10.18.07
Mr. Dizzy
(All right, so maybe for the purposes of this post I identify more with Little Miss Dotty or Little Miss Scatterbrain. Still, I think we should keep the unintentional confusion down to a minimum, shall we?)
I got to thinking a little bit today about the organization scheme I’ve been following off-and-on since February, David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Simply put, it’s not working for me very well because I’m not one who can follow a strict workflow. I was overjoyed when I first saw it, because the flexibility it offered was something I always hoped an ‘organization plan’ would be– I had a plan that could be altered and tailored to fit my needs and my personal style. It turns out, in fact, that my personal style is actually far too random to impose even the slightest order that GTD requires.
During my initial enthusiasm for the concept, I’d spoke a little bit with a friend of mine who was also reading the book; he seemed cooled ont he idea, saying, “I was reading it, and I liked all of the ideas… but it’s stuff I already do.” That ultimately is my issue with GTD. The concepts are nothing new– identify, encapsulate, and act or delegate. The problem for me lies in the order in which I do these things, which is to say there is no order. If I’m doing one thing, a thought will pop into my head and I’ll either file it away to be forgotten, or act on it, dropping my current task to do what I think is just a five-second expenditure. I ran into this last night when, after I’d decided to go to bed, it took me half an hour of preparation to actually climb into bed because while I was turning off lights, a dozen different ‘last-minute’ things popped up.
Now, granted, I’m getting much better about the whole spontaneous disruption of thought thing; since September I’ve tried to reduce my caffeine intake, which has helped me focus so much better than I could before. (Ironically enough it’s also made me even more jittery due to my general nature… people have the unnerving tendency to sneak up on me when I’m not hyper-and/or-paranoid.) But there’s little things, like “is my cell phone charged?”, or “I need to get my clothes laid out for the morning”, or even the mundane “is the door locked and are the blinds drawn?”. I do a lot of preparation in the evening so that I can get out the door relatively quickly in the morning (assuming, of course, I don’t forget my cell phone and need to take a ten-minute detour just to turn around). I try to keep everything flowing smoothly so that I don’t have those lovely “oh crap!” moments of abject panic. Keeping on top of things in that way has been far more effective than just writing them down and referring to them when I don’t have anything to do. I never “have nothing to do”… I tend to see opportunities and take them as they come.
Now, there are some things I’ve picked up from the book that have helped me immeasurably. The first is lists. While Allen’s emphasis is more on listing everything, I’ve been finding that there are lists I need to make that traditionally I haven’t. Specifically, the grocery list. You would not believe how many times I’ve gone to the store with one thing in mind, realized while I’m there that I need other things (and not frivolous stuff either), and then walked out without the thing I went in for in the first place. I know it’s a problem that everyone has, but for one item, I actually did this for three consecutive weeks. It wasn’t anything critical at the time, until I actually did get it. Lists like that have made me be far more focused in my trips out, and I’ve really been getting better about compiling the lists as time goes by, rather than ten minutes before I leave the house.
The other thing that’s been helping me is the concept of the “next action”. At work I keep a single mini-memo pad separate from all other pads. This one is my “task” pad: during the day, tasks are crossed off and added as they’re identified. These are concrete things that I’m working on and can accomplish (though as a last resort there’s usually a “research” task listed if there’s nothing else to do or if I have no idea where to go from that point). At the end of each day, I take 5 minutes before I leave and copy over the tasks left over to a new page. That way, when I get in the next morning, I don’t have to spend an hour re-discovering what I need to do; it’s especially valuable on Mondays. It’s a pretty simple application of the core GTD concept, but it’s really all I need. I don’t prioritize, I don’t cherry-pick, and the tasks are specific enough that I could conceivably hand it off to someone else with my notes, and they’d understand what I’m doing (I have a pretty rigidly-defined notes structure, too, which basically acts as a development diary). It’s a half-hearted application, but it’s enough for now.
Maybe, when you really look at it, I’m just applying enough of the book’s ideas that I really need to. I still have way too many projects on my plate, and I still am trying to do tham all at once. But what it boils down to is that that’s the way it’s always worked for me, and with a few exceptions it’s worked pretty well. (Before you say anything, The Unbelievers was just a bad idea for me to try; I can’t bring myself to be that cynical all the time.) I looked at GTD for the flexibility, and I’m being flexible with it. I probably shouldn’t be looking too closely at how closely I’m following it, as that’ll just drive me to not bother with any of it. Maybe I’m doing it right all along. Hard to say.
I still think the book is worth a read for everyone, but I’m no longer interested in evangelizing it to the letter. I probably wasn’t really all that interested in evangelizing it to begin with. Even if all you get out of it is just, “well, duh”, it’s always good to look at your habits and see how they could be improved, or if they even need to be.