It's been four months since I
resolved to adopt the
Getting Things Done system of personal organization, so I thought that now might be a good time to share what insights I might have to offer. What follows is a set of observations on and personal "hacks" of the system; these are, of course, purely specific to me, but others might find them useful.
1. I'm not finding the idea of a set of "tickler" folders particularly helpful, and haven't really adopted this part of the system.
2. All of my lists are stored as individual
text files; I have the following, labelled, by convention, with the "@" sign:
@_nextactions (the underscore means it appears at the beginning of any alphabetical list),
@PROJECTS (the "master list" of ongoing activities),
@someday (a "wish list" of things to do if and when I ever get time),
@errands (short jobs like dropping off dry cleaning),
@calls (phone calls to make),
@waitingfor (obvious),
@agenda_x (where
x is one of two people I have working with me), and
@weeknote (where I dump ideas for this weekly post).
3. I've tried to keep my
_@nextactions list to items that need to be done
right now. In order to achieve this, I preface each item in the list with a capitalized "tag", corresponding to the project it represents. This allows me to quickly ascertain the high-priority jobs (see later discussion on contexts). So, for example, the first three lines of my current action list are:
WELLCOME: Edit draft 4a
COBRA: Presentation for Brussels
MSF: Mail speakers with agenda
In order to keep track of next actions without necessarily adding them to my immediate action list, I append them with a "=" to the end of the entry in my
@PROJECTS list. So, one project without an immediate action in my
@_nextactions list might read:
INTER: Paper with Naomi on inter-disciplinary science = edit draft
4. All of these files are kept in a "GTD" directory within my
Dropbox folder. Dropbox is absolutely essential to my implementation of GTD, since it allows me to check and update from wherever I am. I have it running seamlessly on a Mac (home), Linux box (work and netbook) and phone (Android). It just
works. If you sign up via
this link, I get extra free space. Keeping everything in plain text means that editing is trivial, whichever platform I'm running on.
5. Because of the availability of my files wherever I am, I find that I don't really make much use of contexts, as such. I'm generally always at a computer when working, so this breaks down the distinctions that are outlined in the book (the exception to this is while travelling, when I prefer to read material, rather than actively work on it). The project-tags in the next actions list allow me to prioritise easily, whereas having a separate list for errands means that I can easily check for jobs when I'm out and about.
And that's where I am so far with GTD. I'm sure my implementation is far from optimal, but it works for me.
In other news, reservations are flooding in for our forthcoming Manchester Science Festival
Artificial Life event. We're almost at capacity, with over a week to go, so please book your (free) ticket soon in order to avoid disappointment.
Most of last week was spent at a meeting of our EU BACTOCOM project. It was the turn of the University of Cantabria partner to host the six-monthly get-together, which was held in the beautiful city of Santander. It was my first visit to this particular part of Spain, and the scenery on the drive from Bilbao was nothing short of spectacular. Despite the unavoidable absence of a few key members of the team, we had a very productive meeting, and I think we're in a strong position to drive the project forward in the coming months.
