Screw GTD to Remember The Milk
Good afternoon, dear habravchane. In this topic, I would like to present a free translation of the article by Doug Ayrton, on how to adapt the Remember The Milk service (hereinafter RTM) to work with the Getting This Done system. It makes no sense to write about GTD itself - this has been done before me many times. But what is worth staying on is how to finish dividing your favorite loved Remember The Milk under this system.
Honestly, GTD I got carried away a year ago and, having moved to Android, began to look for a convenient program for working with tasks and lists. After going through quite a few applications, I came across a couple of synchronization programs with the RTM service and went to dig in that direction. Let's just say, out of the box, RTM is not well suited for working with contexts. But if you use ingenuity ...
I will say right away - for myself, I chose another system and other programs. If it is interesting why, then here and here I am telling about it in some detail. Today I would like to stop on RTM - the service in Russia is quite popular and almost localized.
Original article blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post-advanced-gtd-with-remember-the-milk
')
===============
About the author: Doug Ayrton [Doug Ireton] works as a senior [Sr Platform Engineer] development engineer based on a Windows Server at NordStom (a luxury clothing dealer based in Seattle). Doug is an active RTM user, and after a year of messing around with the service settings, he managed to create a well-functioning system. At the very least, he was able to deal with all work tasks and is able to teach others how to work effectively with lists, tags, smart lists and places.
So, what a good GTD system should be able to do:
1. Allow you to keep track of daily tasks (for example: call at dry cleaning) and projects (for example: create a website).
2. Make the weekly review of tasks as simple as possible. The review will allow you to quickly run through each of the projects and determine further actions, tasks “hanging in the air” (in other words, waiting for any events “from outside”) and tasks delegated to others.
3. Set tasks contexts (such as @ Jobs, @ Houses, @ Calls, @ Grocery store, etc.)
4. To allow focusing on the most important tasks necessary for execution exactly today.
The GTD system has five working steps: collecting tasks, processing, organizing, reviewing, and executing. By following these steps and using Remember The Milk you can transfer all your projects and tasks from your head to a proven, and most importantly, working system. Moreover, you can perform several tasks at the same time, working with smart lists (smart lists), displaying only those tasks that need to be done exactly today. Moreover, tasks will be automatically divided into contexts.
Initial RTM setup takes only 30-40 minutes. After that, a weekly review (Doug writes it with a capital letter, Weekly Review), adding / deleting tasks and projects, etc. actions - that's all you need to keep the system in order.
Creating lists "Personal tasks for the day" and "Work tasks for the day"
Start by creating two PS-Daily and WK-Daily lists to keep track of your personal and work tasks day after day. You will include in the lists all your individual tasks (i.e. tasks not included in any project), such as “call in a dry cleaner”, “reduce the dog to the vet” or “send the April phone bill to your boss for reimbursement ". Once again, these lists should include only those tasks that are not included in any project. We will talk about the tasks included in the projects below.
Do not pay attention to the blue tags written after each task. About what it is, we'll talk below.
Creating a list for each project
After you have combined all your individual affairs into a personal and work list, create a separate list for each personal and working project (for example, “buy a house”, “impose a budget”). Do not think of a project as a job requiring a team of an artist and an individual leader. In GTD, a project means any action that requires more than two steps. Projects requiring less than 3 tasks (steps) are wiser to include in the general personal or work list.
It is recommended to add PS or DS markers at the beginning of the name of each project, this will allow you to distinguish personal projects from workers.
For each of the projects should formulate the ultimate goal (SMART) and arrange it as a task. This will allow you to immediately see the goal of your project when viewing the general list of projects. For example, if your goal is to buy a house before the beginning of summer, then you should create a project “PS-Buy House” with the task “... to buy a house containing 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms, located next to Greenwood Park”. All subsequent tasks should logically flow from the first.
Brainstorming and marking tasks as “next action”
Now that you have created your project lists and decided on the goals of each of them, once a week (or more often, it all depends on your preferences), you should add new tasks to your lists until you cover everything you can generally cover.
From this list of tasks every week you will highlight a so-called. “Next actions” and mark them with the tag NA (next action). These tasks may not be related to each other linearly (we have attended to projects in this bundle), but all together they are tasks for a week. Completed tasks will be automatically excluded from the list.
In the list below as an example, I identified 5 tasks for my project “PS-BuyBuy.” Only two of them have the tag “next action” (i.e. “na”). This is “write a letter to your friends asking you to advise a realtor” and “close accounts with unused credit cards” (it’s not quite clear why this task fell into this project - translator’s comment).
Next, we will use RTM tags to label our tasks according to contexts (@ Jobs, @ Houses, @ Calls, @ Grocery store). After we do this, I’ll tell you how to use smart lists to filter your “next” cases by context.
Using tags and places to create contexts (@Homes, @Work, Web , etc.)
Contexts are one of the key concepts of GTD and allows you to filter “next steps”. For example, when you find in the city center you can limit your tasks to only those that need to be done in the area. On Saturday morning, you can view the tasks from the "@ Orders" smart list and decide which tasks to carry out. At work, you can manage your smart list "@ Job"
Physical contexts such as “Home”, “City Center” or “Work” should be created as Places (there is such a section in RTM). This gives an additional advantage in the form of binding to Google Maps. Remember that you must create a “place” for each of your geographic locations where you regularly perform some tasks. My places look like @ Home, @ Jobs and @ Center.
Logical contexts such as “Web”, “Calls” or “Orders” should be set using tags. You create new tags automatically by typing words in the "tags" field in the "tasks" tab. If you write tags separated by commas, then several tags will be assigned to the task. Some people overdo it with the number tag, so I recommend limiting it to the most common and useful ones. For example: “@ work”, “@ calls”, “orders”, etc.
The picture shows the task “to call the restaurant and reserve a table”, marked with the tags “@call” and “next action”, as well as with the marker “@ work” as the location.
Even if this task is personal, I marked it with the “work” marker, because I want to perform it during the working day, since the restaurant is open at this particular time.
Note that both deposits and tags fall into the so-called. "Tag Cloud". As a result, you get a simple way to display all the tasks for each of the contexts - just click on the desired “place” or tag. True, using smart lists (or smart lists) is even more convenient.
Creating smart lists to separate tasks by context
Your daily and project lists correspond to the first four phases of GTD (collection, processing, organization and review) i. transfer all tasks and projects from your head to a proven and well-organized system. RTM lists focus your attention on the final and most important step - doing your work.
Smart lists in RTM allow you to filter an array of tasks in the way you want. Just as lists in a project allow you to view all the tasks inside this project, smart lists can be used to filter cases by, for example, “further actions” or by matters necessary to be performed at home (as well as at work, and in online).
For example, this illustration shows my smart order list. The lists panel on the right shows which of the smart lists is displayed. In this case, these are tasks marked with the tags “@ orders” and “next action” (i.e. “na”). Thus, only the tasks marked with these two tags are included in this list.
My smart job list is a more complex example. I want it to display all the tasks from the “next steps” and, since I work in the center and run out for lunch, personal tasks that I have to do in the city center (for example, drop by the dry-cleaner). The list shown in the image above contains tasks labeled “next action” and the location “city center”. At the same time, the list is marked with the filter “no tasks ending two weeks from today”. I use this filter to focus only on immediate tasks and not pay attention to future tasks.
Please note that the task “drop by the dry-cleaner” is displayed in two lists at once: the list of orders and the list “work”. Smart lists allow me to be flexible and allow me to perform this task either at lunchtime or on a Saturday day (when parsing the list of instructions).
Recently, I started another smart list, entitled @ Work-MIT, where I put the most important tasks (MIT - Most Important Tasks). As soon as my list containing the “next steps” to work becomes immense, I start working only with the @ Work-MIT list. As you can see from the table below, this list includes only tasks of the first and second priority (importance). As soon as the tasks from the @ Work-MIT are finished, I will return to my regular list.
Name of the smart list: Conditions to hit the list
@ Houses: “na” tag and location “@ Houses”
@ Calls: tag "na" and tag @ Calls
@ Orders: the “na” tag and @ Orders
Web : “na” tag and Web tag
@ Job: “na” tag and location “@ Job” or @ Center. As well as the filter “no tasks ending two weeks from today”
@ Work-MIT: tag “na” and location “@ Work” or @ Center. As well as the filter "no tasks, ending two weeks from today." Priority: only 1 or 2.
Lists "Pending" and "Someday / Maybe"
There are tasks that need to be controlled, but dependent on other people. For example, you can wait for a piece of work from an employee to complete a new logo design for a website you are working on. Or do you expect to return the debt to buy yourself a new iPhone. All of these tasks are “Pending” and should be tracked separately from your current to-do list. Therefore, instead of marking “na” (i.e. the next action) we mark them with the tag “wait”, i.e. "expect".
Any tasks delegated to other people should be tagged with this tag. I also added tags with the names of those to whom I delegate tasks. For example, the tag "K" for my wife and "Aaron" for his assistant. Selecting a separate tag for a person allows you to add it to the tag cloud and quickly see all the tasks associated with this name. This is especially useful when preparing for a meeting with this person.
Name of the smart list: conditions to hit the list
PS-Wait: tag "wait" and exclude the place @ Work
WK-Wait: “wait” tag and place @ Jobs or @ Center
Finally, we will create PS-Someday and WK-Someday lists to track work and personal projects belonging to the Someday / Maybe. This could be a circumnavigation or reading "war and peace", site redesign, or something like that. I draw your attention to the fact that these lists are normal, not smart lists.
Transfer all projects that fall under the category of "someday" in these lists to keep them for the future. Be sure that tasks from this category do not contain the “na” and “wait” tags so that they are not displayed in other places (for example, in “work”). You will view these lists during your weekly reviews and tag them with the necessary tags at a time when the project from the “someday” category has matured to being moved to the list of current affairs.
The PS-Someday and WK-Someday lists will become a safe place to store all those things that you are not ready to do, but would not want to forget about them. If you wish, you can set a reminder with a specific date, if you want to recall a business, say, in 6 months.
Other simple and smart lists (to bring the reminder system into a holistic view)
I use a few other lists to keep track of things:
1. iTunes list of songs that I hear on the radio that I want to buy
2. Book list of books to read
3. A list to keep track of things I took from friends (or friends took from me). I recommend setting reminders to remember when to return.
And I also created a WK-WeeklyStatus smart list to automatically generate weekly activity reports. Now RTM sends me this list every week by email.
Name of the smart list: conditions to hit the list
WK-WeeklyStatus: completed within one week from today, place @ Work. But does not include things from the PS-Daily list.
Making all this work together
Every time you disassemble your inbox, all cases requiring more than 2 minutes for execution should be marked with a corresponding label. I move any emails associated with a project to a separate folder with the same name as the project in RTM. When the project is completed, I will simply delete or move to the archive the corresponding list in RTM and the email folder. By the way, if you use Firefox, I strongly recommend that you use the RTM Firefox extension .
You should also do a weekly review of your affairs, and this is probably the hardest thing in GTD. Remember that review is the glue that holds your entire system together. Use the weekly review to brainstorm new tasks, identify and label “next steps”, move tasks between lists. Pay attention to the “someday” lists and do not forget about the “waiting” lists to remember which events you are tracking.
Once you have recorded your tasks and identified your next steps, you are ready to begin working with your smart lists. Select the list for the current content (for example @ Work) and start working. You can perform tasks based on whether you have the time and energy to perform specific tasks, or choose a random task. It all depends on you. Remember that each completed task is another step to complete one of your goals.
Remember The Milk is my favorite web app. it supports all five phases of GTD (collection, processing, organization, review and execution) in an automatic, seamless mode. His simple but powerful tools help me focus on doing my job, not on endless messing around with the system. Thereby moving my life forward step by step.
================
Translation corrections are welcome.
Honestly, GTD I got carried away a year ago and, having moved to Android, began to look for a convenient program for working with tasks and lists. After going through quite a few applications, I came across a couple of synchronization programs with the RTM service and went to dig in that direction. Let's just say, out of the box, RTM is not well suited for working with contexts. But if you use ingenuity ...
I will say right away - for myself, I chose another system and other programs. If it is interesting why, then here and here I am telling about it in some detail. Today I would like to stop on RTM - the service in Russia is quite popular and almost localized.
Original article blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post-advanced-gtd-with-remember-the-milk
')
===============
About the author: Doug Ayrton [Doug Ireton] works as a senior [Sr Platform Engineer] development engineer based on a Windows Server at NordStom (a luxury clothing dealer based in Seattle). Doug is an active RTM user, and after a year of messing around with the service settings, he managed to create a well-functioning system. At the very least, he was able to deal with all work tasks and is able to teach others how to work effectively with lists, tags, smart lists and places.
So, what a good GTD system should be able to do:
1. Allow you to keep track of daily tasks (for example: call at dry cleaning) and projects (for example: create a website).
2. Make the weekly review of tasks as simple as possible. The review will allow you to quickly run through each of the projects and determine further actions, tasks “hanging in the air” (in other words, waiting for any events “from outside”) and tasks delegated to others.
3. Set tasks contexts (such as @ Jobs, @ Houses, @ Calls, @ Grocery store, etc.)
4. To allow focusing on the most important tasks necessary for execution exactly today.
The GTD system has five working steps: collecting tasks, processing, organizing, reviewing, and executing. By following these steps and using Remember The Milk you can transfer all your projects and tasks from your head to a proven, and most importantly, working system. Moreover, you can perform several tasks at the same time, working with smart lists (smart lists), displaying only those tasks that need to be done exactly today. Moreover, tasks will be automatically divided into contexts.
Initial RTM setup takes only 30-40 minutes. After that, a weekly review (Doug writes it with a capital letter, Weekly Review), adding / deleting tasks and projects, etc. actions - that's all you need to keep the system in order.
Creating lists "Personal tasks for the day" and "Work tasks for the day"
Start by creating two PS-Daily and WK-Daily lists to keep track of your personal and work tasks day after day. You will include in the lists all your individual tasks (i.e. tasks not included in any project), such as “call in a dry cleaner”, “reduce the dog to the vet” or “send the April phone bill to your boss for reimbursement ". Once again, these lists should include only those tasks that are not included in any project. We will talk about the tasks included in the projects below.
Do not pay attention to the blue tags written after each task. About what it is, we'll talk below.
Creating a list for each project
After you have combined all your individual affairs into a personal and work list, create a separate list for each personal and working project (for example, “buy a house”, “impose a budget”). Do not think of a project as a job requiring a team of an artist and an individual leader. In GTD, a project means any action that requires more than two steps. Projects requiring less than 3 tasks (steps) are wiser to include in the general personal or work list.
It is recommended to add PS or DS markers at the beginning of the name of each project, this will allow you to distinguish personal projects from workers.
For each of the projects should formulate the ultimate goal (SMART) and arrange it as a task. This will allow you to immediately see the goal of your project when viewing the general list of projects. For example, if your goal is to buy a house before the beginning of summer, then you should create a project “PS-Buy House” with the task “... to buy a house containing 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms, located next to Greenwood Park”. All subsequent tasks should logically flow from the first.
Brainstorming and marking tasks as “next action”
Now that you have created your project lists and decided on the goals of each of them, once a week (or more often, it all depends on your preferences), you should add new tasks to your lists until you cover everything you can generally cover.
From this list of tasks every week you will highlight a so-called. “Next actions” and mark them with the tag NA (next action). These tasks may not be related to each other linearly (we have attended to projects in this bundle), but all together they are tasks for a week. Completed tasks will be automatically excluded from the list.
In the list below as an example, I identified 5 tasks for my project “PS-BuyBuy.” Only two of them have the tag “next action” (i.e. “na”). This is “write a letter to your friends asking you to advise a realtor” and “close accounts with unused credit cards” (it’s not quite clear why this task fell into this project - translator’s comment).
Next, we will use RTM tags to label our tasks according to contexts (@ Jobs, @ Houses, @ Calls, @ Grocery store). After we do this, I’ll tell you how to use smart lists to filter your “next” cases by context.
Using tags and places to create contexts (@Homes, @Work, Web , etc.)
Contexts are one of the key concepts of GTD and allows you to filter “next steps”. For example, when you find in the city center you can limit your tasks to only those that need to be done in the area. On Saturday morning, you can view the tasks from the "@ Orders" smart list and decide which tasks to carry out. At work, you can manage your smart list "@ Job"
Physical contexts such as “Home”, “City Center” or “Work” should be created as Places (there is such a section in RTM). This gives an additional advantage in the form of binding to Google Maps. Remember that you must create a “place” for each of your geographic locations where you regularly perform some tasks. My places look like @ Home, @ Jobs and @ Center.
Logical contexts such as “Web”, “Calls” or “Orders” should be set using tags. You create new tags automatically by typing words in the "tags" field in the "tasks" tab. If you write tags separated by commas, then several tags will be assigned to the task. Some people overdo it with the number tag, so I recommend limiting it to the most common and useful ones. For example: “@ work”, “@ calls”, “orders”, etc.
The picture shows the task “to call the restaurant and reserve a table”, marked with the tags “@call” and “next action”, as well as with the marker “@ work” as the location.
Even if this task is personal, I marked it with the “work” marker, because I want to perform it during the working day, since the restaurant is open at this particular time.
Note that both deposits and tags fall into the so-called. "Tag Cloud". As a result, you get a simple way to display all the tasks for each of the contexts - just click on the desired “place” or tag. True, using smart lists (or smart lists) is even more convenient.
Creating smart lists to separate tasks by context
Your daily and project lists correspond to the first four phases of GTD (collection, processing, organization and review) i. transfer all tasks and projects from your head to a proven and well-organized system. RTM lists focus your attention on the final and most important step - doing your work.
Smart lists in RTM allow you to filter an array of tasks in the way you want. Just as lists in a project allow you to view all the tasks inside this project, smart lists can be used to filter cases by, for example, “further actions” or by matters necessary to be performed at home (as well as at work, and in online).
For example, this illustration shows my smart order list. The lists panel on the right shows which of the smart lists is displayed. In this case, these are tasks marked with the tags “@ orders” and “next action” (i.e. “na”). Thus, only the tasks marked with these two tags are included in this list.
My smart job list is a more complex example. I want it to display all the tasks from the “next steps” and, since I work in the center and run out for lunch, personal tasks that I have to do in the city center (for example, drop by the dry-cleaner). The list shown in the image above contains tasks labeled “next action” and the location “city center”. At the same time, the list is marked with the filter “no tasks ending two weeks from today”. I use this filter to focus only on immediate tasks and not pay attention to future tasks.
Please note that the task “drop by the dry-cleaner” is displayed in two lists at once: the list of orders and the list “work”. Smart lists allow me to be flexible and allow me to perform this task either at lunchtime or on a Saturday day (when parsing the list of instructions).
Recently, I started another smart list, entitled @ Work-MIT, where I put the most important tasks (MIT - Most Important Tasks). As soon as my list containing the “next steps” to work becomes immense, I start working only with the @ Work-MIT list. As you can see from the table below, this list includes only tasks of the first and second priority (importance). As soon as the tasks from the @ Work-MIT are finished, I will return to my regular list.
Name of the smart list: Conditions to hit the list
@ Houses: “na” tag and location “@ Houses”
@ Calls: tag "na" and tag @ Calls
@ Orders: the “na” tag and @ Orders
Web : “na” tag and Web tag
@ Job: “na” tag and location “@ Job” or @ Center. As well as the filter “no tasks ending two weeks from today”
@ Work-MIT: tag “na” and location “@ Work” or @ Center. As well as the filter "no tasks, ending two weeks from today." Priority: only 1 or 2.
Lists "Pending" and "Someday / Maybe"
There are tasks that need to be controlled, but dependent on other people. For example, you can wait for a piece of work from an employee to complete a new logo design for a website you are working on. Or do you expect to return the debt to buy yourself a new iPhone. All of these tasks are “Pending” and should be tracked separately from your current to-do list. Therefore, instead of marking “na” (i.e. the next action) we mark them with the tag “wait”, i.e. "expect".
Any tasks delegated to other people should be tagged with this tag. I also added tags with the names of those to whom I delegate tasks. For example, the tag "K" for my wife and "Aaron" for his assistant. Selecting a separate tag for a person allows you to add it to the tag cloud and quickly see all the tasks associated with this name. This is especially useful when preparing for a meeting with this person.
Name of the smart list: conditions to hit the list
PS-Wait: tag "wait" and exclude the place @ Work
WK-Wait: “wait” tag and place @ Jobs or @ Center
Finally, we will create PS-Someday and WK-Someday lists to track work and personal projects belonging to the Someday / Maybe. This could be a circumnavigation or reading "war and peace", site redesign, or something like that. I draw your attention to the fact that these lists are normal, not smart lists.
Transfer all projects that fall under the category of "someday" in these lists to keep them for the future. Be sure that tasks from this category do not contain the “na” and “wait” tags so that they are not displayed in other places (for example, in “work”). You will view these lists during your weekly reviews and tag them with the necessary tags at a time when the project from the “someday” category has matured to being moved to the list of current affairs.
The PS-Someday and WK-Someday lists will become a safe place to store all those things that you are not ready to do, but would not want to forget about them. If you wish, you can set a reminder with a specific date, if you want to recall a business, say, in 6 months.
Other simple and smart lists (to bring the reminder system into a holistic view)
I use a few other lists to keep track of things:
1. iTunes list of songs that I hear on the radio that I want to buy
2. Book list of books to read
3. A list to keep track of things I took from friends (or friends took from me). I recommend setting reminders to remember when to return.
And I also created a WK-WeeklyStatus smart list to automatically generate weekly activity reports. Now RTM sends me this list every week by email.
Name of the smart list: conditions to hit the list
WK-WeeklyStatus: completed within one week from today, place @ Work. But does not include things from the PS-Daily list.
Making all this work together
Every time you disassemble your inbox, all cases requiring more than 2 minutes for execution should be marked with a corresponding label. I move any emails associated with a project to a separate folder with the same name as the project in RTM. When the project is completed, I will simply delete or move to the archive the corresponding list in RTM and the email folder. By the way, if you use Firefox, I strongly recommend that you use the RTM Firefox extension .
You should also do a weekly review of your affairs, and this is probably the hardest thing in GTD. Remember that review is the glue that holds your entire system together. Use the weekly review to brainstorm new tasks, identify and label “next steps”, move tasks between lists. Pay attention to the “someday” lists and do not forget about the “waiting” lists to remember which events you are tracking.
Once you have recorded your tasks and identified your next steps, you are ready to begin working with your smart lists. Select the list for the current content (for example @ Work) and start working. You can perform tasks based on whether you have the time and energy to perform specific tasks, or choose a random task. It all depends on you. Remember that each completed task is another step to complete one of your goals.
Remember The Milk is my favorite web app. it supports all five phases of GTD (collection, processing, organization, review and execution) in an automatic, seamless mode. His simple but powerful tools help me focus on doing my job, not on endless messing around with the system. Thereby moving my life forward step by step.
================
Translation corrections are welcome.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/112536/
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