Being a thoroughly disorganized sort of chap, but wanting to attempt to do something about it, I have of late been reading good things about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, and thought I’d give it a try.
Having keenly read several sites (such as 43 folders), and tentatively got together a Hipster PDA (which consists of a collection of index cards clipped together – much less effort to quickly jot something down on an index card than use an electronic PDA, although of course you lose the automagic backup/synchronization with your computer), I ordered Getting Things Done the book.
My next step towards the new organized me was losing my notepad. Having helped deal with laptop/projector at a meeting, which had to be disassembled and taken away very quickly as we had overrun and the people for the next meeting were already coming in, I was halfway back to my office when I suddenly discovered I didn’t have the notepead I’d brought with me. Being loath to disturb the already delayed meeting that was now taking place, I went back to the meeting room first thing next moring to see if it was there. It wasn’t. however, during the day I returned to my desk to find it with a note attached saying “is this yours?”. So all was well. Made mental note to label notepads with my name & department. Haven’t done it yet, obviously. Disorganized, you see?
All this digression brings me to my first step towards implementing GTD-esque methods – setting up Outlook at work according to Adrian Trenholm’s suggestions. Not only did this give me an insight into the ways that email views can be customized in Outlook that I hadn’t really looked into, but allows you to hide items in your inbox that don’t need dealing with yet.
By this stage, I had not yet read Getting Things Done (at the moment I’m about 3/4 f the way through), but had got the idea of some of the general GTD principles from my reading on the web. However, having set up the 2 email views as set out in Adrian’s article, I was then galvanized into a fairly serious email sorting session, which resulted in several hundred redundant emails being deleted, and Next Actions and Due Dates being added to many more. Having not fully cleared out my inbox, I am currently in the position of having to to scroll from the top of my inbox to check new mails to the bottom (there are still about 200+ emails in “in”) to find those emails with a prescribed Next Action, but I now only have 2 places to look rather then having to scroll all the way through inspecting individual emails and trying to guess why they’re flagged – I had no idea efore that you could edit the text that says “Follow Up” by default when you flag an email.
Today has seen me starting to organize the home side of things (inbox: the floor), where email is handled by Entourage 2004 on Mac OS X. This doesn’t seem to have the features that Outlook does (adding due dates & next actions directly to an email), but to compensate has a means of linking items together (e.g. linking an email to a task), and also has a “Projects” feature, which can be used to handle projects as defined in the GTD system, that is anything that has more than one action needed to see it to completion.
There will be more to report when I have more of a feel for GTD and how I’m going to implement it (and how to deal with the home and work aspects), and how I’m going to set up Entourage at home.