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A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

blog.zenkit.com

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Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#161

Post by axiomdata316 »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #31

This was mercifully shorter than the Cal Newport book. That's about all I can say for it. Ivan Sutherland had the secret, and it only took one paragraph to share it: ' I used to hate washing dishes. I would delay as long as possible. Eyeing the daunting pile of dishes, I would say to myself, “I'll be here forever at this dumb task.” The enormity of the task deterred me from starting. I still dislike washing dishes, b…

Cal Newport wrote the book "Deep Work". David Allen wrote "Getting Things Done". Do you mean David Allen instead of Cal Newport?

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#162

Post by bachmeier »

submeta wrote: post #132
bachmeier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree. By being explicit about all of your decisions to do things, and how much time it will take, you learn over time about the tradeoffs and stop doing worthless things. If you capture, review, plan, and think about where you're going long-term, you will stop doing things that have no value to you. (At least it worked for me.) Whether it works for everyone, I don't know, but the first step is to get c…

Try to review all your lists (or one list in a given context) every time you sit down to do work and choose the one that is the right one at a given time, energy level, context. Personally, I find that overwhelming. Also I don't wait to be in a context (at phone, at computer, ...) Rather, I define my context, sit down and focus on one project single mindedly for hours and days to get this project done. Of course I ha…

> review all your lists (or one list in a given context) every time you sit down to do work

That's the opposite of GTD. One of the goals of GTD is that you get to a point that you don't make decisions about what to do while you're working.

> when I want to get work done, I ignore all these lists, get in tunnel-view-mode and forget about everything else.

The ability to do that is the benefit of GTD.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#163

Post by fapjacks »

moshiah wrote: post #126
fapjacks wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I've done every insane, amazing, stupid, disgusting, crazy, dangerous, phenomenal thing in my entire life. From eating balut to asking my wife out to maneuvering under fire.

Please describe the balut, and if you'd recommend the experience.

I ate it right out of the shell deep in the Filipino jungle. I knew for years what it was and had preconceived notions. Besides the texture of certain parts I could identify while chewing (e.g. feet, beak), it really just honestly tasted like a kind of hard-boiled egg. If I didn't know what I was eating, I wouldn't have second-guessed it at all. I do recommend it, for the adventure. The Filipino guys that gave it to me said it gives you a big burst of energy, and I thought they were full of it, but indeed, it gave me a kind of heady feeling. I think that just might have been getting a ton of calories all at once?

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#164

Post by Danihan »

renegadesensei wrote: post #23

I recently started making small handwritten TODO lists that I keep in my pocket. It has significantly improved my productivity. Every morning while I'm getting ready, I usually think of about seven or eight things I really want to get done that day, and if I'm lucky, I'll actually do one or two. With this method I find I'm getting about four or five things done. I find that the act of actually handwriting the TODO li…

Same, except I do it every 4 hours or so.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#165

Post by jvagner »

agumonkey wrote: post #105
PeOe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, true! I see your point now! I guess the determining factor is a mix of motivation and drive combined with "getting started". Breaking tasks up into smaller tasks doesn´t really do anything if you have no motivation and don´t get started.

Sometimes I think we should have resistance training. Just to get used to slightly unpleasant things, done a dozen times.

There's a book called "The War of Art" that addresses exactly that: "resistance"

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#166

Post by jvagner »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #61
d0mine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note: diet doesn't work long term: > After about five years, 41 percent of dieters gain back more weight than they lost. Long-term studies show dieters are more likely than non-dieters to become obese over the next one to 15 years. > ... The study found that a single diet increased the odds of becoming overweight by a factor of two in men and three in women. Women who had gone on two or more diets during th…

Diet works just fine. Human willpower doesn't work long term.

As a tech exec and certified personal trainer, I say: Exactly.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#167

Post by ajnin »

komali2 wrote: post #159
nikivi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"commit nothing except the task on hand to my working memory" is essentially the summary of GTD done approach.

What character did you insert after "G" in "GxTD?" It's not rendering on my browser, weirdly.

I wondered the same thing. It shows up in Chromium but not Firefox. It is apprently character 0x14, or ASCII for "Device control 4". First time I come across this character !

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#168

Post by komali2 »

majewsky wrote: post #160
komali2 wrote: post #154

>Lastly, if something might require action someday, but not now, it is added to the someday list. These are things that you want to remember, but shouldn’t be cluttering up your ‘next actions’ list. Things like ‘Learn Japanese’ or ‘write a book’ go here. So let's take "learn Japanese" as the example, because that is a goal of mine and I already am engaged in achieving this goal. Before having any awareness of this GT…

> how on earth would I break these into "actions" [...] if I had no concept of how to learn a language? If you don't know how to break a larger task into actions, you are simply unable to perform the task, regardless of whether you use GTD or not. What GTD does is make you consciously aware of the process of breaking down larger tasks into smaller actions. > Right now I just putt around in the Santa Cruz mountains an…

So in the GTD system, an action can be a permanent, do-every-day thing? How would you decide it's "done" then? (assuming lots of long-term goals require "practice x for y/times per z" events)

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#169

Post by danial »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #31

This was mercifully shorter than the Cal Newport book. That's about all I can say for it. Ivan Sutherland had the secret, and it only took one paragraph to share it: ' I used to hate washing dishes. I would delay as long as possible. Eyeing the daunting pile of dishes, I would say to myself, “I'll be here forever at this dumb task.” The enormity of the task deterred me from starting. I still dislike washing dishes, b…

I think you meant David Allen, rather than Cal Newport.

Cal Newport seems to think GTD is flawed because it doesn't help you prioritize meaningful work: http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/12/21/getting-unremarkable-t...

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#170

Post by Jtsummers »

komali2 wrote: post #157
nextos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same issue. This is why I now prefer a kanban board. As much as I dislike overhyped "lean" in software, in the TPS spirit I think it's a great way to prioritize and avoid planning waste. With GTD I found I spend too much time writing task lists that would become outdated soon. WIP limits bring focus.

What do you mean by "WIP" in this context? Work in progress? If that's the case, what does "WIP limits" mean?

WIP = work in progress.

Generally, in process management/improvement texts like on Lean or Theory of Constraints, you want to limit your work in progress to prevent backlogs and problems.

I have 100 books I want to read, that's probably an underestimate. I have 10 open right now at home (I cannot read one book straight through most of the time). I will not open another book until I have finished one of those 10.

Since I can only read one book at a time (the actual act of reading) and I only have about 2 hours a day to read, if I let my list grow larger I'd never finish. Many of these take approximately 1 hour/chapter and have 10-20 chapters. So I've got around 100-200 hours of work ahead of me, spread over 50-100 days. Adding another book to the queue means another 10 hours, or 5 days, to clear the list.

(Until I wrote this I actually hadn't put this much thought into my reading, but this is approximately what I do.)

In order to keep moving on any project you have to limit the amount of concurrent activities that you are doing so that progress can continue.

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