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11-02-2006, 11:58 AM
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 GTD Tips and Tricks Hi all, I reckon a forum on personal effectiveness just would not be complete without a thread on GTD. In fact, Steve has a whole blog category dedicated to it, so it must be important! For those of you who do not know what these holy acronyms mean, GTD refers to the system introduced by David Allen in his book "Getting Things Done". Check out their introduction to GTD , then grab a copy of the book and read it  So what GTD related Tips and Trick do you have up your sleeves? Here is a couple of gtd related websites and blogs for those who are interested: http://www.davidco.com/blogs/ http://www.43folders.com/ Regards, From Shannan       |
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11-02-2006, 01:05 PM
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11-02-2006, 05:23 PM
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| I have recently read GTD. And I loved it. The first chapter is the most awakening. And the rest is a great, if a little drawn out by its nature. The most valuable tip I got from the book, is that your head is not a good place to organise certain things. Your head is constantly swimming with emotions and distracting thoughts. Somethings that are concrete, should be put to paper to free up mental resources. Johnny |
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11-04-2006, 05:13 AM
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| I borrowed the Getting Things Done audio CD through my inter-library loan system, then went out and bought the book. I feel like there are times in my life where I haven't been quite as organized as I would like to be, and I was one of those people in the past that would have piles of paper all over the place that I would shuffle around and never properly take care of. So I loved David Allen's system for delegating and dumping material in a quick manner- I've de-cluttered my apartment as a result. Matt |
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11-04-2006, 06:03 AM
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| I read the GTD book after seeing so many rave reviews of it online, especially from 43 Folders and Matt's productivity blog (both excellent!). I didn't completely get everything in the book but I tested it out and while the results weren't mindblowingly fantastic, it changed my life enough that I wouldn't go back to doing what I used to. The best practices that I love doing from GTD: 1) Write everything, everything and everything down. Or capture it in any way. I agree with David Allen 100% on this one, ideas and thoughts float around in mindspace with too much randomness to trust that they'll stay there perfectly, always and until the right time. Good ideas usually come at the strangest places, I can be riding the train and go 'hey, I should read that book I saw online yesterday!' but forgotten a while later, unless I capture it down. 2) Process things immediately. GTD has a 2 minute rule, if it can be down within 2 minutes, do it now, or process it immediately either as unactionable, in which case you store, or actionable, you schedule. Using the above example, it's great to capture the 'read-the-book' idea, but troublesome if I'm reminded of it all the time. So I create a 'locations-read' category where I file it in so I'm only looking at that list where and when I can do something about it. 3) Only schedule in things you really, really want to do. I can't help it. I'm an idea nut, I love generating ideas and I want to do everything. Pretty soon, my tasks lists became more bloated than a sinking ship and I got stressed just by looking at it. That's when I realized the power of the GTD 'Someday/Maybe' list where I could throw everything I would have liked to do, but didn't really want to commit to do. And filling up my tasks lists with stuff I really wanted to do didn't only make me less stressful, it also encouraged my ability to make real decisions on what to focus on, and get more things done. GTD Primer: What To Do When You Know Nuts About GTD A great resource for GTD newbies is Black Belt Productivity's GTD Primer. |
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11-04-2006, 08:10 AM
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| GTD works GTD has changed my life guys. It really made me stress-free and organized. I used to revisit the book and the audio materials over and over again and I always catch something new. Although I've been GTDing for more than a year now, I just realized that it doesn't claim to help you stop procrastinating. In fact, David himself says that the worlds most successful people are the biggest procrastinators. Procrastination is not a bad thing. GTD is about always having a list of constructive things to do, so when you procrastinate, you do it constructively. Make sure to visit Merlin's 43 Folders. There are a bunch of new mp3 interviews with David Allen which will give you an overall introduction to GTD. If you happen to be a GTD veteran you can still benefit from this material. |
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11-04-2006, 09:18 AM
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| I haven't read the book at all. What I've learned about GTD, I've gotten from googling the net. 43folders is a great site, but there are many other great GTD sites out there as well. GTD is a lifesaver. I was already creating contextual lists before I stumbled onto the system, but GTD laid out the whole program for me. It's a terrific thing and I highly recommend it. |
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11-04-2006, 10:00 AM
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| "Productive Talk" The GTD Podcast "Productive Talks" with David and Merlin are great to listen to. It's like listening in on a conversation between two influential speakers about GTD. Here are the links to the first five from 43folders: [http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/10/productive-talk-procrastination/] [http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/12/productive-talk-leaks/] [http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/16/productive-talk-someday-maybe/] [http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/23/productive-talk-04/] [http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/30/productive-talk-05] [http://www.43folders.com/2006/11/06/productive-talk-06/] Download the mp3 and enjoy. Regards, From Shannan Last edited by Yynatago : 11-09-2006 at 10:54 PM. Reason: Added Productive talk 6 |
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11-04-2006, 11:03 AM
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| "Productive Talks" Quote:
 I subscribe to the master rss feed from David's website which includes any new podcast in the series. Regards, From Shannan |
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11-04-2006, 01:32 PM
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| Kingless GTD for the Mac gtd-php for PHP but the Hipster PDA beats them all. I am also working on a professional GTD application but it isn't close to release yet. Until then, I'm actively using my Hipster PDA. It's about the process, not the tool, really. |
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11-04-2006, 02:29 PM
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| GTD is gr8 I've read book once half year ago. Great first impression, great technique. Second half of the book was little bit boring (imho), so many details about what to do and how to do that and I personally didn't get much out of it. But this book has overall impact of to my life - no doubts 
__________________ ---------------------------------------------- Loser let it happen - Winner makes it happen -------------www.hawran.org----------------- |
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11-04-2006, 04:13 PM
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It may not even be software - many people use paper-based systems.The book really is the best place to start, but there are many online places to get info too, David Allen's website and 43Folders being two of the best (URL's elsewhere in this thread). Kevin |
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11-04-2006, 04:23 PM
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| I also LOVE the "write everything down" part of things. Quick story to illustrate the point: this past week I finished a bunch of big projects that had consumed me for a while, and while I know there are a bunch of different directions I could go from here, I was basically frozen for hours, not knowing what to start or what to do next. Finally, I got out a notebook, wrote down everything I was thinking about, started to organize it a little bit, and--BAM, suddenly my motivation was there, I could start working, my mood was better. It was incredible. Half an hour, three pages of notes, and I felt like a different person. It's been tough for me to really write EVERYTHING down, but the more I do it, the more I realize the genius of it. We (I, anyway) spend so much time planning and tweaking the plan that it's easy to forget how much brainpower is wasted doing those things.
__________________ http://www.gmathacks.com: Get Into a Better Business School |
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11-04-2006, 06:10 PM
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| About software - UltraRecall comes with a template you can use for GTD. You can also adapt it for use with just about any system of your own devising. |
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11-04-2006, 06:29 PM
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| I enjoyed Allen's book, but I also enjoyed Covey's top-down approach to organization. I tend to be a big picture kind of guy, so just focusing on individual to-do's drives me crazy -- the purpose gets lost in the shuffle. However, writing things down is extremely helpful (especially having paper around when I have a random idea), as too many things in my head makes me forget many of them. On the other hand, my best ideas are often connections between two seemingly disparate thoughts, making it valuable to leave as much as I can handle in my head. Plus, writing everything down is inefficient. Has anyone developed a good system of writing down certain things while still focusing on the big picture? I'd like to optimize using both a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. |
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11-04-2006, 08:09 PM
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| I've created a computer set-up that works for me in Outlook. I have a separate outlook file that i keep on a flash drive. I've used ideas from Setting Up Outlook for GTD site. The idea is to set up Outlook contacts to masquerade as Projects. This way you can assign tasks for the projects and have hierarchical organisation - something that native Outlook tasks lack. So the pipeline is as follows - i capture everything in notebooks that I carry in my wallet or straight into outlook. I treat all things to do as projects - write the end goal and the necessary steps in description. Then assign the next action task for the projects. The tasks are dispayed sorted by the context and then by project. When a task is done, I go back to the project the task belonged to and assign the new next action untill the project is eventually complete. When I first did the capture process it took me a long weekend and I ended up with more then 700 tasks, many of which were multy-task projects. Then I've realised why I was so stressed and why I had the feeling that I'm not doing enough. When I've got all this stuff out of my had my stress fell to zero and I saw for the first time that I'm actually doing a lot of things and achieving a lot. It was a breakthrough.
__________________ Ilya. |
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11-05-2006, 02:41 AM
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 Tracks (GTD Solutions) Have you guys ever tried Tracks? If you don't want to invest the time to get Tracks running on your own, here are a few hosted solutions. It really streamlines the GTD process.
__________________ Jim RunFatBoy - Exercise for the rest of us. "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" -- Jack Kerouac |
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11-05-2006, 02:50 AM
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| Online GTD Software Quote:
http://icommit.org/ , which redirects to GTD V2 Regards, From Shannan |
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11-05-2006, 03:30 AM
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__________________ http://miloriano.com: Young man’s journey to become a CEO & succeed |
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11-05-2006, 07:17 AM
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I've heard good things about Midnight Inbox, which is still in beta. |