Category Archives: GTD

GTD

The enemy of the good

I came across this quote in the subversion book:

“It is important not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, even when you can agree on what perfect is. Doubly so when you can’t. As unpleasant as it is to be trapped by past mistakes, you can’t make any progress by being afraid of your own shadow during design.” — George Hudson

Someone introduced me to this phrase in the last few weeks, “better is the enemy of good” or something like that. It’s an interesting maxim, especially for those of us who end up bent on creating the “perfect GTD system” or who are overly self-critical because we can’t do something-or-other perfectly. Sometimes working for perfect distracts us from producing or using something that’s good, and something good is better than nothing perfect. “Good enough” things are what keep us moving forward every day.

What are you striving for perfection on that’s preventing you from moving forward?

Next Action Elimination Week

My life is now pretty much back in order. It was rather out of order after 2 months of craziness plus a month of traveling a lot. Nonetheless, I kept capturing thoughts and filing them away in my GTD system, and there they wait. I had a good weekly review on Friday and did a little pruning, and it left me with (as of today) 100 @Lab Next Actions and 132 @Rivendell (my apartment) next actions.

I’m going to make a concentrated effort to knock down Next Actions this week. At one point early in 2007 I was down to something like 15 @Lab next actions. One nice thing about iGTD is that it provides Next Action counts in the Contexts views. These were recently upgraded to show total counts for nested contexts (and projects) when collapsed. The numbers next to each context give me a kind of meter by which to measure my efficacy at getting things done. If the numbers are going up, that’s an indication that (a) I’ve been really creative and lots of things have been coming up to add to my system, (b) there’ just a lot going on and into the system it goes, or (c) I’m not knocking down Next Actions quickly enough. On the other hand, it’s rewarding to watch the numbers drop as I get things done.

I think a reasonable goal for this week would be to get down to 20 Next Actions each in the @Lab and @Rivendell categories. Here it goes!

Modified Meditation for GTD

I practice a modified form of Zen meditation. Typically thoughts that come up while sitting should be let to pass by, somewhere off away from your conscious attention.

This is complete anathema to the Getting Things Done methodology.

When I’m meditating, a lot of times things that have been bugging me, things I need to do or take care of, that have been hiding beneath my conscious level of thought come up. So, I do what any good GTDer would do. I write them down. I keep a notebook in front of me and write them down immediately, and then go back to meditating. This way I really get them out of my head, rather than trying to somehow forget or ignore them, and they’re recorded so that I can properly deal with them later.

Once my dictaphone arrives I may try leaving it recording while I meditate, and reviewing it afterward. That way I could simply speak rather than having to move my arms from the proper posture.

I noticed tonight, and have noticed on other occasions, that things build up when I don’t meditate daily. I may think that everything is out of my head, but when I sit down to actually meditate, all kinds of stuff comes forward. Today it had only been 4 days since my last meditation. I filled an entire page of college-ruled paper (one item per line) with items I needed to somehow address. When I went a week without meditating, I filled one and a half pages at the same density.

Part of me wants to keep track of how many items come up while meditating and relate it to my inter-meditation interval or minutes of meditation per week. I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll probably do it at some point. From my sample where n = 2, it seems to be a nonlinear relationship. 1.5 pages for 7 days, 1 page for 4. I guess it could be linear, but the y-intercept is not zero. (I think it’s 1/3?) If I always have 1/3 of an idea in my head immediately after meditating, that could be valid.

Using your RSS aggregator as an Inbox

It occurred to me this past weekend that I use my RSS aggregator like an inbox. I have long since quit categorizing my feeds. Rather, I just view them as a “river of news”, reading them in the order in which they arrive. This isn’t really interesting.

What is is how I process them. As I mentioned in my post on using the Firefox bookmark bar, when I see something I want to read, I drag it into my Action folder. More specifically, I read as if I were processing an inbox:

  • I first decide whether I want to read something or not, based on the headline and glancing over the body text.
  • If I don’t want to read the item I just skip it. It gets marked read when I’m done with the batch of 10.
  • If I am interested in the item then I decide if it’ll be a quick read (i.e. < 2 minutes). If so, I read it.
  • If I want to read it but it’s too long, then it gets dragged to the Action folder to be read at a later date.

I suspect my 2+ years of GTD practice led to the unconscious development of this processing strategy. It seems to work pretty well — it allows me to catch up on a lot of items without actually having to read and dwell on all of them.