve.
“I can’t believe you ignored it,” my husband said. “Don’t you realize being on a jury is not only a right, it’s a responsibility?”
And a nightmare for busy people like me or, say, Madonna, who also received a jury summons this year. She reported to the Beverly Hills Courthouse in February with a personal assistant and a BlackBerry.
Since Madonna and I have a lot in common, such as demanding jobs and children and having dated Warren Beatty - O.K., two out of three - I vowed to follow her example and fulfill my civic duty without sacrificing control over my life. I don’t have a personal assistant. Or a BlackBerry, come to think of it. Instead, I reported to Room 244 at 9:30 a.m. with my most important organizational tool, a laptop, and prepared to rely on the free WiFi connection.
My plan was to read and follow the suggestions posted on all the gazillion online productivity blogs - Unclutterer.com, 43folders.com, Dumblittleman.com and Lifehack.org, for example - that offer eclectic advice on how to spend time fruitfully.
Zenhabits.net advised me to “focus on one thing at a time.” This prompted me to focus on how this was all my husband’s fault, because if I had followed the jury summons instructions, I could have rescheduled my service for a date like, say, the Friday before Memorial Day, when it was unlikely anybody would need jurors.
I felt better already.
By the time lunch rolled around and I had caught a glimpse of the courthouse cafeteria’s Chinese chicken salad, I felt it would be a cinch to follow other online tips, including Zenhabits’ “How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way.”
But then the worst happened. Even as I was memorizing tips on how to brew my own natural flavors to add to water on Lifehacker.com, my life diverged from Madonna’s in a very troubling way. Unlike the celebrity superstar, who went home a free woman after a defense attorney complained she was a distraction and dismissed her, I was put on a jury.
I almost blacked out from panic. I didn’t have time to go to jury duty for even one day, and now, suddenly, it looked like I would be at the courthouse for the entire next week. I was going to miss work deadlines. Not to mention my volunteer time slot at the public library. And Hebrew school carpooling duty. And an interview with a source who had made travel arrangements around my schedule. How would I cope?
The productivity blogs had little to say on this particular topic, unfortunately. But as I spent the weekend frantically skimming their advice on how to declutter bookshelves (at Unclutterer.com) and how to “de-clump sugar with a slice of bread” (Lifehacker.com), I couldn’t help noticing a pattern.
Many of the bloggers idolized David Allen, a best-selling author whose “Getting Things Done” time-management system was described at 43folders.com as taking “a backseat only to the Atkins Diet in terms of the number of enthusiastic evangelists.”
I reached Mr. Allen by phone. “Can these productivity blogs help me through this desperate time in my life?” I asked.
He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to ask him this question. The problem with my plan, he said, was that I wanted to take a piecemeal approach to a systemic problem. Mr. Allen thought I would be better off focusing my energy on setting up comprehensive organizational procedures that would back me up in any emergency.
“How?” I asked.
“First, do a mind sweep and make an inventory of all the projects that need to be taken care of this year,” Mr. Allen said. “Most people have 30 to 100 projects pending at one time. What I mean by a project is anything that takes more than one step and that you’re committed to finish in the year, from getting the dog vaccinated to getting new tires on the car to planning a trip to Greece to dealing with what the kids are going to do in the summer.”
“Making an inventory of everything sounds hard,” I said, thinking it might be more thrilling, say, to make my own laundry soap by following the recipe involving borax and washing soda on TheSimpledollar.com. Or to memorize a few keyboard shortcuts every typist should know, according to ProductivityCafe.com.
“It takes one to six hours to do the inventory,” Mr. Allen said. “I bet there’s a big pile of stuff on your desk and stuff all over the house that you need to read. Gather it, and then you can make decisions about what you’re committed to do to move each project forward.”
He suggested, for instance, putting all my unread material - from magazines to unopened mail to notices from my daughters’ schools - into a “To Read” box. Simply identifying this clutter as a project would count as a step toward completing the project.
Having an inventory would prepare me, he said, for unforeseen contingencies.
“Life is full of surprises like jury duty, and when you’re surprised is when it becomes critical to know exactly what you’re not going to be doing when you’re doing jury duty,” Mr. Allen said. “You also need to take with you at the courthouse all the things you could be doing instead of sitting around watching paint dry.”
IF I managed at the courthouse to complete those things - which in my case included paying bills, updating my household’s monthly finance charts and responding to critical e-mail messages - Mr. Allen suggested I make a master list of every pending project I had identified.
“Stare at the list, during a break, until you see which ones you need to finish first and which ones you just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it and then cross those off,” he said.
I followed his advice. It took me more like 12 hours to make an inventory. (I got sidetracked looking through old baby photos that I found inexplicably stuffed into a desk drawer along with grocery store receipts from 1993.)
But by Thursday I was feeling so in control of my schedule that when the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom for a brief break, I had time to read productivity blogs for entertainment.
Then I realized the fact that I found the ClutterersAnonymous.net 12-step program so riveting probably meant I was ready to move on to create another tool Mr. Allen had mentioned: a to-do list.
The first item was easy: in the future, ignore husband’s advice.
E-mail: slatalla@nytimes.com
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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