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A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

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Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#181

Post by marcuschristie »

blonky wrote: post #148
throw7 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just reminded me of a song from one of my favorite childhood shows... "Put One Foot in Front of the Other" from a stop-motion film titled "Santa Claus is comin' to Town". Put one foot in front of the other And soon you'll be walking 'cross the floor. You put one foot in front of the other And soon you'll be walking out the door.

This was a mantra both my brothers used while going through Marine Corps bootcamp. You don't have to get to the end of the 50-mile-hike. Just take one more step. I always remember this when facing my own seemingly impossible tasks. Mental or physical.

I do something similar when running. When I feel like stopping and walking the rest of the route I'll pick a landmark up ahead, like a telephone pole or a mailbox, and say to myself, "I'll just run to that." Once I get to the landmark though, I feel I can still go on a bit so I pick another landmark up ahead that I'll run to. And so on.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#182

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

submeta wrote: post #37

I read David Allen's book in 2002 and immediately started implementing it. At first it felt like godsend. Capturing every "open loop" (everything that is not the way it should be = everything with a delta between current and desired state) and deciding for each of them if there is any action that I need to take and if so, what the very next step was - that practice alone released a ton of energy and gave me a sense o…

The key takeaway I got from GTD was just in capturing the thought, and therefore stopping it from cropping back up in thinking, and causing stress about stuff NOT getting done. This, in an of itself, helped me greatly.

Then, one random morning, as I was thinking in the shower (as one does), I had a sudden revelation: As someone who frequently suffered from intrusive thoughts over past pain (as many of us do), could this "mind like water" approach be applied to these thoughts as well?

I started writing out all the things that bothered me on a continually recurring basis. All the bad things I had done. All the bad things that had happened. This wasn't anything special; I just journaled the events, with an attempt to identify why these memories stuck with me, and still caused me pain, and what, if anything, I had learned from the experience. Within weeks, I was mostly finished. It's a Word doc, weighing in at about 25 pages, last I checked.

The difference was nearly miraculous. There's very little else that has changed my life so profoundly, and none so quickly. It's been, probably, 8-10 years ago now. I almost never have intrusive thoughts now. I still do things I regret, of course, but, with experience, I make smaller mistakes now, and my maturity in handling them has caught up to their magnitude, and there's no longer a huge gap between the action and reaction. To use a computer analogy, I cleaned out all my old core files, and now I use a garbage collected language anyway, so I'm not wasting all that disk space any more.

I'm relating this in the off chance that someone like me could see it, and benefit from this as well.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#183

Post by bachmeier »

submeta wrote: post #174
bachmeier wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You always have to decide. Say you are in the context "at office" and have a list with twenty action items on a list called @office. Which one will you do? You have to choose. Based upon your energy level, time available, etc. David Allen (DA) outlines a process where you sit down ( way before you start implementing a project), brainstorm / think through / clarify / define the endgame, and finally come up with "atomi…

> DA recommends not to organise lists by priority

I agree with his advice. You are either going to complete a task or not complete it. If you define one task to be important and another to be trivial, they shouldn't be on the same list, or if they are, you should put the important task on the top. Things that have to get done should really go on your calendar.

> Why not take a decision way before and learn to clear things in advance, internally or externally (by saying the magic word: "no"), decide, that I don't want to follow up on that thing. Instead of having various lists with endless "open loops" that I want to close asap / someday/maybe.

But that's what you're doing with GTD. You capture everything that requires a decision, then at the end of the day or week, you make a decision about it. One of the motivations for GTD is that anything that needs a decision with either be floating around inside your brain, or inside a trusted system, and if you put it in a trusted system (where you know it will be reviewed soon enough) you free your brain to do work.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#184

Post by npsimons »

kaybe wrote: post #59
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…

There is a second step to this: 'You can stop if you want to.' Just washing one plate does not mean I have to wash all of them. Stopping after only half of them is acceptable and preferable to not starting. So I can pick up and wash one without worrying about the full task.

Works great for exercise too: "just run for five minutes, then see how you feel", "just do the warm-up sets". Even if you stop, it's better than vegging on the couch.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#185

Post by npsimons »

submeta wrote: post #37

I read David Allen's book in 2002 and immediately started implementing it. At first it felt like godsend. Capturing every "open loop" (everything that is not the way it should be = everything with a delta between current and desired state) and deciding for each of them if there is any action that I need to take and if so, what the very next step was - that practice alone released a ton of energy and gave me a sense o…

> But it lacks the advice to implement a filter: To ignore 80% of the potential issues before we let them onto our lists.

Is there a problem with just capturing, moving on, then filtering later? I find my anxiety much reduced and my focus much increased if I just org-capture random idea, then get back to the task at hand. Version control of my org files and feeling free to archive, even going so far as setting status to DEFERRED or CANCELLED, but it's still written down (and no longer cluttering my mind) keeps me saner.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#186

Post by rconti »

ryangittins wrote: post #130
swah wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar trick works for avoiding sugary treats: don't strongly oppose this desire - instead say to yourself you can eat it at a later time and move your mind to something else. (When you finally eat whatever it was you so much desired, you didn't really fail, because you are only consuming 1 unit for those 3/5/whatever days, instead of one every day...)

I use this trick when I want to buy something online which I don't absolutely need. I'll add it to a wish list on Amazon (or even put it in my cart) and then leave the site. When I come back a few days or weeks later, I often find myself asking why I ever wanted that thing in the first place and remove it.

This is actually my entire approach to spending. It got started when I was a kid or teen. When you want that stupid frivolous pair of $150 sunglasses but can't afford them, you can't help but put it off. If, at some point in the future, you have the money (or close to it) and you've been thinking about the same stupid thing for a year or two, maybe it's not so stupid! Or at least maybe it's worth splurging to make yourself happy. It would seem that postponing a purchase accomplishes nothing, but actually, sometimes you end up not making the purchase at all. And if you do, you're more satisfied by it, and have gone a longer time between satisfying those spending urges, and you spend less per year. The times when I say "ah, I'm just gonna have to buy all this stuff eventually, might as well just do it all at once" are sure to be the most wasteful.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#187

Post by rconti »

PeOe wrote: post #71
lxglv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I used the same approach to start running: “just lace the shoes”. After you finish this, you are almost running.

Haha! that´s genius. Could technically be applied to lots of unpleasant tasks. I sometimes have difficulties with getting out of bed in the morning. Might a "just stand up" help with that problem? I will test that tomorrow.

I'm an expert at getting out of bed, walking across the room to snooze the alarm, walking back, and getting back in bed. Sometimes for hours!

That said, I sort of rely on this process where each time I wake up I'm slightly less likely to fall back asleep. Sometimes I grab my phone and figure I'll just look at a few things while I lounge in bed, and within a minute or two my brain is awake and I realize I'm past the hump and may as well just get up. Whereas when I'm less alert, falling back asleep seems FAR easier than just getting up.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#188

Post by Jtsummers »

komali2 wrote: post #168
majewsky wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

You may pick a piece you want to play of modest complexity and difficulty. You're "done" when you can play it. But are you really? No, you just pick another, harder, piece.

The practice is to get you to that skill level. If you simply enjoy playing, you may never be done. But you know that each day you have allocated 30 minutes or so to practice.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#189

Post by rconti »

The hardest part for me is consulting my lists.

Does anyone ever get so bored (or motivated?) that they say "hey, I wonder where I could find a huge list of tasks to choose from!"?

I email myself reminders. I put items in my google calendar. I've occasionally used google todo lists. I use Remember The Milk. I have iCloud notes and text files. I have Jira tickets.

I never look at these things. Or at least, I never consult them with proper regularity.

Working with todo lists has reduced my mental burden, but I STILL have those things hanging out in my head that I know I need to do, yet aren't written down. Or maybe they are, but they also occupy space in my mind. Again, far less than before I had a "system", but even with the "system", I don't find much relief.

I have maybe 30-40 items in my RememberTheMilk list. Some have dates, many don't. Many of the ones with dates I've been postponing for 6+ months. Which means to consult the list (which I do only every 3-5 days) is a burden in and of itself, because now I have to re-schedule a lot of things. I could leave these items without a date, but then they'll be even LESS likely to get done, because they're down somewhere at the bottom. And the list is too long for me to regularly look over and feel I have a handle on. So I create calendar items with reminders for things I really need to do, say, sometime this afternoon. But maybe 2pm was a bad choice because I got involved in something, so I'll ignore the alert. now I have to look back at the calendar and see there was a think I was supposed to do in the past.

I don't know -- I'm getting better, I guess, but the difficulty still seems to be the actual DOING.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#190

Post by Jtsummers »

Azareus wrote: post #4
miguelrochefort wrote: post #2

Getting Things Done is by far the most influential book I've read. It has changed the way I think about everything. However, I have never been able to find a good implementation of the system. I know that David Allen (GTD) and Charles Simonyi (Intentional Software) were working on something at some point, but I haven't heard anything since.

The only implementation I have found worthwhile is paper, and to a certain extent, plain markdown/org files in Dropbox. Everything else, like OmniFocus and whatnot has had severe issues with the flexibility inherently required.

Out of curiosity, what are your issues with OmniFocus?

I have some issues with it (primarily that it's hard to share information from it with other people), but otherwise I find it to be a fantastic personal tool for GTD (I'd use it for work, but my office is all Windows).

That said, I do like paper and org-mode at least as much. I definitely find paper best for writing down my intentions and clarifying them before I enter them into OmniFocus.

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