devlog

Coming across Getting Things Done through a piece of giles writing about productivity that edd put me on to. I recalled how highly dngnand had spoken of the book last year and sworn by the Life Balance PDA version; we’ve talked with perigrin about writing an irc lifebalance bot based on dngnand’s description of the operations, and sketched prototypes…

I felt i had to buy the book, not being able to glean enough of the practise form the summaries i’ve seen online, not fully. I was at a morning meeting in the cafe in Foyles, where the authors of Mind Hacks, Matt Webb and Tom Stafford, are doing a talk and a signing next Wednesday, 23rd March. I picked up a copy of Getting Things Done, and read half of it on the bus on the way back to Limehouse.

I hardly have paperwork in my life, thankfully. i bought a stack of 100 index cards, and wrote on each on some ‘action’ that i had to take. i used up about 85 cards this way. i took them and sorted them into groups, and 8-10 groups emerged, each encompassing one area or another of my life, a couple of categories still a little vague or copious - “people”, for example. While sorting them, i thought about project ‘groups’ and came up with a list of about 35 projects which describe at a slightly higher level what i am involved in, with more that one ‘next action’ each.

Then i went through the stack of index cards, on each one annotating the next action i would or could take about that activity - sometimes more than one - resolving immediately, any that took less that two minutes - sending quick emails, looking up some addresses, submitting a conference presentation outline i’d written.

I made small files for the cards by chopping A5 size brown envelopes in half, one for each broad area of responsibility. I have an ‘inbox’ file to carry around with me, which i will have to reinforce a bit, and a pencil that goes in it. The idea is to file everything in the inbox as soon as possible - broadly defer, delegate or do it. Every action gets a next action, and within each category you make balance judgements between the time you have, the kind of energy you have, the context you are in and the relative priority of the work.

Having spent about four hours going through the process, i went swimming. I had a great feeling of mental lightness and clarity, of random and creative thought. Things to think about pop up, but i just file them in my inbox. Managing the process on a weekly review basis might be more of a challenge, and i think one only has to keep up the intense note-taking and almost immersion process, for a couple of months. The idea of a zen state of organising is an entrancing one. Though the book is very business-style and packed with heartwarming anecdotes it its easy to skim over them for the real advice, and i really found it to be a positive and interesting exercise…