Black Belt Productivity

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This is the first entry of our Black Belt Series. The topic for this first series was “How has GTD changed my life?” The series is going to run every Wednesday (that we have a submission available). Please leave comments or send Jason and I emails with comments.

We are going to start off with bsag, developer of Tracks and author of her own blog, but she’s a girl. Both Jason and I are users of Tracks. I think that it is the best web-based implementation for GTD that is available.

- Michael

From bsag…

What my state of affairs was like pre-GTD^®

I think it could be summed up in two words: pretty dismal. I made sporadic attempts to write things down on various lists which I would then lose or forget about. I always had that horrible, chilling feeling that there was something important that I’d forgotten, which resulted in a low level but chronic kind of stress. I constantly felt as if I was chasing my tail and therefore not having any time to either plan ahead or think about what I had done in the past.

How I found out about GTD^®

You know, I really don’t remember the specifics, but I know that I read about it on the web. I’m pretty sure that I saw mentions of it many times before it piqued my interest and I thought I’d take a look. I think the fact that it was officially ‘geek endorsed’ encouraged me to think that it might suit me, because I’m usually rather turned off by the kind of corporate self-help manuals that crowd the shelves of bookshops. When I actually bought the book, I feared that it might be infested with management-speak and full of a kind of ‘Ra-ra! Aren’t we great?’ motivational poster enthusiasm that would put me off. (I’m British and we tend to get embarrassed by that kind of thing). Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised that the system seemed so commonsense and simple. Again, being a geek, the fact that there was A System appealed to me, as did the fact that you could actually put the system into practice in any way that you chose: using just paper, a PDA, a computer, or any combination of those.

How easy/difficult was my implementation?

I’m not sure that I want to use the past tense, because being a compulsive tinkerer, I don’t think that my implementation will ever be finished. In fact, I’ve cleverly managed to legitimise my tinkering by releasing my implementation, Tracks, as Open Source software! It really developed fairly gradually. As soon as I’d finished the book, I started building up lists of actions in projects and contexts, and making an effort to make sure that the moment I thought of something, I wrote it down. Initially, I just used paper, but that was messy, and I got irritated by having to re-write lists of actions in contexts and projects and duplicate them so that each action could be found in its context and, if appropriate, its project. As it happened, I was just starting to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails, so I decided to avoid those tedious minutes of work by spending many hours writing my own GTD tool. And yes, I do see the irony in that.

Since then—when I can restrain myself from fiddling with the system—things have gone pretty well. I capture actions whenever they occur to me, but also in regular sessions right at the start of each day. If I happen to be near the computer (which I usually am), they go straight into Tracks. However, I also carry around a small Moleskine notebook (which manages to survive the rough and tumble of my computer bag), for noting down things when I don’t have a computer in front of me. I’ve got much better at noticing when something has been lingering on my list for a while, and thinking again about whether that next action is really the very next action I need to do. Often, it isn’t, and by altering it, I suddenly find that I can do it and things move forwards. I still find it amazing that despite all our so-called intelligence as humans, having “Get car serviced” as a next action when it should be “Ask neighbours for recommendations of a garage for car servicing” paralyses us into inaction. I’m really hoping that it’s not just me…

I still don’t file my papers in an A-Z system as recommended in the book, and I’m still rather bad at doing a weekly review on a weekly basis, but on the whole it’s a massive improvement.

The current tools for my system

See above: Tracks (available anywhere that I have web access) plus a Moleskine and pen. Usually, I pick a few things off the list in an appropriate context and just do them. I don’t worry too much about how urgent or important it is—it all has to get done. That’s why I only put due dates on actions that really do have a due date, after which there wouldn’t be any point in doing that action at all. On occasion—when I can feel myself drifting through the day on a series of distractions—I set up a timer widget on my Mac (Stop It!) to ring every 15 minutes. This helps me keep me focussed on what I should be doing, particularly if I use it with David Seah’s Emergent Task Timer. That can often be quite a revelation, and not a very comfortable one. With all the distractions of email, phone calls, IM and in my case, students and colleagues putting their heads around my door, it’s often very difficult to get your head down and just work solidly through something, particularly if you need to concentrate on it. I use Apple’s iCal for appointments (the ‘hard landscape’), but I’m currently evaluating Google Calendar to see if that might work for me. Other little tools I use are Backpack, mainly to keep a wishlist of books, CDs, DVDs and so on but also for getting reminders sent to my mobile phone by SMS.

What is the state of affairs like now, post-GTD

A lot better. I haven’t suddenly turned into some kind of uber-organised, lean, mean, GTD machine, but things have improved enormously and are getting better all the time. I think that the main effect is that I feel much more in control now. I’m just as busy as I was, but I have a much clearer idea about what I need to do, and thanks to writing every little thing down, I no longer get that sinking feeling that I’ve forgotten something that will ambush me at a later date. That alone reduces my stress levels considerably. I also feel as if I’ve got a much more robust system. Before, when things got on top of me, I had a tendency to just abandon hope of ever getting back in control. Now, because I’ve got a system in place, it’s quite easy to climb back on the wagon when I fall off, and also easier to remove blockages in the system that would have been a major problem before. We’re all creatures of habit, so the secret (if there is one) in is following a series of steps habitually so that it becomes second-nature.