This is a summary of what I’ve learned from the “getting things done” methodology.
Firstly, I haven’t been using the techniques very long, so what I say may be overly critical, because I haven’t got to grips with it yet. Secondly, I would welcome any feedback on how I could improve my usage of it, or tweak the techniques to become more efficient.
My initial impression was that it produces a lot of items in the todo list, which immediately made me think that there was too much to do. What I realised from reading the rest of the book after doing this, was that not all of the things on the todo list necessarily are worth doing. Some of the items can be delegated, ignored or postponed to a later date. Immediately after doing this, however, I did feel a relief that everything was written down, meaning I didn’t have to keep the todo list in my head. I could simply refer to it.
I chose to use outlook as a glorified todo list, you may well have chosen differently. The reason I chose this, is that I have access to it at work and at home, so I can maintain a common format between these two locations. I decided that for work items it really wasn’t much point in categorising by context, as my job does not involve much travelling (beyond the commute to work). I rearranged the categories to define the type of work that I was doing. My job is of a technical nature, so there is little scope for using contexts.
Having written some small vba code to interface with our current tracking software, I feel that this pretty much covered the collection phase, as everything at work that needs doing should in theory be logged in this.
Having attempted to do this now for about a month seems to be paying off. I feel a bit more organised. However, it does seem like I’m missing something here. There is no scope withing GTD for projects, other than as a list of connected actions. The handling of projects is left largely up to the opinion of the implementor, and no advice is given on this. I would have liked to have seen some more guidance on how to handle larger items, rather than as a small series of interconnected tasks. I found this to be extremely unhelpful in helping me to see the bigger picture of larger items. Your experience may vary on this. This particularly is what I’m interested in trying to improve. You are welcome to comment, if you have any suggestions, or think I’ve totally missed the point here.
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