How to safely go to GTD
As an epigraph: " Throw everything out of my head! " © D.Allen
If you think about why you are not satisfied with the current state of affairs, then this means only one thing - you have a problem with doing business and the fact that your current system of control over affairs does not work. There is of course a rare exception - you are too much charged on you so that you can fulfill it. But I have not seen this yet.
Silver bullet, alas, is not here. Nobody will do your work for you, and the control method, even the most effective, will not add more hours to the working day than it has. Therefore, you should not hope that all problems will evaporate like smoke, you just have to install the appropriate program or implement a particular technique. It all depends on you and no one else.
')
What I “love” David Allen for is that he said a lot of good things, gave food for the mind, but did not give any effective recipes for introducing his technique. I want to smooth this gap.
“The method, in essence, Gurdjieff's, refers to the so-called“ cunning man's way ”. In it, you see yourself as a car. ” © V.Pelevin, Generation P
So, when we found out that no one is going to help us solve our problems, a reasonable question arises - what is all this about? Yes, your problems are your problems. I can't help here. But you can help start to feel better, even with a load of problems many times more than the current! So, for the most part, we will not be talking about business, but about your conscious and subconscious mind.
The transition from any system to another system is heavy. If only because your consciousness needs to be reconstructed. Each case that is currently on your list is a separate process / algorithm / condition. And they all eat up your attention, which is not unlimited. This is the mess with which you have to fight. How many reminder notes do you have? How many entries do you have marked “Do not forget”? Gained, I think pretty. But as soon as we make such a mark, our consciousness begins an infinite cycle, constantly raising this task to the top of your attention. But when there are many such tasks, the “stack” begins to fail, and you forget exactly what was needed “not to forget.”
So, when switching from one system (or from a total mess) to another, you additionally hang more processes for each task. Your poor consciousness is already overloaded! Therefore, it makes no sense to try to cover everything at once. Do it gradually. In the case of GTD, the process will go on an avalanche (slowly at first, further and faster and easier). Why is that? Because the GTD system offers a single algorithm for all cases, and accordingly, your consciousness over time begins to unload from unnecessary repetitions of the algorithms hung on each case, freeing up "useful space" for something else.
(here you should read the book Getting Things Done for terms.)
Do not immediately try to build a large universal scheme. You bog in it again. You will improve it later, as needed.
To get started, take your to-do list and select from it the most exciting cases at the moment. They will be typed from a dozen two, for a start it will be enough. Now place these "affairs" in the incoming. Then take from your list at least 5 cases that you feel uncomfortable / do not want to do, which you constantly postpone for later. Put them there too. This is your "starting capital". It is these cases that currently occupy your “operational memory”; it is from them that we have to start getting rid of first of all. But "getting rid of" does not mean that you will make them right away! “Get rid” means to unload your mind. These are different things.
Retreat: D. Allen advises to immediately sort out all the cases. This will work only in the case when the affairs are already relatively tidy or the consciousness is not overloaded yet, and the free time is just heaped up. I want to make the transition more painless and effective.
Add up? Good. Now let's forget about them for a while and do another thing - we will create a audit trail. This will be a list of daily mandatory actions. With his viewing should begin your working day. Let's write in it only several actions:
This is your action plan until the old list is empty. Your self-organization will begin with it. Your working morning should start with the fact that you perform each item sequentially. As long as the list of your old affairs is not exhausted, you will have business at the end of the working day at the end of the day - don’t worry, you’ll sort them out tomorrow.
Now we will return to the incoming.
Crush, categorize, but do not shrink
My first mistake was to produce a bunch of contexts just like that. After some time I had to re-review the entire list. The task is not pleasant, it takes a lot of time.
So, for starters, define yourself the rules for naming contexts:
@ Is a place that suggests action
# Is a temporary frame (let's say # morning, # day, # evening)
= - Action Type
^ - this event ... (Although it's too early to mess with them)
! - this is a group of contexts (not used for marking cases)
The main types of contexts you will have only two - the place and type of action. The rest is for programs and advanced users.
So, start the following contexts:
@House
@Office
@The outside
@Score
These are the main places. You can add here more places where you are often on business. But only those where you are more than once a year.
Attention! Do not add contexts if you do not have any business for them.
Now we will create contexts for actions:
= Call
= Email
= Meeting
= Document
= Buy
= Check (used to check delegated tasks)
For self-organization and to control the daily routine you can add time contexts:
#Morning
#Noon
#Dinner
#After lunch
#Evening
Status:
~ Frog
For now, only this! The rest you will have added as needed.
Now you can proceed to the analysis of the tasks that we stored at the very beginning.
Stable cleaning and eating amphibians
I am more than confident that the list of those 10-20 tasks that you have put together will grow as a result of parsing up to 50 tasks. Why? Because there are always not tasks, but goals (such as “raise sales”, “develop a concept”, “move to another office”). They will be broken down into 5-10 tasks related to the very goal you have already described. You have to take each case into your hands and follow the GTD scheme - “what is it? Do I have to do? How long will it take? ”
In other words - you read your task and ask yourself one question - “ What is it? How should I do it? ”. If this is a simple action that you can perform, then the task is set correctly. If this implies several actions, or a case that is ramified with a number of conditions, then this is the goal (or project). It should be split into a list of simple and understandable actions, such as "call, talk, write a letter, create a document, find information, transfer". So you free your mind from the task of redefining "What is it?" When you look at the entry in the task list.
Disassemble tasks from the top down, not grabbing what you think is easy and that you can perform this very second. It is very important. You are not required to perform, just disassemble! But if the current case, which fell into your hands, can be completed in less than two minutes, then complete it and forget about it! Need to call and make an appointment? Take the phone and call. But if it takes more than two minutes - leave it for later, because otherwise the entire list of your affairs will move to the inbox and nothing will change.
What should you do at the time of analysis? Determine the type, place, maybe time for action, mark it with context / s and transfer this matter to a specific folder. You can have any folder structure as you like. It does not matter. Everything!
As a digression: What happens to the mind at the time of the analysis? When you define a simple type of action, then you unconsciously understand that the action is actually extremely simple and can be performed by you without much effort. By labeling a case with a context, you automatically add a standard algorithm to the case. Your mind ceases to keep in mind the algorithm for this particular case. It is sorted into a certain library of algorithms to the side, and the case is in a different direction with the note “when used, get the necessary algorithm from the library”.
When moving a case out of its own folder, your consciousness believes that it is already partly on the way to execution and reduces the anxiety factor and, accordingly, stress.
Unpleasant things are called with the light hand of Arkhangelsk - frogs. They need to eat. You have no idea how much RAM they eat! This may be quite a simple two-minute operation, but it is so unpleasant to you that you postpone it for a day or two, then for a week or two or three months ... And in the end it grows up just into a huge problem. This can be anything - from an unpleasant call to the payment of a bill or tax that you do not want to pay.
The frogs have a very unpleasant feature - they love to multiply. It so happens that an unpaid bill runs the risk of turning into a trial or not a call at a loss for a company on time, an unsubstantiated resume into a good job that was not received, a gift to a home altercation that was not bought on time. And initially a primitive action will grow in ten of the same unpleasant actions. Personally, with only a couple of dozen frogs, I was driven into a state of severe depression.
But after you ate it - the feeling is that from the soul they took just a huge stone! The sun shines brighter, the grass is greener, I want to live
So, leave the daily business of eating a frog in a magazine and be a gourmet of French cuisine - this is useful for your nerves and business in general.
Tasks dismantled, what's next?
Have you completed a daily plan for analyzing your tasks? Wonderful! Now, using the context system, filter and proceed to their execution. FORGET ABOUT LIST WITH OLD DEEDS !!! Everything, you will return to it only tomorrow. Confidence in this will give you strength.
How to filter? Very simple: ask yourself the question “Where am I? What's next to me? What can I do at the moment (based on the context of action) "
- I am at home, next to the phone, computer, now it's noon ...
We filter: @ House + (= Calls, = Email, = Document, = Check, # Noon)
Now playing filters you can easily see all the current possible cases. Then everything depends on you.
If it happened that your to-do list was suddenly empty, proceed to step 1 — refill the incoming ones and start the parsing, sorting, marking algorithm ...
On the importance of algorithms. Do not cut corners!
Popular wisdom says: haste is needed only when catching fleas. The same applies to your business. Always, always, always act only with a well-honed algorithm. This will allow you to:
The more your consciousness will be released, the more you will be able to pay attention to the expansion of the system. You will have to expand it, but mostly only for planning the next steps. Otherwise, everything will remain unchanged. Many tasks, one algorithm, several rigid rules and a free and clean head
Finally, a few rules that have been suffered by me personally:
Do not use reminders, this does not work. Discard the reminder, better look in the list more often. This disciplines you and removes the stress factor that causes the reminder. It's a paradox, but we hang reminders most often on frogs. Excessive reminder of them, and even in such a rigid form - is a stress factor. Be yourself a master of your affairs.
About technical means
In my opinion, the best tool for doing things, for today - MyLifeOrganized (MLO). But not a mobile version, alas. Use your mobile phone only to collect incoming cases and to monitor cases outside the home. But not for planning / sorting - the small screen does not allow to see the full picture.
Update: habrahabr.ru/blogs/blackberry/123227 - my experience with the BlackBerry.
As postscript
Remember what I said at the beginning? Yes, there is no silver bullet. Most likely, you will still encounter a number of problems, but this topic is for a different article.
If you think about why you are not satisfied with the current state of affairs, then this means only one thing - you have a problem with doing business and the fact that your current system of control over affairs does not work. There is of course a rare exception - you are too much charged on you so that you can fulfill it. But I have not seen this yet.
Silver bullet, alas, is not here. Nobody will do your work for you, and the control method, even the most effective, will not add more hours to the working day than it has. Therefore, you should not hope that all problems will evaporate like smoke, you just have to install the appropriate program or implement a particular technique. It all depends on you and no one else.
')
What I “love” David Allen for is that he said a lot of good things, gave food for the mind, but did not give any effective recipes for introducing his technique. I want to smooth this gap.
“The method, in essence, Gurdjieff's, refers to the so-called“ cunning man's way ”. In it, you see yourself as a car. ” © V.Pelevin, Generation P
So, when we found out that no one is going to help us solve our problems, a reasonable question arises - what is all this about? Yes, your problems are your problems. I can't help here. But you can help start to feel better, even with a load of problems many times more than the current! So, for the most part, we will not be talking about business, but about your conscious and subconscious mind.
The transition from any system to another system is heavy. If only because your consciousness needs to be reconstructed. Each case that is currently on your list is a separate process / algorithm / condition. And they all eat up your attention, which is not unlimited. This is the mess with which you have to fight. How many reminder notes do you have? How many entries do you have marked “Do not forget”? Gained, I think pretty. But as soon as we make such a mark, our consciousness begins an infinite cycle, constantly raising this task to the top of your attention. But when there are many such tasks, the “stack” begins to fail, and you forget exactly what was needed “not to forget.”
So, when switching from one system (or from a total mess) to another, you additionally hang more processes for each task. Your poor consciousness is already overloaded! Therefore, it makes no sense to try to cover everything at once. Do it gradually. In the case of GTD, the process will go on an avalanche (slowly at first, further and faster and easier). Why is that? Because the GTD system offers a single algorithm for all cases, and accordingly, your consciousness over time begins to unload from unnecessary repetitions of the algorithms hung on each case, freeing up "useful space" for something else.
(here you should read the book Getting Things Done for terms.)
Do not immediately try to build a large universal scheme. You bog in it again. You will improve it later, as needed.
To get started, take your to-do list and select from it the most exciting cases at the moment. They will be typed from a dozen two, for a start it will be enough. Now place these "affairs" in the incoming. Then take from your list at least 5 cases that you feel uncomfortable / do not want to do, which you constantly postpone for later. Put them there too. This is your "starting capital". It is these cases that currently occupy your “operational memory”; it is from them that we have to start getting rid of first of all. But "getting rid of" does not mean that you will make them right away! “Get rid” means to unload your mind. These are different things.
Retreat: D. Allen advises to immediately sort out all the cases. This will work only in the case when the affairs are already relatively tidy or the consciousness is not overloaded yet, and the free time is just heaped up. I want to make the transition more painless and effective.
Add up? Good. Now let's forget about them for a while and do another thing - we will create a audit trail. This will be a list of daily mandatory actions. With his viewing should begin your working day. Let's write in it only several actions:
- Parse inbox
- Eat a frog (or a few frogs at your discretion)
- To bring 10-20 important for today affairs from the old list in entering
- Add 5 unpleasant cases from the old list to the inbox
This is your action plan until the old list is empty. Your self-organization will begin with it. Your working morning should start with the fact that you perform each item sequentially. As long as the list of your old affairs is not exhausted, you will have business at the end of the working day at the end of the day - don’t worry, you’ll sort them out tomorrow.
Now we will return to the incoming.
Crush, categorize, but do not shrink
My first mistake was to produce a bunch of contexts just like that. After some time I had to re-review the entire list. The task is not pleasant, it takes a lot of time.
So, for starters, define yourself the rules for naming contexts:
@ Is a place that suggests action
# Is a temporary frame (let's say # morning, # day, # evening)
= - Action Type
^ - this event ... (Although it's too early to mess with them)
! - this is a group of contexts (not used for marking cases)
The main types of contexts you will have only two - the place and type of action. The rest is for programs and advanced users.
So, start the following contexts:
@House
@Office
@The outside
@Score
These are the main places. You can add here more places where you are often on business. But only those where you are more than once a year.
Attention! Do not add contexts if you do not have any business for them.
Now we will create contexts for actions:
= Call
= Meeting
= Document
= Buy
= Check (used to check delegated tasks)
For self-organization and to control the daily routine you can add time contexts:
#Morning
#Noon
#Dinner
#After lunch
#Evening
Status:
~ Frog
For now, only this! The rest you will have added as needed.
Now you can proceed to the analysis of the tasks that we stored at the very beginning.
Stable cleaning and eating amphibians
I am more than confident that the list of those 10-20 tasks that you have put together will grow as a result of parsing up to 50 tasks. Why? Because there are always not tasks, but goals (such as “raise sales”, “develop a concept”, “move to another office”). They will be broken down into 5-10 tasks related to the very goal you have already described. You have to take each case into your hands and follow the GTD scheme - “what is it? Do I have to do? How long will it take? ”
In other words - you read your task and ask yourself one question - “ What is it? How should I do it? ”. If this is a simple action that you can perform, then the task is set correctly. If this implies several actions, or a case that is ramified with a number of conditions, then this is the goal (or project). It should be split into a list of simple and understandable actions, such as "call, talk, write a letter, create a document, find information, transfer". So you free your mind from the task of redefining "What is it?" When you look at the entry in the task list.
Disassemble tasks from the top down, not grabbing what you think is easy and that you can perform this very second. It is very important. You are not required to perform, just disassemble! But if the current case, which fell into your hands, can be completed in less than two minutes, then complete it and forget about it! Need to call and make an appointment? Take the phone and call. But if it takes more than two minutes - leave it for later, because otherwise the entire list of your affairs will move to the inbox and nothing will change.
What should you do at the time of analysis? Determine the type, place, maybe time for action, mark it with context / s and transfer this matter to a specific folder. You can have any folder structure as you like. It does not matter. Everything!
As a digression: What happens to the mind at the time of the analysis? When you define a simple type of action, then you unconsciously understand that the action is actually extremely simple and can be performed by you without much effort. By labeling a case with a context, you automatically add a standard algorithm to the case. Your mind ceases to keep in mind the algorithm for this particular case. It is sorted into a certain library of algorithms to the side, and the case is in a different direction with the note “when used, get the necessary algorithm from the library”.
When moving a case out of its own folder, your consciousness believes that it is already partly on the way to execution and reduces the anxiety factor and, accordingly, stress.
Unpleasant things are called with the light hand of Arkhangelsk - frogs. They need to eat. You have no idea how much RAM they eat! This may be quite a simple two-minute operation, but it is so unpleasant to you that you postpone it for a day or two, then for a week or two or three months ... And in the end it grows up just into a huge problem. This can be anything - from an unpleasant call to the payment of a bill or tax that you do not want to pay.
The frogs have a very unpleasant feature - they love to multiply. It so happens that an unpaid bill runs the risk of turning into a trial or not a call at a loss for a company on time, an unsubstantiated resume into a good job that was not received, a gift to a home altercation that was not bought on time. And initially a primitive action will grow in ten of the same unpleasant actions. Personally, with only a couple of dozen frogs, I was driven into a state of severe depression.
But after you ate it - the feeling is that from the soul they took just a huge stone! The sun shines brighter, the grass is greener, I want to live
So, leave the daily business of eating a frog in a magazine and be a gourmet of French cuisine - this is useful for your nerves and business in general.
Tasks dismantled, what's next?
Have you completed a daily plan for analyzing your tasks? Wonderful! Now, using the context system, filter and proceed to their execution. FORGET ABOUT LIST WITH OLD DEEDS !!! Everything, you will return to it only tomorrow. Confidence in this will give you strength.
How to filter? Very simple: ask yourself the question “Where am I? What's next to me? What can I do at the moment (based on the context of action) "
- I am at home, next to the phone, computer, now it's noon ...
We filter: @ House + (= Calls, = Email, = Document, = Check, # Noon)
Now playing filters you can easily see all the current possible cases. Then everything depends on you.
If it happened that your to-do list was suddenly empty, proceed to step 1 — refill the incoming ones and start the parsing, sorting, marking algorithm ...
On the importance of algorithms. Do not cut corners!
Popular wisdom says: haste is needed only when catching fleas. The same applies to your business. Always, always, always act only with a well-honed algorithm. This will allow you to:
- Avoid mistakes
- Unload your mind
The more your consciousness will be released, the more you will be able to pay attention to the expansion of the system. You will have to expand it, but mostly only for planning the next steps. Otherwise, everything will remain unchanged. Many tasks, one algorithm, several rigid rules and a free and clean head
Finally, a few rules that have been suffered by me personally:
- Always put a new task in your inbox without marking it. Just write down the task / note, comment to it and add to the inbox without making any attempts to categorize it. If you follow the action algorithms, then you are sure that you will return to this task when it is at that time. Calmly evaluate it, categorize and then make a decision.
- Do not keep anything in your head. A thought came to mind, even the most primitive in the style of “it would be necessary to check the odometer for an oil change” - write it in your inbox. If you do not do this, the consciousness will constantly return to it. You have already designed it in your mind and have given yourself the task. Until you fulfill it or refuse to perform it, it will occupy your attention, even if it is hidden, but it will be! The only exception to the rule is that if you can do it right now within two minutes and you have time for it, better do it now. You will be surprised how much is being done right now.
- Changing the location, look in the to-do list. This will give you confidence that you are not forgetting anything. Initially, your mind is still in the habit of keeping things tied to a place in your head. But, if you constantly check the list, the mind will relax and trust your habit.
- Mark cases on the date they are listed. This will allow you to sort things that have been hanging for a very long time. Most likely - it is garbage that must be thrown out. Your consciousness will be free from it with great pleasure.
- At the time of the transition to GTD, forget about things that are out of the system! It is very important. You have to trust yourself. Without this, the system will never work. But new cases should fall only in GTD, and not in the old list.
Do not use reminders, this does not work. Discard the reminder, better look in the list more often. This disciplines you and removes the stress factor that causes the reminder. It's a paradox, but we hang reminders most often on frogs. Excessive reminder of them, and even in such a rigid form - is a stress factor. Be yourself a master of your affairs.
About technical means
In my opinion, the best tool for doing things, for today - MyLifeOrganized (MLO). But not a mobile version, alas. Use your mobile phone only to collect incoming cases and to monitor cases outside the home. But not for planning / sorting - the small screen does not allow to see the full picture.
Update: habrahabr.ru/blogs/blackberry/123227 - my experience with the BlackBerry.
As postscript
Remember what I said at the beginning? Yes, there is no silver bullet. Most likely, you will still encounter a number of problems, but this topic is for a different article.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/123040/
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