We all desire to be productive and acchieve our goals. Yet this desire is often hard to put into practice. The shere amount of work, needed to be done to achieve the set goals, is astronomical and can often lead to a productivity block, which can bring work progress to a complete halt. There are several sort term solutions to deal with an existing productivity block, such as taking a break or finding new inspiration, as described in this blog post. But an even better solution is to never have such productivity block occur in the first place. The framework, outlined in this page, is perfect for organizing the tasks in a manner that does not overwhelm you and you always know what to do next.
“Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
- Susan Ertz, novelist
Compared to modern computers, our brains have quite limited computing power and storage space. We have hard time remembering things without a lot of repetition (only about 7 things can be stored in the short term memory according to this article), we regularly forget things and we can only process thing sequentially in a single conscious thought (computers are able to process multiple things at once via multi-thread; it is debatable whether / how subconscious is able to achieve this). And unlke computers, brains do not get improved with each new iteration, at least there is no new improvement on the horizon.
With such limitations, it is imperative that we organize our thoughts externally - by writing them down - and thus enable our brains to focus on doing only the most relevant processing. Just like cleaning the desk before starting work, freeing the brain of clutter is the first step towards productive thinking (working) sessions.
Pretend your brain is a white board. Is it covered with to-do lists and “DO NOT ERASE”? Is there space for drawing and combining ideas?
- Jessica Kerr
GTD or “Getting things done” is a framework for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Each idea is written down, later analysed, and extracted into a clear and easily achievable task (or set of tasks). In this way, no idea is lost and no task is forgotten. The path towards progress is clear each step of the way. Additionally, GTD is not limited to work and work projects alone, but it spans throughout our complete daily lives and everything we do. It works on all scale tasks, from vague things like "invent greatest thing ever" to very concrete ones like "do exactly this small thing tomorrow". It works for everything.
This main feature of GTD is also its biggest burden. To be able to plan all our tasks for every day, GTD needs to be implemented constantly. Every little task, every little idea needs to be processed through the lense of GTD, and time has to be set aside for planning sessions, in order for the system to function. One has to have 100% trust in a system to achieve all the advertised benefits.
The main source for this page is the article on hamberg.no, which, in addition to complete description, provides a lot of examples how and why to use GTD. It is written in a leasurly tone and well worth the read. My take in this page stems from this article and incorporates information tools (computers) into the process.
An even more comprehensive guide can be found in David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”, which describes GTD in a very formal and detailed manner and was used as a source for the Hamberg guide.
GTD builds on an assumption that our brains need a suport system in order to achieve their best performance. GTD collects tasks, whims and ideas and converts them into concrete and visible actions. It keeps track of what you need to do, should do, or should consider to do. This allows the subconscious to stop keeping track of all the things you need to do and stop constantly reminding you, thus freeing up precious brain time for more productive thinking.
And how does GTD achieve this? Simple. Using lists. A lot of lists.
GTD is defined by its series of lists that keep track of all tasks and ideas. Each list has a separate and distinct purpose and contains only tasks that are related to it and will be worked on, sooner or later. These tasks are regularly moved between these lists in planning sessions, so it is helpful if these lists suport such actions - it is easier to move tasks between lists on digital lists compared to physical, paper lists, which need to be rewritten every time.
The following lists are used in GTD:
In the following subsections, these lists will be each separatelly reviewed.
List named Inbox (also named In in Hamberg article) is the dump list. Into this list you write anything and everything that comes to mind. Every idea and every non-time-critical task (does not need to be done ASAP) that comes to mind goes here. This is a temporary storage where you safely offload your thoughts and be certain that they will not be forgotten and will be processed once you have more time to allocate to them.
During your day you are quite busy with tasks and activities. When you see a poster for an event you want to go to or a quick meeting is scheduled with a friend over the phone, you probably not have to dwell on these thouhts and plan them out to the fullest (e.g. purchast those event tickets or make a reservation for that meeting). The barrier for adding something to this list should be as low as possible - all things that aren’t as they should be, where they should be, etc. go immediatelly into this list. The Hamberg article) calls this process “brain-emptying”. Dumping those ideas into this list allows you to go back to and continue whatever you where doing when you got disturbed. At a later time, normally a daily planning session, you will review these jolted-down notes and create proper tasks out of them.
The ideas and tasks that you write into the Inbox list do not need to be detailed and thought through, but they need to be crystal clear. Write them down in such a way that anyone reading it would immediatelly understand what you meant. You might think that a simple word is sufficient to remind you later on, but you would be wrong. Often you will completely forgot what you meant with that short idea / task description that you have written down by the time you finally have time to revisit it. Do not rely on yourself to remember - we are trying to unburden th brain, so allow yourself to completely forget about the thing you wrote down.
Do your future self a favour and write clear descriptions.
This Inbox list has to be regularly processed and you are advised to do this in daily processing sessions. The main function of these sessions is to distribute tasks into other lists and plan their execution. But more about this process and sessions will be discussed after all lists are described in daily process section.
These lists contain time sensitive tasks. Waiting for list contains tasks that need to be done after a certain event has occurred. For example, create budget report after boss sends email wiht relevant data - this task can only be done after the email is received. Similarly, the Calendar list contains tasks that need to be done at specific times. Into this list go tasks like dentist or doctor apointments that need to be executed at preciselly predetemined times.
These lists contain tasks until they are ready to be worked on / executed. Once the precondition is met (the event has occured or the day of the appointment has come), the task is moved into other lists.
GTD’s definition of a project is very broad. It defines any objective that requires more than one action / task to complete as a project. These tasks are stored on a dedicated list for that particular project. Make sure that projects are well-defined - they have titles, descriptions and clear goals / intended outcomes. It is prudent to take careful time to plan these projects and define all tasks that need to be done before we start working on them. A little foresight pays well in the future.
These lists only contain tasks that need to be done for each project. At least one action / task should at all times be in the "Next actions" list. Once the project is defined, the very first task is moved into "Next actions" list. Afterwards, each time a project task is finished in the "Next actions" list, the next task in project sequence should be moved to the "Next actions" list. If there are multiple tasks that can be worked on next, select one or even more of them to move to "Next actions" list. Just make sure that you do not overwhelm the "Next actions" list with project specific tasks - only put there tasks that you actually plan on working on next. When reviewing the projects list, make sure that there is always at least one action on your "next actions" list for each project, thus making sure that your projects make progress and aren’t forgotten.
This is a list that holds all your wishes and plans for the far future. Put here all the tasks that cannot / will not be done right away, but you wish to do them some day. This list simply contains things that you wish not to forget about. In regular intervals (preferrably weekly) this list should be checked and tasks moved to other lists - "Next actions" or new dedicated project list - if you decide to work on them.
This list contains all of the tasks that should be acomplished today. This list should be filled on every morning's daily processing and by the end of the day all tasks in it should be done and the list should be empty again. During your day, you should have this list always nearby and be ticking off tasks frequently.
Sometimes you will come up with a time-sensitive task that neeeds to be done as soon as possible. These tasks generally cannot wait until next processing session. In such situation you can add the task directly into this list so you will not forget to do them later today.
This session should be done at the beginning of every new day. This is a short session that should take no longer than 15 minutes every morning and should prepare you for the day ahead. The two goals of this session are (1) to empty the "Inbox" list and (2) to populate "Next actions" list.
(1) Empty the "Inbox" list
All entries in the Inbox list need to be converted into proper well-defined tasks. Every idea and note needs to be converted into a task form - e.g. an idea "self-driving table" can be transormed into a task "research if self-driving tables can be bought on Amazon". After the tasks are created, they have to be sorted into their appropriate lists that have been defined above. For detailed description how to achieve this, follow the flow in the "Organize tasks flow" subsection below.
(2) Populate the "Next actions" list
Go through the projects and prepare "Next actions" list for the new day. Put in all and only the tasks that you plan to execute in the course of this day. If you have any left-over tasks from previous day, either keep them in or consider postponing them.
This might seems like a lot of work, but if you do it regularly (every day), you will have only a handful of tasks to organize every time and will be quickly done with them.
The flow for organizing tasks is the following:
This is a bit longer session that serves as a review and cleanup. You are encouraged to go through every list and every task and revieew its importance. If you haven't worked on it yet, consider removing or archiving it - be honest with yourself: if you haven't worked on a task in quite a while and it has been just sitting there, perhaps you never will work on it and it is better to just remove it and avoid poluting your lists.
A task is well defined if
The main goal is to have tasks that can be easily picked up and wored on immediatelly, and not be too large or confusing so that they would create a productivity block.
For example, "renovate living room" is a daunting and unclear task. But it can be restructured into a series of tasks "move sove under the window", "buy new flat-screen TV", "bring coffee table from storage". The latter tasks are much more clear and managable.
The following acronym roughly describes the GTD method.
This is an improvement from the poor description in TickTick GTD article.
The “Next Action” in this case is the task that can be executed without any further thinking.
There are a couple more features to GTD, that I did not touch in this page, such as:
@work to tasks that you need to do when you are at work)I consider these things just additional features that help with GTD and make daily organization easier, but they are not representing the core of GTD, so I did not bother describing them here. If you are nonetheless interested in them, read the Hamberg article for details.