Do YOU know the best practices of GTD?

Although they’ve been recorded for our GTD Connect online learning center, we have been posting the GTD Best Practices series to our free public podcast as well, for all to benefit from.  These informal podcasts are a great way to learn the essentials of GTD.  Here are the first 4 in the series.

Best Practices of Collect

Best Practices of Processing

Best Practices of Organize

Best Practices of Review

The final phase, the “Best Practices of Doing,” will be recorded in early March.  It will be released for GTD Connect members first, then put into the public podcast feed some time after that.  If you like these podcasts, GTD Connect has over 110 recordings like these, with more added every week, that you can play on the Connect site or  sync to iTunes.  It’s a great way to learn coaching tips from David and the staff, listen to interesting interviews with GTD’ers (Evan Taubenfeld being one of the recent ones), watch the “Slice of GTD Life” videos and more.  Good stuff.  Check out the free trial of GTD Connect.

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Here’s a great Q&A between David and a new GTD’er.  To appreciate David’s response, it helps to understand the GTD definitions for projects and next actions:

Projects = Your outcomes that require more than one action step.

Next Actions = Your next physical, visible action steps. Some are project-related, some are not.

Question:

If a project requires, by your definition, at least two steps, I am not clear about how many of the needed steps to put into my action list.  For example, say I have a project with 20 steps.  I may be able to do the step 1, but if I had also put down 2  or 3 steps of that project, I might have done more on the project.   Presently I have about 57 projects, but some are monster projects I’ll be working on for months.  Others I can list two steps and it’s done very quickly.  A few projects are so trivial–but important enough to be listed–that some days I don’t do the one item I listed as the next step for that project.  I could put it into the “Someday” list, but I know I’ll do it sooner than that, so it stays around not being done.  I’d rather do step 2 and then 3 and then 4 of a more important project (I might be on a roll!) than complete one whole project that is easier to do but less important.  So I’m a bit unclear about how much of one project to put in my action list.  I find myself doing the “Weekly Review” every day, so I can add more steps from more important projects.  Could you share any thoughts about how to solve this concern?    [Read more →]

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A Community Contribution from Ryan Oakley

Whether you’re a proficient OneNote user or just started using it after reading my GTD and OneNote article posted on GTD Times it doesn’t take long to populate the software with a tonne of pages and a tonne of information (yes, I am Canadian).

First, some definitions:

MS Office OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively.

ActiveWords is a Windows application that relates words and actions, giving you instant access to what you want, making you more productive, and improving the quality of your work.  (Editors note: ActiveWords was also featured in a podcast by David Allen.) [Read more →]

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Let’s talk about the Horizons of Focus.  In my experience, this is one of the parts of the GTD approach that can take a little time for people to get their arms around. This is where priorities and perspective live. Whereas traditional time management approaches attempted to give people an ABC type coding system for defining their priorities, David Allen’s GTD approach has always been that priority codes are too simple for the complexity of most people’s changing lives, as the only measure of what to do. For example, assigning an “A” priority to something (or flagging is the popular method in email programs these days) could change with the next new piece of input you get. Plus, in my experience, people tend to get lazy with that code or flag without really deciding the next action. A flag, or #1, or lighting the email on fire still doesn’t tell you what your next action is. So is David saying to never use those? Of course not.  Just be sure that what you are marking as high priority has a a clearly defined next action and be willing to change that priority the moment your world changes–which it will. [Read more →]

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Many of you enjoyed the GTD & OneNote article contributed by community member Ryan Oakley.  Here’s another shout out for using Outlook & OneNote, from Ivar in Norway.

I am writing to you to tell you how brilliant I think it is to use Microsoft Office OneNote in my GTD system.  I’m from Norway and am employed in the public sector as a project manager for various ICT projects.

I read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” two years ago. Since then I have spent much time trying to find a good solution to the lists and project lists that fit my needs. I feel now I’ve got this to work, providing very much in terms of both time and money.  The ultimate solution for me has been using Outlook with Microsoft OneNote.  In Outlook, I have action lists that are categorized by place of execution, in good GTD tradition. [Read more →]

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This is a community contribution by Ryan Oakley.

For me, GTD has always worked extremely well for those small(er) tasks and projects.  You know – those little things that used to fall through the cracks but, with the help of GTD, are now easily tracked and moved on until completed.

These smaller projects don’t need much in the way of “project support material” (PSM) — maybe just 4 or 5 lines of information to keep close at hand to help finish the project.  For me, I have mostly used the “notes” section of a project task item in outlook for a good and easy place to put this type of PSM.

But…what about those larger projects?  Like a 2 week vacation to Europe (travel books, emails, reservations, tickets, list of things you want to do and see, things to pack, addresses of family to visit, etc.) or maybe that multi-million dollar project at work that has 8 months worth of project plans and 5 milestones, 247 emails, 156 page reports, bi-weekly meetings, and 7 team members (complete with collaboration).  Ahh!

My GTD system breaks down with that kind of complexity.  [Read more →]

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A computer programmer implementing GTD asked David Allen about projects:

I’m confused about (and I’m sure you are extremely bored with this question, but from the books I couldn’t work out the answer) – how do you size projects?  I’m continually having problems working out what is or isn’t a project – and getting lost in the confusion.

I’m a computer programmer.   I have to design systems and then build them.   A typical “task” of mine will last 6 months – and involve maybe 800 real hours of my own work.   There will be all sorts of things inside that that can be done simultaneously, things that I have to wait for and so on.  Is the whole thing a project?  Or do I break it into individual projects of do the first screen, do the second screen, do the back end?   [Read more →]

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Dear DavidCo:

After working with the GTD system for quite awhile, I find tracking next actions in Outlook to be pretty easy.  The harder part is tracking projects.  Where do you do that and how do you move from the 10,000 ft. level to the runway?

Wayne Pepper, a senior coach and presenter with David Allen Company replied:

I keep my Projects list in Outlook Tasks.  I simply create a category in Tasks labeled “Projects”.  Then, whenever I process a thought, an email, a piece of paper that has an outcome associated with it that will take more than one step to complete, I create a new Task and enter into the Subject field the name of the Outcome (for instance, “tune-up car”) and then I identify the very next action (call mechanic to find a good time), and I create another Task with that action in the Subject field.  I would then categorize that next action as a call by selecting the “”@Calls” Category.  I then review my collection of Projects (my Projects List) once a week during Weekly Review, making sure the project is still relevant, making sure that I have appropriate Next Actions supporting it, and focusing on how much attention that Project has or has not been receiving as a way to assist my focus and intuitive choices for action into the following week.

Our GTD & Outlook Setup Guide also walks through using Outlook Tasks for managing both your Projects and Next Actions. It’s a great resource for applying GTD to Outlook.

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