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Simplicity Part VI: Getting things done by doing fewer things

As I work on implementing David Allen's excellent Getting Things Done system in my life, I'm also working on paring down the sheer number of things I do, and getting my priorities really straight.

Some tasks are inevitable.  My mother, who will turn 90 in a little over a week, has had two hospital stays in the past three months, one for a broken hip, one for a blood clot.  This generated a great deal of work for me, including taking her to follow-up doctor's visits, and dealing with the prescriptions and much of the administrative detail.    Family emergencies have to be dealt with, no matter what else is going on with one's schedule..

On the other hand, many things I do constitute wasted time and scheduling noise.  Even many of the things which can be justified in the grand scheme of things (political activism, for instance) translate into a great many scheduling collisions, and often unrealistic todo lists.

So I'm faced with a series of questions:

What are my high level priorities?

What's the relative importance of recreational down time to my "saving the world" activities?

How many discrete tasks is it prudent to put on the schedule for any given day?

I have the luxury of time to think about those things at the moment.  I've retired from my "day job", and  my new business is in that formative stage where I can stop and resume when other things arise (in other words it isn't bringing any money in yet, so interrupting it costs me little money).  Even taking my mother to the doctor's appointments results in time in the waiting room to think and write.

I have figured out one thing already, though.  Part of my ability to "get things done" is going to require not only paring down physical objects in my life, but arranging my life so that I have fewer external committments.  Note that I didn't say "no external committments".  I'm a very socially engaged person, and I value my family and friends.  It's also not possible for me to drop all community and political activity.  I'm a born activist.  I just have to be a lot more selective, and learn to say "no" to overcommittment.  In fact, the most  compelling reason to pare down things is so that the things I do commit to are done well.

So in focusing on a few important aspects of my life, I hope to have more time for friends and family, not less, and for my business life to go better, not worse, and for all the community interests I have to result in more effective work, not less.

Clutter is not just a word that applies to physical objects scattered around the house.  It also means poorly considered, disjointed, badly executed things festooning my todo list.

Simplicity Part V: More on Getting Things Done

It might seem that a personal organization system which requires that you begin by pulling together, in one spot,  everything in your life which needs action, or which you want to do or even exercise vague fantasies of doing, is the opposite of simplicity.

Actually the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach is much less complex than letting a wide array of nagging unfinished tasks continue to spontaneously distract you at inappropriate times, and disrupt your schedule in a manner from which it's difficult to recover.

The system is based on the premise that the unaided human mind is a terrible organizing tool.  Without some external and complete tracking system, tasks will pop into your head at times you can't do anything about the issue at hand.  The mind is not very good at evaluating the context.  For instance, it's no use thinking about a phone call you forgot to make if it's 2 AM.  It's a waste of mental energy.  Likewise mulling over tasks requiring a computer while you don't have immediate access to one is pointless.  You should be focused on some action you can actually perform in the context in which you find yourself.

So the GTD system divides workflow into five steps:

1) Collect (or capture) the individual items you're working with

2) Process the items (figure out what the item is, and what should be done about it

3) Organize the results of the processing

4) Review the organized items periodically

5) Take the actions needed

What this looks like in overview is that you pull everything together and evaluate each item. Items which take less than two minutes get done on the spot, other things might be delegated to someone else, or deferred for a later action.  The deferred items get organized onto lists.  Some of the lists are by context (for instance, things to do when you have access to a phone) and some are by project.  Every item has a "next action" associated with it.  This is key.  Another premise of the system is that items on todo lists which don't spell out a specific next physical action are incomplete.  The lists are then frequently reviewed and updated.  Finally the action steps are done, along with an evaluation of any needed next steps.

I've found in my increasingly successful (but not quite victorious) attempts to get the system up and running that the collection stage is the most difficult.  Once thought is brought to bear on any individual item, it's pretty easy to figure out what list it belongs on, and to come up with a next action step.  Making sure that your system is initially complete is the hard thing.  Then, like any system, maintaining it becomes an issue.

Leo Babauta, who publishes the excellent blog Zen Habits, has developed a modified version of the system called Zen to Done, and has described his system in the book Zen To Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System.  I haven't studied Babauta's book closely yet, but the main modification to GTD  I've seen so far is Babauta's conclusion that new habits should be acquired one at a time.  So instead of immediately beginning to do all five of the steps in the GTD system, you spend a month practicing the collection step, a month practicing processing the results, etc.  That way each step becomes habitual.  I think this is worth exploring if the GTD system becomes hard to start and maintain.

My notion of the Holy Grail of Getting Things Done is to have a complete set of lists, organized by context and project.  Every currently known project or task in my life is there, along with sets of actions I need to take.  When an emergency, new task, or interruption occurs, I just incorporate in into the system and take the appropriate steps without having my life thrown into disarray, even in the short run.

Of all the organizing or "time management" systems I've tried, GTD has come the closest to its promise.

 

Simplicity Part IV: Getting Things Done (or not)

For the past several years I've made attempts to get David Allen's well known and popular Getting Things Done (GTD) system working for me.  The GTD system is explained in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Every time I focus on it, things get better in my ability to not only get things done, but to react to dramatic external events in a way that doesn't totally disrupt parts of my life not related to that event.  But GTD is initially very time consuming to set up, unless the things to get done in your life are already few and simple.  I'll explain the time consuming part later.

I'm in the middle of another such attempt, and it's going well so far.  Each time I make a stab at setting up the system I can get it implemented faster and better, and my understanding of the system is a little stronger.

There are several important components of GTD, but at the core of the system is getting all your "stuff" (unfinished tasks, mail and documents you need to deal with, ideas for things to do which have popped into your head, phone calls or conversations which may or may not require some action, meeting and appointments which may or may not need preparation, etc)  into one trusted system which you review periodically.  One of the main traits is that the system cannot depend on your memory or any innate organizational ability.  Everything is cleanly and simply written down on an appropriate set of action lists, organized by context and/or project, which you review often.

Within this system each item which enters your life has a life cycle, which you largely determine up front.  Some items die early.  For instance, a piece of mail arrives.  Rather than throwing it on the pile of mail to open at some later time (which in many cases may arrive much later, or never), you open it, determine that it needs no action, and put it in the shredding or recycle bin.  Perhaps, on the other hand, it does need some action.  There are a set of criteria for how to process it.  If it will take less than two minutes to process, you go ahead and do it.  If it needs filing for archival reasons you go ahead and file it (rather than throwing it back in the "in" box).  There are a number of different paths from the point of receiving the mail to acting on it in the most effective manner.  But the point is that you have a trusted and complete system, with a place for nearly every project or discrete item in your life.  And most importantly, that system is not carried around in your head, but is an external system which you review frequently.

I'll describe the system more fully in my next post, but it's worth stating why GTD is so daunting to initially set up.  The first step in the process is pulling everything which needs to be done in your life into a hugh "Inbox".  David Allen calls the process "Collection" or "Capture".  This means that every piece of paper stacked on a pile on a desk, every badly filed paper in a file drawer, every bit of email, every unanswered phone message, and every nagging unfinished task needs to be piled (in some appropriate manner) into one manageable location to begin processing.  Of course some things have to stay more-or-less where they are (email, a huge rusting piece of equipment in your back yard) but you come up with an accomodation for that (in the case of email, it gets dealt with in place, the huge equipment gets dealt with by writing a note and throwing it on the Inbox stack).

Do you see the difficulty?  For most people this is a huge process.  When I had the additional house I described in an earlier post, the collection process was daunting to the point of overwhelming.  My first stab at setting the system up was almost demoralizing.  I had to account for both physical objects and administrative tasks associated with two different locations, one of which was buried in clutter.  It didn't invalidate the GTD approach (all those objects and tasks had to be dealt with in some manner, GTD or not, and GTD's solution of deciding what to do with each item up front was actually the most effective way to do it).

Consequently I made several week long attempts to set up the system.  It certaining improved my organizational skills and general time management.  But at that point I never really got GTD up and running, and each disruptive interruption would sent the whole project into disarray.

Only after I got rid of my extraneous house full of junk did the system become more manageable.  At the moment I'm working on getting the system habitual.  My tendency is to throw objects which enter my life (even virtual objects like email) into some random place with the thought that I'll deal with it later.  In actuality "later" often never comes, and what I'm left with is a pile of disorderly objects.  I've begun stopping and thinking before placing each object somewhere.  The upfront thought process is no more time consuming than throwing the mail in a pile on the table.  It's not working perfectly (I still occasionally pile the mail on some randomly chosen surface) but this time around the system is taking shape better.

My next post will describe more fully the life cycle of the "stuff" which enters the Getting Things Done system.  But despite the difficulty I've described, GTD is the most effective system I've tried for getting organized.  And I've tried a lot of approaches.