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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

#191

Post by Jtsummers »

Jtsummers wrote: post #170
komali2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sinc…

Too late to edit, and just reread.

Addendum:

> if I let my list grow larger I'd never finish

I'd never finish any books. As there's always something new to read the task of reading will never be done. But if I start new books without considering the number currently being read, then the odds of getting back to and finishing any other book is pretty low.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#192

Post by dford »

rconti wrote: post #189

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 con…

I'm the same exact way... Tasks and reminders are spread across multiple services, but I never check them.

Have you tried offline notes?

It's not sexy and it doesn't sync with all of your devices, but for computer-related tasks the only to-do list I've had consistent success with is large post-it notes. It's always next to my keyboard so the effort required to consult the list is next to none.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#193

Post by barrkel »

brianzelip wrote: post #104
barrkel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GTD can be dangerous for people who like systems too much; a bit like people who play RPGs because of the rules around bookkeeping of stats and deciding of battles, rather than for the imagined world the bookkeeping keeps honest. I'm highly task-oriented in my work, but mostly it's just a list of lists, maintained in a text file with infinite persistent undo. Every task starts out as a line, gets a few sub-li…

> maintained in a text file with infinite persistent undo How? Is this persistence a function of your text editor?

I wrote a notepad app that tracks document history indefinitely to a log file - https://github.com/barrkel/scratch

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#194

Post by dredmorbius »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #136
BeetleB wrote: post #122

I first encountered GTD in 2007. After about 8 years of trying, I finally accepted that GTD didn't work for me. I think any workflow management has to be tailored to your personality. I digged that from the start and did not fall into the trap of being 100% David Allen compliant. Some of my issues: - My lists grow long. Way too long. I recall he suggests looking at the Someday/Maybe during the weekly review. That jus…

What's a good tool for managing the various lists/projects? I've tried Google Docs, Apple Notes, and Txt files. I'm good at making giant "inboxes". From there I move them into 20-30 separate files, but it's tedious -- trying to find the right GDocs tab in Chrome. Then it's hard to pick out the top must-do items from the 20-30 lists.

Org mode or index cards, for me.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#195

Post by dogruck »

d0mine wrote: post #52
dogruck wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make the bizarre claim that nobody successfully follows GTD because you’ve never done so, and you know many others who have also failed to do so. That’s like a fat dude looking around at the donut shop and saying “nobody ever sticks to their diets, haha!” I’ve used GTD for years. I just shattered your claim.

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…

I’m think the number of self-defeating replies, on this forum of high achievers, is sad.

What if I listed studies showing how hard it is to stop smoking. Would you say, “well, there it is — pass me the tobacco.” No — most of you would acknowledge that it was difficult, but you’d find a way to quit.

Maybe GTD isn’t your style of personal time management. But time management is an extremely important skill if you want to excel in life.

To dismiss it by pointing to failure statistics is sad.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#196

Post by anotheryou »

Most important for me:

- remember nothing (clear head), write down everything (and with enough detail to really remember e.g. some decision instead of just jotting down a keyword)

I have yet to figure out how to handle too much to do though... Sure, just drop the less important stuff, but at some point something will break or someone else will depend on work I didn't do.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#197

Post by jstewartmobile »

axiomdata316 wrote: post #161
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?

See reply to danial

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#198

Post by jannyfer »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #182
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 t…

Thank you for this. I thought about how I handled my intrusive thoughts (also about eight years ago) and I realized I wrote songs about it.

I have never been as prolific as a songwriter since I became generally happy, but reading your comment gave me strength in remembering how much pain I used to be in and how things turned out not so bad after all.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#199

Post by BrandonY »

chasd00 wrote: post #97
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…

In college a friend of mine gave me a book on Zen Buddhism once as a joke more or less. I read it cover to cover, what you describe is very zen ( well it is as much as it isn't I suppose ;) ). When i was reading that book i was in college and I remember dreading and dreading studying for a particular boring class. I was miserable thinking about it and then it just sort of dawned on me, i got up and went to the librar…

The GTD book gets into this very directly. It talks a lot about the principal borrowed from martial arts of having a "mind like water." When a pebble disturbs the water, the water responds instantly with exactly the right amount of force and then returns to stillness. GTD is big on the idea of responding to emails, ideas, projects, new work items, etc, with exactly the right amount of response and then letting the problem slip out of your mind once you're confident that the thing to be done is filed and therefore will get done.

The trick to making the whole thing work is that you need to have confidence that, once something is on the list, it will get done. That's what allows you to stop fretting about the stuff on the list. But to get that confidence, you need to regularly do the stuff on the list.

Re: A Beginner´s Guide to Getting Things Done

#200

Post by wtallis »

Off topic, but I'm often puzzled and peeved by the characters that get used as apostrophes. The HN submission uses a standalone acute accent character (U+00B4), which renders with way too much spacing around it. The article itself uses a right single quotation mark (U+2019) in the page title and in the article body, but uses a genuine apostrophe (U+0027) in the author's name. The quotation mark at least renders more or less the same as an apostrophe would. The accent character must have been introduced by the HN poster using a misconfigured keyboard when they manually re-typed the title.
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