We all have times in our lives when we feel overwhelmed, out of control or simply burnt out with the enormity of the things that we have to do. As a teacher and a school leader, I certainly felt this throughout my career and went through some pretty dark times trying to keep on top of everything. One of the things that helped me significantly through the last 15 years or so was the principles, advice and guidance from David Allen’s GTD system, or Getting Things Done.
As I have matured in my thinking and reading, I am aware that such systems have recently gone out of favour in the personal development world, as more work has been done on promoting and focusing on getting the right things done. I am a great believer in this modern perspective contained in books such as 4000 weeks and Groundedness, however I am still firmly in the belief that once we have a true vision for our life’s focus…we still have to actually get things done to move towards that vision.
In my own personal productivity system I am keen not to throw the baby out with the bath water and have stuck with many GTD principles that serve me just as well today as they always have, whilst ensuring that I adopt the latest thinking on work life balance. What has happened overtime is that these methods have evolved as I have grown with them, and they have morphed into my current system that I will describe for you below. I hope that there may be one or two pointers that you may look to apply to your own systems when trying to cope with all the stuff that comes your way.
First things first priorities
There is a whole blog in itself on establishing the meaning of our lives and what aspects are really important to us.
Before we do anything with productivity systems, we need to be really clear on what is important to us and what are our personal priorities. If we are not clear on this, our systems may be highly effective at clearing stuff, but it may be entirely the wrong stuff.
The well known theory of Parkinson's Law is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. For example, the more productive we get at dealing with our email, the more email that productivity generates. If we slavishly reply to every email, even with just polite platitudes, people will inevitably respond to us in the same way, generating an increased flow into our inboxes. The real question is then- which emails are really important for me to action? And conversely, which are not and need to be discarded?
Only when we have got a clear vision of what our life’s mission is can we truly make these prioritisation decisions accurately and decisively. Without this clear vision of our priorities, we may be the most productive person on the planet, but we will ultimately be going in the wrong direction.
I categorise my daily priorities into 4 simple areas of focus- Live, Love, Learn and Legacy.These encompass all the things that I value in life. Many thanks to the work of Ben Bergeron on this structure, seek out his podcasts, he is a very wise man.
These daily areas of focus have stemmed from my quarterly and annual priorities based around my career, relationships, health and personal growth. Again, many thanks to Chris Williamson and his Modern Wisdom podcast for the guidance and resources that he provides free of charge to structure an annual review thought process.
Weekly review
I have 3 parts to what I would consider my overall weekly review.
Midweek inbox zero slot scheduled in my calendar each week on a Wednesday to get up to date and current with all my information flow. I was finding that if I didn’t have this scheduled mid-week catch up with myself, my weekly review would be dominated with trying to get up to date and current, rather than looking at the strategic direction of where to go in the following week.
Weekly review scheduled for 1 hour every Friday. This time is sacrosanct and must happen each week. For years I did my weekly review on a Sunday afternoon, but I found that it interrupted my mental downtime and caused me anxiety over the weekend. By scheduling it on a Friday I had some closure for the week and went into the weekend happy and content about the plans for the following week.
Gratitude review on a Saturday morning. I gratitude journal every morning for purely personal development reasons. This is absolutely not linked to my GTD system, but more for my emotional health and wellbeing. One of the best bits of advice I adopted is incorporating a distillation of the daily gratitudes into a weekly gratitude list. Research has shown that this additional review maximises the benefits of the daily gratitude journaling process. It is certainly something that I have enjoyed incorporating into my Saturday morning routine.
Daily review
At some point in the day, normally before I leave work for home, I have a quick review point to see that my system is up to date and that I don’t have any unprocessed stuff hanging around that needs to be dealt with. This does not involve a lot of actual work- more organisation of the incoming stuff into the system. I tend to ritually close the end of this process by setting my out of office notification on my email, shutting down the PC and heading home thereafter.
As part of my daily morning routine, I quickly check the details of the day ahead that I set in place the previous evening, but in reality this is little more than a quick check ahead for the day.
Handling your stuff
The GTD system serves as an external brain for us that we must trust implicitly. The key philosophy of the GTD system is:
the human brain is designed for having ideas not holding ideas.
If we can keep our stuff safely stowed in a trusted system, we can deal with that information at the most appropriate time, without having to devote any effort to revisit it or remember it. Only when we have got all of the stuff truly off our minds and in to the system can we be in a position to really have our minds like water and operate optimally.
Most of us already run a system like this successfully, as we all have some sort of calendar system to remember birthdays. We don’t worry day-to-day about the task of remembering birthdays as we have a system where the information is held securely. It is a system that we trust implicitly. GTD is just about extending this principle to other facets of our lives.
Capture tools. Ways to simply get stuff off your mind. This could include notebooks, scribbled notes, post its, voice memos, emails, to-do lists, etc. In essence anything that is always easily to hand and works best for you.
Inbox. Ways to collate all the captured information into one or two trusted inboxes so it is never misplaced. I only have two inboxes in my life- my email inbox and an inbox list on my Trello account that I can access via my phone, laptop and work PC. The key benefit of Trello that I will go into later in this blog is that it syncs live to all devices. Any stuff that I cature will find its way into one of these two inboxes.
Places to keep non actionable, but useful information- I struggled with this for many years, trying various physical filing solutions that never really worked. I currently save any reference material that is non-actionable in Apple notes as text files, images or scanned docs. This is a good solution as the notes sync across all my devices, and I am having to deal with much less paper clutter in my life.
Processing your stuff
Once we are confident that we have a way of capturing all of the stuff that comes our way, we need to take time to make sense of the stuff and move it from our inbox further into our GTD system for appropriate action. Allen makes this process really simple by providing a decision making flow chart that introduces us to all the different component parts of the GTD system.
Next step actions- inevitably- some of our stuff will make it onto a to-do-list for action at a future time. We are all probably used to using some sort of lists to manage our lives, such as a grocery list when shopping, but not all to-do-lists are the same. For many people, their to-do-list is simply a collection of random of jobs or unclear ideas that still need additional thought. So what is the difference between a things to do list and a GTD next step actions list? Let me illustrate:
You may have on your things to do list something like Mums Birthday. What does this mean? What is the very next step that you think about when you look at Mums Birthday? In reality, it is a whole series of tasks including:
research ideas on Amazon for Mums Birthday gift.
Order the gift to be delivered.
Await gift arrival.
Buy wrapping paper and card for Mums Birthday.
Call Mum to arrange a time to visit.
Etc.
So the very next action step is not Mums Birthday, but actually research ideas on Amazon for Mums Birthday gift. Once we have completed that action, it would be replaced on our next action list with order the gift to be delivered. At any point in time, we should see a list of next actions that we can do to move a particular project forward.
The GTD system classifies a project as an task that requires one or more actions to complete. In the above example, Mums Birthday is not an action, but a project consisting of a number of separate tasks.
Keeping track of your next actions
Once you have a comprehensive list of next actions, the key is where to keep them so that they are easily accessible, reviewable and ready to hand when the opportunity to deal with them comes to hand.
The purest form of the GTD system suggests that you keep separate next action lists for different locations that you may find yourself in- an office list, a home list, a phone list, a supermarket list, etc.
I personally found this too cumbersome and preferred to keep lists on a more time stamped basis. I have the following action lists set up on my Trello board:
Actions for today- I limit this to no more than 6 actions. Once I have completed one and moved it to my actions done list, I can add another action to this list.
Actions done list- this really helps with my positivity for the day, being able to look back at all the things that I have achieved before I delete them at the end of the day. Of course, it would probably be more efficient to discard completed actions straight away, but by doing this I found it hard to recognise my successes at the end of the day.
To do this month- this is my holding list that I am constantly shuffling tasks up and down in terms of their priority. Tasks from this list transfer to the action for today list when there is space available.
To do next month- a non-urgent but important list of actions that do not have to be actioned in the next 3-4 weeks. By having this, it makes your monthly action list more manageable in size.
Waiting for- this is the best list. It is for tasks that you have delegated out to others and you are waiting for an outcome.
Not yet- this list consists of great ideas that are not yet ready for action. The time may not be right, or the capacity to deal with them is not yet there, but the ideas are too good to discard right now.
Top practical hacks that work for me
Email setup- I have a number of structures within my email system that helps with GTD.
Reference files set up so that I can drop key emails into these files for future reference. I appreciate that it is always possible to use the search facility to find legacy emails, but unless you know what yo are searching for, it can be fiddly. By having reference files for particular tasks or people, it keeps all the legacy information easily to hand.
Action files set up. In order to get these to appear at the top of my reference files list, they have to have a @ prefix. I have @action, @waiting and @not yet files that I use and check regularly in my daily and weekly reviews to see what next step actions need to be taken.
Out of office automated email replies for evenings, weekends and holidays. This assures me that anyone who emails me during these times will be certain not to expect a reply until I am back in work. The certainty is good for them, but incredibly reassuring for me when I am trying to mentally switch off from work.
If an action is going to be required from another person, I always CC myself into the email I send, and then file this in my @waiting file for reference and review.
If the email requires additional actioning to simply a reply, I sometimes save time by forwarding the entire email to my Trello inbox so that all of the relevant information is kept together.
Trello setup. In addition to the boards that I have mentioned above, I have a few practical tweaks that I incorporate into my Trello system.
Operate a priority ranking within each board, by physically moving task cards into priority order. This can be automated by Trello using a 5 star ranking system, but this does not work for me as priorities change over time. By physically moving the cards, I engage a natural prioritisation using my own values, the current context and how I actually feel about the task. The most important tasks on each board appear at the bottom of my boards.
I have a card for each person that I interact with regularly. This enables me to add actions to the card for when I see them next.
I have project cards with the title of the project and then only the very next action added to the card. Once I have completed that specific action, I replace it with the very next action that needs to be completed. This ensures that every next step action it is clearly visible on the card.
I colour code my cards for other contexts. For instance any home related actions are automatically recorded on blue card and actions relating to my Mum’s care are recorded on pink cards so they are easily identifiable.
Calendar usage. I use apple calendar that integrates with a number of other calendars in my life. Each calendar has a set colour that I can filter at the point of viewing. I have the following calendars that I use regularly:
Work (green)
Home (blue)
Birthdays (red)
MS365/MS Teams (orange)
Notebooks. I love my notebooks. My only brand of choice is soft covered moleskines. There is something very luxurious about using fine stationary and I love the way that the moleskine journals age over time. I always have a notebook to hand, as they are a great capture tool for stuff. At the end of each day, I check these for any actions that need to be added to my inboxes.
So there you have it, my personal take on the GTD system that works for me. There may well be aspects that you can incorporate into your own system, but they have to work for you. The thing that I have learned over time is that there is no such thing as a foolproof system that works for everyone. You have to take the best of what is already out there and then try and adapt and develop it to your needs. The most important factor is that you develop a feeling of control over the stuff in your life. The stuff will keep on coming, that is for sure, we just get better at dealing with it and ultimately freeing up our minds to handle with the things that are really important in life.
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