:zenhabits » Simplifying David Allen’s Complicated GTD Setup Every Monday is Productivity & Organization Day at Zen Habits. Take a look at the setup on the right. It was published in a recent CNNMoney article on David Allen and GTD, and it outlines The David’s GTD setup. It’s way too complicated. That’s just my opinion, of course, but the master of GTD is a living example of how GTD is a great system that has great concepts, but can get way too tool-heavy and complicated when implemented. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s no reason GTD has to be so complicated. Let’s do a David Allen vs. David’s Tools A five-tray desktop inboxA laptop with USB hub for iPod, camera, cell phone, labeler, digital recorder, external hard drivePalm Treo organizer and cell phoneLotus Notes software for all GTD stuff and email; Word, Excel, PowerPointTwo-drawer file cabinetBriefcase5 plastic travel file foldersDesktop organizer Leo’s Tools pocket Moleskine notebook & pensingle-tray desktop inboxdesktop computerFirefox browser; Gmail, Google Docs, WordPress That’s it.
Getting Things Done: Step 2/3 - Processing & Organizing - CBS MoneyWatch.com This article is part three of a seven part series on Getting Things Done ? (GTD ? ) -- the time and productivity management system by David Allen. Columns In Series: GTD Post #1: Getting Things Done: Introduction GTD Post #2: Getting Things Done: Step 1 - Collection Getting Things Done: Step 2/3 - Processing & Organizing Now that you've Collected, you should have a huge stack of stuff as well as a bunch of index cards. At this point, you might start to freak out a bit. Processing and Organizing involves getting everything out of your temporary Collection Buckets and putting it where it belongs. Start with either the index cards or the physical stuff. Is it actionable? The answer to that single question seals the fate of the idea/thing. What to do if it is NOT Actionable There are three possible outcomes: Trash. Email Waiting For Lists. It would be nice if someone developed some kind of flow chart graphic for this process . . . oh wait, they did. (Trashcans image by Chego101 , CC 2.0 ).
Get Everything Done GTD Times: The official blog for David Allen, Getting Things Done® and GTD® The most successful executives/professionals/people keep their decks clear, make decisions on the front end, dispatch the results to trusted people and systems, track commitments rigorously (their own and others’) and get physically engaged taking actions on the projects they own. The five steps of GTD workflow are Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage. When it’s time to Engage, people often ask how to choose from what may be long lists of tasks to do. That’s when it’s helpful to use the criteria for choosing: Context – What place, tool, or person will the action require? Continue reading “Choosing what to do” Question: It seems to me that focus and productivity are different concepts that often get conflated. William Elliott, GTD® trainer and coach in South Africa, talks about ways to use GTD to deal with anxiety or fear. Steven Coutinho talks about how the stories we make up can get in the way of productively innovating, and shares his vision of what school could be like.
Getting started with "Getting Things Done" This article was originally posted during the first week of 43 Folders' existence, and, pound for pound, it remains our most popular page on the site. Please be sure to also visit related pages, browse our GTD topic area, plus, of course you can search on GTD across our family of sites. I’ll be talking a lot here in coming weeks about Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen whose apt subtitle is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” You’ve probably heard about it around the Global Interweb or have been buttonholed by somebody in your office who swears by GTD. Like I did the other day with Quicksilver, I wanted to provide a gentle, geek-centric introduction to Getting Things Done, so that you can think about whether it might be right for you. The Problem with “stuff” Getting Things Done succeeds because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the atomic tasks that we want to accomplish in a given day. So how does GTD work? GTD is geek-friendly The OSX angle/warning Links
Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I Since new folks visit 43F each day, I thought it might be valuable to return to one of our most popular evergreen topics to review some "best practices" for keeping a good to-do list. While a lot of this might be old hat to some of you, it's a good chance to review the habits and patterns behind one of the most powerful tools in the shed. Part 2 appears tomorrow (Update: now available). Why bother? In my own experience wrangling life's entropic challenges, some of my best gains have come from maintaining a smart, actionable, and updated accounting of all the things I've committed myself to doing. While you can argue for the flavor and approach to task management that best suits your style (and your personal suck), it's hard to disparage the benefits that come from getting task commitments out of your brain and into a consistent location. Anatomy of a To-do Glancing at your own to-do list, do you see any potential troublemakers? Break it Down to the “Next Action” Let's Get Physical
GTD: You need a daily action plan The alarm sounds. A long day ahead to enjoy, but also many things to do. Do you feel relaxed or overwhelmed by everything you have to do? Do you have a plan for your day? The truth is that there is a difference when you start your days knowing what you’re going to find. But beware! A daily action plan should be a guide destined to eliminate the stress of uncertainty and motivate you to carry out a series of actions that you have formulated as fully feasible. If you use GTD as your personal productivity system then you already have a structure of action lists that show you your action options when you need to see them. First, you must look at the events that you have committed in your Calendar.
My planning system A couple of readers have asked me for more detail of the diary and planning system that I use, so here goes. Warning – this is a really long article!Click on the pictures to see a larger version. The core of my ‘system’ is a set of key area to goals to projects to next action sheets that sit behind a tab in my filofax which is unimaginatively labelled “goals”. Just before this New Year, I spent a lot of time thinking. So, my key areas – the aspects of my life that are really important to me – are: Writing Health and Happiness Chimwemwe (Work) “Work” is in brackets because I am trying this year to focus on the good bits of my current job and see it as a way of earning money. The first page in my “goals” section, is therefore a mind-map, drawn on plain filofax paper and using colour-coding for each of the key-areas. On the page after my mind-map, I have a page with two questions on it: Is it my dream? Is it essential? Then a statement: Time is finite. Produce and sell 50 calendars Okay. 11. 1. 2.