Category Archives: GTD

GTD

Daily Work Log 2006-07-25

I spent an hour and a half dealing with e-mail, health insurance, taxes, papers, and so on.

Blech.

A lot of it was stuff I’d been putting off, but was in my system. For some reason this morning felt like the right time to do it. Nobody’s here yet. I recently read a suggestion, I think on 43Folders, not to deal with e-mail first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, it’s something I prefer to have cleaned out, especially because my e-mail account has its own -Action-, -Waiting For-, and -Response- folders to check on.

…

Right now there’s this metaphorical cloud on the horizon. Our lab is moving. We’re leaving Tulane. Sure, we’re going to “greener pastures”, but this city and university have been my home for seven years. This lab, for nearly four. The cloud is not only philosophical — it’s logistical. In a few weeks our servers will be shut down. The following week, all of the workstations will be packed up and shipped off. In one of our most productive times of year, we’re facing substantial downtime, yet deadlines continue to nip at our heels.

Some of us still haven’t got apartments in Baltimore yet. I am included in that group, unfortunately.

…

I went to the Payroll building to take care of my tax situation (no big deal, but needs addressing), and I found that Payroll has become “New Orleans Jazz Orchestra”. At least that’s what the sign says. Apparently they never moved back to campus after Katrina. Everything else moved back, basically.

I wonder why they didn’t move back… oh wait. I know. Because it’s a pain to get them to do anything, and you have to go bug them in person. That’s a lot harder when they’re a 15 minute drive across town, rather than walking distance on campus.

*sigh*

I sent them an email. That’s step 1. Step 2 is to call them.

…

I just spent some time discussing our workstation set-up with Rob and Umar. We currently use a central file server to host people’s home directories, and we remotely mount them on the workstations. Due to increased file I/O and bandwidth issues, that’s no longer a great solution. It also used to be more important, because people shared machines a lot. That doesn’t really happen any more, so it makes more sense for people to have local home directories. We’re going to want mirrored local disks on the workstations, where possible. For the machines where that’s not possible (like laptops) people should back things up onto external disks. I currently do that every night with my powerbook, automatically.

…

Busy day. More news later. I’m going to try to make it home through the rain now.

Daily Work Log 2006-07-14

Today was something of a whirlwind. I got in pretty early, have now stayed rather late, and I got a ton done. Items include

  • Weekly Review
  • 4 x 1-hour dashes on several subjects
  • A de-cruftification of my Next Actions system… they weren’t making it onto the right lists at the right times, so I’ve stopped putting next actions on the wiki pages altogether
  • Etc etc…

There’s more I could write about, but honestly, it’s Friday night and Amanda’s at home waiting for me so that we can eat dinner, so I’m going to pack up and head home. Have a good weekend!

Daily Work Log 2006-07-12

In an effort to increase my blogging, I’m going to start making daily logs before I leave work.

I spent most of today reading journal articles to prep for writing the discussion and introduction of my paper. The methods and results have been coalescing for a while, and I think are nearing completion. I received some helpful comments from my coauthor via trans-Atlantic fax this morning, and addressing those comments is next on the agenda for that project.

In other news, I’ve begun work on my prospectus. It needs to be defended before I leave for Baltimore, and that doesn’t give me very long. Luckily a lot of the groundwork has already been done for other reasons, so it should be mostly synthesis. The department does require that I write it up in NIH format in addition to the standard format required by the Dean’s office, so I get to join the wonderful world of people who’ve filled out all of that stuff. I hope it’s simpler than my AHA fellowship application was.

Tomorrow I have to take the day off to go to Mandeville, so I’ll follow my first day of daily posts with a day of no posting. My apologies!

One last note before I go home. Last night I found a great meditation timer for Palm OS, PocketDoan. It’s good for much, much more than meditation, though. People have siezed on it for use in work “dashes” particularly the (10+2)*5 method discussed at 43 Folders. I used it for that today and it was fantastic! I only got 3 dashes in today, and I only managed to finish one of the three without an interruption (though pausing is easy). I’m going to keep trying this and try to squeeze more 1-hour periods in per day. My ideal goal would be 7-8 per day.

A tip on calendar use in GTD

Users of the GTD methodology should know that only two things go on your calendar: things that must be done on a certain day, and ‘tickler’ type reminders, if you choose to put them there.  Items that need to be done but don’t have a specific date associated with them belong on Next Action lists, not in the calendar.  The calendar (aside from the tickler bit) is a hard landscape of what has to be done and when.

As much as I understood that from the get-go, I had a hard time with it.  I wanted to plan in lead time for goals — how was I supposed to do that without scheduling the Next Actions ahead of time?

I have discovered the answer: frequent reviews of the calendar.

It’s essential in GTD to review the calendar at least daily, but that review needn’t and shouldn’t be restricted to the current day. It should extend into the next few days and even the next week. Thus, when deciding what to do next from the available Next Actions, upcoming deadlines can be considered.

This seems so simple it’s stupid — and perhaps it is. But, just in case you, like me, were confused about the calendar, be confused no more.

Science, Buddhism, and GTD

When I realized that I was essentially a Buddhist (without even deciding to be, mind you) and a scientist something snapped and it all came together.

In my view, Buddhism and scientific inquiry are two sides of the same coin. While scientific observation and testing deals with the outside world, Buddhism deals with the world within. Both approaches seek to understand what is through careful attention and observation. An often-suggested approach in Buddhism is to seek to have a mind like a child.

What is a child’s mind like? Do you know any two or three-year-olds? What word is so often on the tip of their tongue?

It is: why?

When you let go of something and it drops — why?
When the sun comes up in the morning — why?
When someone sees a wobbling star way out there in space — why?
When we shock the heart and it stops fibrillation — why?
When I’m in a bad mood and I want to lash out — why?
When I’m happy and I feel on top of the world — why?
When I’m impatient and I get that twisty feeling in my stomach — why?
When I’m obsessed with figuring something out — why?

You probably get the picture, but there’s more. There’s a twist. Neither one works if we ignore what we find because it’s not what we think is true when we seek the answer. We have to make a completely earnest effort to get as close to the truth as we can, and if there’s no objective truth to an issue or no clear-cut answer, to find out as much as we can about it and act accordingly.

The bad mood thing is a particularly good example of the power of Buddhism (for me in particular, Zen) and the harm of clinging to what we think we know. I’m sometimes in a bad mood, but I don’t know why. I may attribute it to anything that annoys me at the moment, but addressing those annoyances doesn’t eliminate the problem. It becomes clear after a few attempts to fix things that even though I think I’ve found the problem and fixed it, I have not. To rage on that the problem is unfixable when I’m fixing the wrong problem is folly, and it’s oh-so common. This is when two things have to happen:

  1. Recognize the state of off-centeredness
  2. Take a moment to sit and observe one’s thoughts

The first bit requires some practice beforehand. If you’re not used to having a quiet mind, it’s hard to notice when you’ve deviated from that state. (click — just remembered where Getting Things Done fits here) With regard to the second bit, it seems impossible, in the arena of one’s own mind, to make objective observations. However, after a little practice by meditation, it becomes possible to do just that. Depending on the type of meditation you practice, the approach may be different, but the results are similar. If you can arrest the active part of the mind, the part that is in the thoughts, and just let thoughts arise from the subconscious or wherever, then you can observe. The mind is pretty good at finding patterns, and if you sit back and just pay attention to the thoughts that arise for a few minutes, usually a pattern emerges. Once you know what the problem is, it’s a lot easier to fix it.

Back to the Getting Things Done bit. I had meant to post about how Buddhism, Science and GTD are interrelated months ago, and couldn’t figure out how to write about it. I lost the epiphany I’d had about it. I gave up and decided to just write this post on science and Buddhism, but then it clicked as noted above while writing. An underlying principle in GTD is that if your mind is clear, you can properly recognize and deal with new input. Really Science and GTD are linked by Buddhism, as such:

Science <— Buddhism —> Getting Things Done

What Buddhism and Getting Things Done have in common is their ‘rest’ state. There’s a saying in the GTD community that, “If it’s on your mind, it’s not Getting Done.” In GTD, everything that you need to do or be concerned with should be out of your head. When it enters your head, you dump it to a capture device, and process it later. Then you make sure it’s in your system in such a way that you will see it again when you need to. I won’t get into the details just now. In Buddhism, all of the “other stuff” of your life should be out of your mind. Your only concern should be what’s often referred to as “The Now” (as compared to the past and the future).

The neat thing is, GTD actually facilitates living in The Now. By removing all of those thoughts that bounce around in the head, reminding you of things when you don’t need to be reminded and so on, the mind is cleared.

It is then possible to (a) be in the moment and (b) focus with full intent, clarity, and creativity on what you’re doing. In fact, that sentence is nearly redundant, because (a) and (b) are practically the same thing.

I think there’s a particular synergy in these three things, and now that I’ve finally laid it out in words I hope to have more observations about this synergy to share in the near future. Questions? Comments?