Program Yourself

[Continued from Getting Things Done]

Some more barely organized rambling about GTD.

One key for me is that GTD is not a calendar based system. I subscribed to Daytimer for a year once, and found it almost useless for the way that I work. I did really like the little lined, blank notepads that came with it though, and ended up using those quite a bit.

Calendar tools don’t help me much, because I don’t have a schedule-based
job. I have maybe three to five (at the very most) appointments or meetings in a given week, and keeping track of stuff that has to happen at a specific time has never been my problem anyway.

What I do have are dozens of general, open ended responsibilities, assigned tasks, self directed projects, problems to research, and systems to update. I also have to deal with interuptions from programmers with silly emergencies, calls from the helpdesk, questions from coworkers, filling in as backup for other admins, and a thousand other things. Sometimes all at once.

A significant source of stress can be keeping track of all the tasks I mentioned, plus all the ones I didn’t mention, and figuring out how to get them all done. Preferably in the order that makes the least number of people unhappy.

Anyway, back to why most organizing systems suck. In addition to being calendar/schedule based, the other “feature” of other planning/organizing systems I’ve seen is that they all seem to be rigid, top down solutions that require explicit catagorizing, prioritizing and/or goal setting in order to be useful.

I got dragged into a day long “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” seminar
once. I found it very motivating, until about 2 minutes after I walked out of the Covey reality distortion field and realized that I had no idea how to “synergize” the pile of crap on my desk.

If I’m going to stick with a system it needs to work the way I do. I don’t want to have to set goals, state my mission and identify my core principles before I can get any work done. I already know how to do my job, I just need to keep track of the stuff I need to get done. If I have to do a bunch of “meta” stuff in order to make the system work, I’m probably not going to make the system work.

Along the same lines, another important point is that when I fall of the system, which I know myself well enough to know that I will, if it isn’t easy to just start using the system again, I probably won’t start using the system again.

I’ve also tried using PDAs. I used a Palm V for a while, which was nice, even though entering text is annoyingly slow. I eventually quit using it though, because it seemed too inflexible and laborious compared to just a plain notebook and pen, which is the system I’ve used ever since then. I now realize that one problem I had with the Palm is that I didn’t know how to make lists. Now that I’ve figured out the “projects” vs “next actions” scheme from GTD, I think I might fire up the old Palm V again one of these days and give it another shot.

Side note on PDAs: I also tried using an iPaq 5450 for a while, but I hated it. Using it felt like combining the worst features of Windows with the worst features of hitting yourself on the head with a rock.

Note 2: I really, really want a Zaurus SL-C760

Next Time: How GTD works