Weeknote #22 (w/e 17/10/10)

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.

Weeknote #5 (w/e 13/6/10)

The focus of the past week has been on Getting Things Done. After what's been probably my busiest academic year so far, I finally decided that my workload was such that I required a rigourous approach to task management. I trawled around for methodologies that would allow me to organize a multitude of different jobs, whilst maximizing the time I could spend with my family. After reading about Getting Things Done (GTD) on Merlin Mann's well-respected 43 Folders blog, I decided to give it a go. There's a nice "getting started with GTD" article on 43 Folders, which summarises the approach thus:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
   
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
   
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
   
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
   
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
   
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly
   

And that's it, really. Most of the week was spent on the first three steps (the creator of GTD recommends at least a couple of solid days), but the effort was well worth it. I started by taking the various slush piles, to-do lists and marked-up journals and papers in my home office, and merging them into one big "in" pile. I then had to do the same with my work and Gmail inboxes, extracting only the "open loops" (i.e., unfinished projects).

I had over 4,000 emails in my Gmail inbox, and working through the whole lot, deleting as I went, quickly lost its appeal. I therefore adopted a "tagging" approach; I created an "@action" tag in red, and then skimmed through my inbox, tagging anything that required an action on my part. Everything was then selected and archived (just "select all", answer "yes" when it asks you if you want to apply this to all conversations, and then hit "Archive"), leaving nothing in my inbox (for the first time in many years). I could then select only the tagged messages, which was much more manageable.

The end result of this physical and electronic clear-out was a car-full of paper to go to the recycling centre, a clean workspace (shown above) devoid of distracting piles of paper, and a fresh outlook on work. I'm already feeling the mental benefit, as I've been relieved of the self-inflicted stress brought on by my subconscious constantly asking "what am I currently not doing?" I've always been quite cynical in the past about "snake oil", management-driven "productivity" schemes, but I can honestly say that GTD is an eye-opener, and it actually seems to work.

I've managed to condense everything down to a list of just over forty "projects" (ranging from "Fix external hard drive" to "Write next book"), most of which have a discrete "next action" attached to them.

I'll be writing more about GTD in the coming weeks and months, as I learn more about the system and (hopefully) realise its potential.