February 10th, 2010 Jeff
Most of us are experts at getting our to-dos out of our minds and into whatever task management system we use. Everything from GTD to plain old sticky notes gives you a sense of empowerment once your world is on some sort of manageable system.
But what happens as the to-dos don’t move from to-do to to-done? Your list becomes crowded, unmanageable and before long you’ve abandoned your system and life has descended back into chaos. This is where the power of the due date comes in.
Now lets review what a due-date is. Most people think it’s self-explanatory;
A date when something must be complete by.
But not all tasks have external forces pushing you towards a completion date. If you need to clean the fridge, the world will not explode if it’s not done by Friday. So items like this get pushed farther and farther down the list of priorities. But what if we play a mental game with ourselves and change the word must to should. So now the definition reads.
A date when something should be complete by
Now we can play all types of mental games. A week is more than a reasonable amount of time to get off your duff and clean the fridge. Do you have plans this week? Fine, make it for the week after next, but just make sure you assign a reasonable date to it. Lets put extra emphasis on reasonable, because a date that can’t be hit becomes even more of a distraction.
We’ve got a due date on our tasks, now what? Psychology does the rest. If you’re the type of person that keeps to-dos, then chances are you’re also the type of person that derives satisfaction from checking things off the list and experiences sadness or remorse when they stay on the list. The key is to make sure that your to-do system has someway to alert you when you have a task with a due date approaching or when a task is overdue. This signal is almost like the two-minute warning in football. It signals the brain that you’re behind and you’ve got shit to do! It motivates you in a way that can’t be explained without a PH.D.
We are a weird people psychologically, but we can use this insanity to our advantage. After reading this, go through your to-dos and start assigning realistic due dates to everything you want to move off the list.
There’s a special high that comes with checking off an item off your list. Use this post to stay high all day and all night.
p.s.
Just to drive the point home, this post has been on my to-do list for a week. As soon as Omnifocus told me the task was overdue, I felt like I had to have it complete by the time I head to bed tonight. So I’m sitting in Third Coast Comics, making sure I can check this off my list tonight.
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January 28th, 2009 Jeff
A lot of us are busy people. As a result we’ve implemented all manner of different systems to help us stay organized. No matter the system though, we’ve all experienced the vegetables of our to-do lists. It’s like when you were a child and you were supposed to eat your vegetables, but instead of eating them you just pushed them around on the plate hoping they would go away.
I’ve noticed a pattern with the task versions of our vegetables. We push them around in our list management tools but we can’t get into actually taking care of them. In my experience the problem is always the same. We’ve set ourselves up for failure. The explanation is very “GTDish” but if you think about it in an unbiased fashion it makes sense. The problem is simply that you haven’t broken your work down into doable actions. I’ll give you an example.
I’ve been writing a script for a comic book story I’ve had kicking around in my head. For weeks and weeks I’ve had the task “Complete first draft” on my to-do list. It’s not often I have enough time to sit down and bang out a 22 page rough draft. As a result the task stays on my to-do list because when I reviewed my items I never have enough time to tackle this monstrosity of a task.
How I solved the problem may sound a bit like overkill but it worked. The script was targeted to be about 22 pages long. So I broke the “final draft” task into 22 separate items. “Write Page 1, Write Page 2, Write Page 3″ etc became all of my tasks for the first draft project. While an entire draft is a bear, writing a page in a sitting is easily achieved. Before I even realize it the script was done. It doesn’t have to be single page chunks, but chunks that you can manage to do in a single session. For you it might be “write pages 5 – 20″.
When we’re breaking down a task we don’t go far enough. Some items become dwindled down to a level that seems silly, but depending on personal style we may need our items at the baby food level. The level of detail that gets it off your plate is called “widget” mode. Widget mode is when you can sit down and crank through your to do list with minimal brain power or effort involved. The tasks are at a digestible size and don’t seem as daunting. Again a lot of this depends on personal style.
So if you see that item just sitting on your list, try slicing it up into more steps and see if that helps. It’s like mamma always said “Those vegetables aren’t going to take care of themselves, better find a way to eat them”.
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April 10th, 2008 Jeff
LifeHacker.com has put together a list of the best GTD apps out there. (again)
http://lifehacker.com/378062/five-best-gtd-applications#poll_=kTO2QTM
A lot of people hear about these GTD applications and try to just jump right into them. They quickly become confused, frustrated and toss the applications as “crap”. You HAVE TO KNOW THE SYSTEM. So if you haven’t read David Allen’s book yet, you really should check it out first. While these applications are great, how should YOU go about evaluating a GTD tool?
Read the rest of this entry »
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November 19th, 2007 Jeff
For those GTD fans out there this is good news! Merlin Mann of 43 folders has been working with the boys over at OmniGroup. So you KNOW this thing should be THE tool. Looking forward to checking it out. My only problem is, I don’t work with Macs on my day job. So I’ll probably be sticking to one of the online variations of GTD. Or I’ll switch jobs.
BIG NEWS OVER HERE PEOPLE. After over 500 sneaky peek releases, which so many of you have been kind enough to give us feedback on, we are finally drawing the OmniFocus early release cycle to a close, with a bright and shiny final release date in mind: January 8, 2008.
The Omni Mouth » OmniFocus public beta/introductory pricing
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June 19th, 2007 Jeff
You know me, I love GTD tools. Lifehacker has a pretty comprehensive list of GTD tools for use. I’ve used a few of them, most notably KGTD (kinkless is my current GTD implementation on my Mac for personal stuff) and Thinking Rock for my work implementation. Thinking Rock is a solid implementation of GTD but kind of sucks in the performance department. (I mean it IS Java) Check out the here at Lifehacker
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May 3rd, 2007 Jeff
Our boys at Life Hacker have a pretty good write up on how to implement GTD using Google Notebook. I’ve been trying to find a good, practical, useful purpose for Google Notebook. I even went as far as to put it on my Google homepage.
And there it sat. For a long time. Doing nothing. Wait no, I did put a web link in there once, but then I remembered that’s why I have del.ico.us. So I removed it all together. Either way, check out the article. It probably doesn’t suck.
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April 26th, 2007 Jeff
Well my search for the perfect (digital) GTD Implementation continues. The funny thing is I have the best implementation in Kinkless GTD. The problem of course was mobility/portability and of course managing my corporate life. (Which subsequently belongs to a Windows world)
Well the good news is this. As a result of the boom in macs, we’ve gotten quite a number of complaints from our customers. Why? Because our web portal doesn’t support Safari, until now. And with Safari, i’ve managed to piggy back my way into the exception process and can now bring my Mac back into the office. (Although it can’t leave the department)
Mobility is a bit of a hurdle but I might have overcome it. Now that I can standardize on Kinkless GTD, syncing will handle updates on the mobile phone. I’ve also setup another Inbox for those times when I don’t have my phone. I’ve got a vanilla folder for my Inbox during the day at work. I’ve also setup Gmail with a label for inbox. I have an automatic filter that will look for the subject of @INBOX and have it skip the mail accounts inbox and go straight to the label. It sounds shitty but so far it’s been working nicely. When I do my review there are 2 major places I have to check for work, but all in all it’s a solid process.
So i’ll be attempting to further work the “kinks” out of my system. The next issue I’ve got to tackle is note taking. I take a lot of notes at work, but how do I capture those notes digitally so that I can save, backup, search and group notes from a meeting? How can I keep that info instantly accessible? The only thing I could come up with for the time being is a program called Journler. It does categories, tagging , smart folders. It’s basically Yojimbo on steroids. So after a meeting I create a new entry, tag it accordingly and let it sit until I need it again.
Not the most elegant, but I’ve got a strange feeling I’m going to have to keep hunting and pecking until I find something that works. I’m still in the process of developing that Web based methodology. In fact, I put it in my Kinkless GTD doc =).
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April 22nd, 2007 Jeff
Well my search for a GTD implementation that I’m in love with has ended. I’ll be writing my own I guess =) I’m looking to do a web based implementation with a mobile version. Lets see how long it actually takes since I’ve NEVER developed in PHP and I’m not much of a web designer. Gives me something to do at least.
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April 21st, 2007 Jeff
The more I work with NetCentrics plugin, the more I realize that I miss my Kinkless GTD. So much in fact that I may go back to the dreaded paper based system. *GASP* (For those that don’t know I HATE paper)
I stumbled upon this iCommit website which is another online implementation of GTD. Many people have said MANY positive things about the site, but I just couldn’t get comfortable in it. It just felt a bit clumsy interface wise. Now that may sound petty, but for me an attractive interface is a major piece of the puzzle. Call me a shallow software whore, but that’s my opinion. The developer is working on a version 3 which is supposed to look a lot neater. It’s in beta at the moment and I’ve got some high hopes for it.
In other news, I was on Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders and read his post on Trimming the Sails. Actually it’s this guy Brian’s blog. But he’s got some pretty good tips on staying productive. Don’t now how many will work in my office where hellish life is the norm, but you never know.
On today’s plate is getting out to enjoy the weather! With Stephanie out of town my date will be my iBook. A sad pathetic life.
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April 18th, 2007 Jeff
I’ve been on a long hard search for a good GTD implementation. Now let me start with saying that I absolutely LOVE Kinkless GTD. It is by far THE best implementation of GTD that I’ve ever used. Then why aren’t using it? Portability. I’ve had a lot of sync issues with my Treo 700p, but the other large issue is the fact that it’s run on my iBook and only my iBook. I’ve tried moving the Kinkless file to a USB thumb drive, but what happens when I don’t have the drive? It’s another item I’ve got to have around with me.
So I started using Vitalist, (http://www.vitalist.com)a web based GTD Solution. It has a mobile version as well, so it helps me dump items into my Inbox as they come, as opposed to having multiple inbox’s depending on my location.
So Vitalist has been working well for me except one big thing. There is no Next Actions logic. So there is a bit of hunting that needs to happen to make sure your working on a task that really is ready to be worked on. Because I’m lazy, I want a quick, simple way where I can go to my Next Actions list and just blow through them. That’s a very important feature of a GTD implementation to that. If Vitalist were to do this, it would be perfect.
I have the same problem with my corporate implementation of GTD. (I use GTD for my office work, which is separate from my home/personal GTD implementation) At work I use the NetCentrics GTD plug-in for Outlook. (http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/home/) It has the same limitation. There is a bit of work in order to get the Next Actions and all that work is manual. I’m lazy. I want easy simple. Anyone know of any good solutions? I also tried http://tracks.tra.in/ which had the same limitation. (Le Sigh) Please…..anything.
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