Apr292005
Book 11 : Getting Things Done
Jerry introduced me to David Allen’s book over New Years. It only took me 3 months to read the whole thing once. And only another month to get all the stuff and get it implemented in my working life. Its great/wonderful/amazing book about increasing productivity and being more organized to be less stressed. I need to read it about 4 more times. I’m slowly getting the whole system in place. I still struggle with not making ‘to do’ lists all over the place and I haven’t quite figured out how to manage my projects beyond putting them on the ‘Projects List.’ I mean, where am I supposed to put random thoughts I have about a project that aren’t the ‘next action?’
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I also read/listened to it a couple times. It helped me get it into my head, and to customise the system to work for me.
What I do with Projects. Instead of a single project list, I sort of have a project section in my notebook: one page for each project. That gives me some room to jot down thoughts, references, notes about that project (including the successful outcome). Sometimes, I’ll put down a list of action items. Then I can take the top one off the list, and put it on my Next Actions list. Check out the section on horizontal/vertical thinking. I do a bit of vertical thinking on the project.
I had a chance to test the system when we got back from Turkey. I had all this *stuff* that needed to be handled, at work, and at home, that needed to be taken care of. So I spent a couple hours; I put everything in my Inbox (actually, I have several inboxes - email, phone messages, snail mail). So I collected all my stuff, and just went through it all in order…figured out if it was something I could do right away, or made a project, and created a whole slew of next actions. It was really good.