Self-Organisation for Effectiveness
Pretty good summary of the GDT-method:
Important lessons:
- Get things out of your head into your inbox! Then process your inbox into projects and process every project into actionable items. I’ve done this for 8 months now and it works very well!
- Focus on one thing. Focus on the next action, i.e. the next actionable step towards completion of your project (e.g. getting the vacuum cleaner out of the closet comes before vacuum cleaning!)
- Organize your actionable items by context. This is a very important. There are things that you can only do in a certain context. Be it at home, at the office, online, offline, at the grocery store, at amazon.com, at the train station etc. E.g. I have a list in my Treo with items for my next grocery store purchase. Every time something in the fridge is missing I put it into my Treo. Then when I go to the grocery store I have a perfect tobuy list that is going to fill for sure my fridge and freezer. Same thing with amazon.com.
- Start your work-day with a important task (not email). I don’t do that yet, but I only spend 5-10 min on my email, because I only process my inbox to zero and come back later for my important @action emails.
- Practice discipline and balance. For me thats 1-2 sports trainings per week.
- Fight procrastination. Always reflect on yourself. Be aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I you find yourself procrastinating, review the phrasing of your actionable items for the project and check if they are really actionable. E.g. since June 22 I’m fighting with vacuum cleaning. The paper only says “vacuum cleaning”, but it really should say “get vacuum cleaner of of the closet” ;-).
- Avoid interruptions. Turn off your Skype, IM and maybe even Cell when doing important tasks. Interruptions are a killer. I’m almost never online on Skype or IM. I hate those things since many years! ;-)
(via nicozorn)
Tags: getting things done
Categories: Life in General, Videos
September 23rd, 2008 at 14:41
Very good informational list. Make sure to keep your organization techniques simple, if it gets too complicated you will be less likely to stick with it.
April 28th, 2009 at 20:45
Very good info. For me I especially liked the part “focusing on one thing,” and “fighting procrastination.” So many times I as well as I would imagine many other people try to do too many things at once only to fail at them all. And then, I know I do, procrastinate until the last moment trying to get important things done and completed. Really good advice.