By Michael Sliwinski

“Don’t try this at home” (MTV – Music Television)
As I mentioned in my last article, being at the GTD seminar and listening to David Allen inspired me to try out different approaches to GTD.

I decided to actually try GTD at home.

I had a pleasure of talking to other fellow GTD-practitioners about their positive experiences at their homes. This short article will include tips and tricks for implementing GTD at home gathered from my friends’ homes and from my very own.

Although in my case the experiment is an ongoing work-in-progress, I’m really happy with the results. Here’s a small fraction of GTD concept you can introduce in your family to get more done and motivate (and inspire) each other and have a happier home:

Inboxes for everyone!

First step is to prepare inboxes for each and every member of the family. Put the names on each of the inbox and instruct the family members “what is the inbox and why do they need one”. Some practical tips on setting inboxes for family members:

• Don’t put all of the inboxes in the same place – put each inbox in the place the family member will most likely see and pay attention to it. Why? If the inboxes are grouped together – the items will most likely “migrate” from one inbox to the other instead of being processed and done by the family member they belong to. Family members really understand the concepts of “delegating” too well.

• Locate the inbox in a place where the family member will pay attention to it. I initially placed my wife’s inbox in the hallway of our apartment. She would repeatedly ignore it. When I relocated her inbox to a spot near her cabinet with jewelry, the results improved tenfold.

• Motivate your family members to process their inboxes. Initially assist them in processing their inboxes and from time to time remind them about the piled-up inbox that needs to be cleaned to zero. I even heard a tip by one of the fathers who would actually put occasionally a 1-dollar bill or another kind of “pleasure-item” to encourage inbox-processing among his kids. I think this kind of bribery is worth trying out.

Work on the projects together

A family is a team and there are many projects, especially home-related ones, that need to be planned and executed together with several family members. Planning a project like “cleaning up the house”, “redecorating one of the rooms” or “family Sunday dinner” can be planned with a simple to-do list for each of them. In my home one of the places for these kind of to-do lists is on the fridge.

A simple to-do list won’t be enough, though. When planning a project like this, it’s important to pay attention to these two things:

• Clearly point out each other’s responsibilities in the project and delegate the tasks to each of the family members.

• Clearly define Next Actions for each other so that everyone knows what they should do right away.

Encourage the 50,000 feet level thinking

Make sure you talk to your loved ones about the meaning of their lives. About their overall area of responsibility, their goals – both long-term and short.

Try to schedule these kinds of talks to on at least monthly basis and make sure everyone (including yourself) really knows why they are doing what they are doing. Why they participate in their projects and review their priorities and analyze the motives of their actions.

I’ve started this kind of ritual with my wife and found out one of the best moments to do it is Sunday morning, right after our breakfast, when there is no pressure to go somewhere or do something.

Apply the great 2-minute rule at home!

After my last article about the “2-minute rule”, one of my friends told me how he applied the 2-minute rule at home and gave me several examples of daily rituals that could be accomplished within this short period of time, or faster (and I never realized that!):

• Take out trash
• Clean the table after the dinner
• Put the dishes into dishwasher
• Start the dishwasher to actually clean the dishes
• Make the bed
• Turn off lights in the rooms unoccupied by other family members
• Put the shoes into the shoe-drawer
• Grab a beer from the fridge
• Etc.

I’m sure there are many more quick 2-minute tasks at home that you can add to this list. I’d encourage you to identify these quickies with your family members. Once discovered, nobody will have an excuse to procrastinate and leave these tasks off for later.

Tip: To motivate my family members and myself, I’ve actually created a list of these 2—minute “quickies” and posted it on my fridge for others to see.

Do it now – start introducing GTD in your Family.

I’m hoping I’ve encouraged you more than enough to try and start GTD in your family. Creating good habits is very important in a team such as a family that lives under one roof and wants to live in harmony, love and respect for one another.

To foster family-friendly GTD I’ve introduced a “family plan” in my Nozbe web application where you can set up an account for up to 6 family members to manage projects and next actions together and spread more GTD-goodness among your loved ones.

Please post your comments about GTD in your family and share your successes and challenges below – I’d be more than happy to discuss my experiences with you!

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I’m really excited to be making this particular introduction because the topic he plans to cover - GTD for Kids - is both new (to my knowledge) and I think will be incredibly valuable and very well received.

When Nathaniel approached us with the idea of having some content on how to implement a version of GTD for kids I immediately felt like this was a great idea.

Nathaniel is the full time father of 3 (Charlotte, Judit and Thomas). In his own words, Nathaniel says:

“The best surprise of my life was the arrival of the twins soon after our daughter arrived. From that moment on I had a lot to do.”

“It was not till 2006 that I first read David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and that really changed my life. As a parent and at work.”

“I quickly realised big changes with GTD in how I work and live. As a father I thought that these changes could help my children get more fun out of the day. It certainly has helped me. So starting to share experiences and ideas for GTD with kids is what I want to do here and on GTD4kids.com.”

Please help me in giving Nathaniel a warm welcome to the GTDtimes team - I am sure that like me you’ll be excited to see what he’s got in store when it comes to ideas about implementing a GTD program that can be an exciting, stimulating and ultimately, incredibly useful skill for your kids as well perhaps as a way to bring families closer together.

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Editors Note: This great piece has been contributed by GTD Community Member Joe Ely who was kind enough to offer to share his personal GTD system with us in the following post.

A bit about Joe: Joe Ely is the Director of Operations at Cook Biotech, Inc, a medical device manufacturing company in West Lafayette, Indiana. He writes the blog Learning About Lean, a study of Lean Manufacturing. In his spare time he enjoys distance running and the Chicago Cubs, both avocations requiring great endurance.

By Joe Ely joeely618 at gmail.com

Kelly Forrister recently blogged on what makes a good GTD list manager? One of the beauties of GTD is its flexibility; as such, the “best system” will vary for each individual. Being a systems geek myself, however, I’ve been working for sometime to find what works for me. Kelly and Oliver invited me to share my decidedly low-tech system which, for me, meets all of Kelly’s criteria… [Read more →]

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Michael Sampson over at Effective Collaboration has a post that I found quite interesting.  Zen Habits is a very popular blog among the GTD community, however Michael, in a recent post, took exception to some statements that Leo made concerning GTD, its degree of complexity, and how he (Leo) has simplified the system.  What do you think?

The image is from a related post over at Zoomstart.com .

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By Sebastian Stadil

Editors Note: This work is by Sebastian Stadil. He attended Ismael Ghalimi’s “Extreme Productivity” Seminar several weeks ago and was kind enough to pen this post comparing the system that Ismael uses with the system that he has been refining for himself. I think it’s fascinating how many iterations people have developed for their personal trusted systems.

Do you have a novel “Trusted System” of your own? Care to share it with GTD’ers everywhere? Write me “editor at GTDtimes dot com” and I’ll post it for the world to see. In fact - I’ll even give a prize to the system that the DavidCo GTD Coaches think is “most creative while still being functional “ I will collect entries for 30 days from today to give folks a chance to write this up. So hurry and send your “most creative while still functional trusted system” write-up in soon.

Last Friday I attended Ismael’s Extreme Productivity Seminar.

I know Ismael somewhat, and I know he always takes the things he does to extremes. He applies David Allen’s GTD quasi religiously, and is very disciplined and organized. I was curious as to his GTD setup, using Salesforce over the specialized tools. No code, and a relational model make for a good framework to work with, I learned. [Read more →]

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One thing I’m learning as I get more and more involved in the GTD community is the vast array of activities to which people are applying David’s principles to improve their ability to perform at the highest level possible. Hardly limited to work, we know that household management can be radically improved using GTD tactics, while my own “ah ha!” moment came at the recent Road Map Seminar when I suddenly saw GTD through the eye of my old athlete self and realized that it was much like a periodized training approach to work and life.

As novel as those are, they pale in comparison to Mark Crump’s very creative approach to something that may be quite unfamiliar to many readers; the world of Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. If you’ve never heard of this before, ask your kids if they have and you’re sure to get that eye roll that can only mean “get a clue, dude, you’re like so totally out of it”. MMORPGs are incredibly popular. So popular in fact that were the economy in one of the most popular games, World of Warcraft a real economy, it would have a GDP greater than all but a handful of the world’s largest and most powerful countries.

There are entire companies devoted to helping build up powerful characters that can then be purchased by well heeled but time-shy participants who are likely to watch that expensive purchase be summarily disemboweled by a precocious 11 year old female who, lacking the bucks, has been building her character organically since she was nine.

Given that time is something that we all agree is at a premium, any strategy that can help an individual be more efficient at anything, from pedaling a bike, to getting the kids off to school to slaying dragons is going to be highly valuable. What’s interesting also is that if you take the time to read the comments on Mark’s post you’ll see two things; the number of people that are using some kind of list to help keep themselves organized for better play and also that a number of people were so intrigued by the GTD approach that they commented as much with more than one even saying that they were planning on using the GTD system in their “meat-space” environment as well.

Do YOU have a unique way in which you are using GTD? Or perhaps you have a unique job or lifestyle in which GTD figures prominently? If so we would love to hear from you. Tell us how GTD is helping you in your every day life. The most interesting and novel uses of Getting Things Done will be written up here and maybe, just maybe I can find some interesting prizes for the really “out of this world” uses of GTD.

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