As I mentioned in The Pursuit of Happiness, one of my key insights when I took a step back to analyze my life was: I enjoy my work when I feel like I am succeeding at it, and I become stressed and unhappy when I feel like I am not.
Even once you figure out all the math and how-tos of the FIRE movement, reaching financial independence will still probably take years. Stressed and unhappy is no way to spend these years. It was time to try to step up my game at work!
For improving myself I had two goals:
- Improve the work I was doing.
- Spend less time doing it.
Work Life Before GTD
During 2016 I had been working for 11 years. I was the project manager on the structural engineering of a $50M brand new high school, as well as many other projects that were simultaneously in various stages of design or construction. All of these projects seemed to be behind schedule. This would generate daily “emergencies”, aka “fires”, that I would have to put out.
I had a larger team of people helping me accomplish the high school design than I had ever led before. We didn’t have enough staff in our office to do this, so I recruited help from many of our different offices all over the western half of the country.
The design itself was extremely complicated. The design schedule that should have been about 12 months was compressed down to 4 months to try and let the school open a year earlier.
This was a much larger team, and a much more complicated project, than I had ever dealt with before, and I was drowning. I couldn’t seem to keep track of who was doing what, what I needed to do, and when all these things needed to be done.
A Day in My Life During 2016
I start working on something important. I then get an “urgent” email about a different project. I stop what I had been doing and start working to solve the “urgent” matter. Before I can get too far though, my phone rings, and it is a contractor telling me about some “urgent” thing on a different project that he needs right then because he is dead in the water without it. Before I even hang up the phone, I look up to see my boss standing there waiting. As I hang up, he asks me about the status of some other thing that I was supposed to have given him the day before. I throw my hands up in despair and tell him that I haven’t started it yet. He reminds me that it is “urgent” and that he needs it right away.
I drop all the other stuff and start wrapping my head around what my boss said he needed, but then one of my teammates pops in with a question about some piece of the high school she is designing. I get flustered at this most recent interruption and tell her that I don’t have time to talk now. This hurts her ability to do her job. Putting my head down on my own tasks and neglecting the team I am supposed to be leading is the opposite of leveraging my time. This contributes to putting the whole project further behind schedule.
I finally finish the thing my boss needs. I stop and think, “What the heck was I working on again?”
“Sounds like a rough day, Mr. DS. We all have occasional rough days though. Suck it up and then enjoy the days that aren’t like that.”
Therein lay the problem. The day I described above was how almost every day felt like it went. This was my typical workday.
To compensate I started work very early and stayed late in order to try and “catch up”. Work weeks were frequently over 60 hours, with some extending all the way to 80. It felt like running on a treadmill though. No matter how many hours I worked, the next day I felt just as behind.
Prior to this phase of my life I had been known as a generally happy person. During this time though, the question I got most often was, “Are you alright? You seem stressed out…” I can remember getting in the car to drive home (usually very late) and just screaming at the top of my lungs and banging my fists on the steering wheel.
Something clearly had to change. I didn’t need some higher level understanding of my goals and values, I needed to get my shit together on the ground floor. I needed to get a grasp on all of the day to day “stuff” that was grabbing my attention. I needed help Getting Things Done…
Getting Things Done (GTD)
Getting Things Done is a book by David Allen. This book, more than any other, helped me get a grip on life. It helped me to find a place of calm amidst the storm. It helped me to realize that it is possible to be focused and happy even when you have more things on your plate than you can possibly do.
Getting Things Done teaches a system for organizing your life. Before I get into what this system is, and how I have applied it, I want to touch on the purpose of this system.
Is the purpose of this organizational system to help you get organized? NO! It will do that, of course, but that is not the higher purpose.
The purpose of the GTD system is to give you the ability to focus on what matters.
It does this by getting all of the things you are trying to remember (and that are distracting you) out of your head. Your brain becomes clear. Your ability to focus on the task at hand is greatly magnified.
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” -David Allen
The GTD system is all about creating an “external brain” that can do the job of remembering all your tasks and ideas so you don’t have to.
Prior to implementing GTD, my brain would often interrupt myself with things I was trying to remember. Maybe I’m in the middle of a complicated engineering calculation, when all of a sudden the thought pops into my head, “Oh crap, I need to return that book to the library!” The distraction has broken my train of thought, but I do my best to get back into the calculation when another thought pops in, “Oh crap, I’ve got to call the architect about _________! I’d better stop what I am doing and call now so I don’t forget!”
It is very hard to get anything of value done when your brain keeps bouncing around like this. When your mind is in this state you are behaving like a dog that can’t focus on its owner’s commands because it keeps getting distracted by squirrels.
As soon as I started using the GTD system in earnest, it was like magic! The squirrels were gone! I could really focus because I didn’t have to worry about what I was forgetting to do. It was all written down in my GTD system, and I trusted myself to review that system frequently enough that nothing would get missed. A giant weight had been lifted from my brain!
Distractions were easier to deal with too, because I didn’t have to worry about forgetting to finish the thing I had been interrupted from, and I had a way to capture the request that was coming in so it wouldn’t be forgotten either.
David Allen refers to this state of having a clear and focused mind as having a “mind like water”. He attributes this quote to Bruce Lee. The idea with “mind like water” is that water does not over react or under react. It acts appropriately to the stimulus that it receives. If you throw in a pebble, it will ripple. If you throw in a boulder it will splash. Once it has dealt with the stimulus, it will return to a place of calm, ready for the next stimulus.
So how do we achieve this “mind like water”? Let’s dive in and find out!
A Ground Up Approach
Many resources on productivity will have you start with your life’s purpose, or with very long term goals (the top floor), and work backwards from there to prioritize what you should do next (the ground floor). GTD does the opposite.
There is nothing wrong with spending time pondering your long term aspirations to make sure you are headed in the right direction. In fact this is a wonderful thing to do! A great book if you want some help making progress towards ONE big goal is Gary Keller’s The One Thing. It suggests you distill your dreams down to ONE big long term goal, and then work backwards to determine what you should be doing right now to move towards that goal.
The problem for me was that the ground floor of my day to day life was in utter chaos. I was drowning in “urgent” minutia to the point that I could not trust myself to make progress on any long term goals. Heck, I couldn’t even slow down enough to really figure out what my long term goals were!
I needed to start from the bottom. I needed to clean up the day to day stuff before I had the mental bandwidth to focus on long term dreams.
GTD has you do just that. It starts at the bottom to get your day to day stuff under control to free up the mental space that you will need to focus on the bigger picture.
Some people don’t like to get too far into the weeds, but the weeds are where life happens! Vision is not enough, you must take action!
The Steps to Getting Things Done
David Allen’s book is software neutral. It doesn’t recommend one specific product with which to build your system. It gives you the tools you need to get organized whether you are using a GTD specific software, generic software, or just paper and pen.
To implement GTD I used Microsoft Outlook for the first couple years and recently switched to Asana. I’ll go into how I set up my specific system in a future post, but first let’s look at David Allen’s steps for GTD:
1) Capture
The Capture phase is one of the more profound pieces of David Allen’s work. Write down everything that you have to do. Everything that has your attention.
The key word above is EVERYTHING. Most people have created a to-do list before, but it tends to be ad hoc containing only the items considered important.
The problem with only including the “important” things is that your brain doesn’t care if the thing you are remembering is “get a haircut” or “solve world peace”. Your brain will interrupt you to remind you of this thing regardless. Unless, of course, you have thought through a next action and stored it in a system that you trust to remind you at the appropriate time.
As a reminder, the purpose of this system is NOT to organize your important stuff. The purpose is to allow you to focus on what matters, and prevent your brain from interrupting you.
Thus you can see that you should capture everything. It does not matter how mundane. If it has your attention at all, write it down.
For the initial capture phase David Allen recommends writing each item on a separate piece of paper and putting into an in-tray. This lets you deal with 1 item at a time.
How do you know when you have captured everything? When there’s nothing left on your mind. Then as time goes by and you think of more things, capture them immediately. In this way you will get all of your life’s open loops into your trusted system.
Think there may be more items hiding in your head somewhere? One of the best ways for me to get the ideas out is to go for a run with no headphones. Your legs move on autopilot. Blood is pumping through your brain, and you have nothing that you have to think about. There are lots of ideas that your mind wants to have, but we are constantly redirecting it away from those ideas and back to what we are trying to focus on. Running is the perfect time to let your mind wander to all those places it’s been wanting to go.
I will often have some of my best ideas when I’m running or riding my bike. These great ideas used to frustrate me because I knew that I would forget them before I was in a place where I could do them. So how do you capture them? What I do is whip out my phone and either email it to myself or create a task in Asana (which I’ll get to in a different article). In this way I can capture my good ideas anywhere so that I can later process them and figure out what to do with them.
“Don’t forget to furminate the dogs this week so that they aren’t shedding all over our friends when they come for dinner on Friday”. I can use the speech to text function of my phone to dictate this into an email to me and then click send. If I’m out on a run, I can do this without even breaking stride.
Voila! I now won’t forget my good idea. My mind doesn’t need to worry, so it can go back to enjoying the run, or having other good ideas!
Keep something nearby to capture good ideas at all times. The sense of trust that nothing possibly useful will get lost will give you the freedom to have many more good ideas.
2) Clarify
Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash
All of the stuff that you captured is just that, “stuff”. Before we can organize it, we need to figure out what this “stuff” means.
By now, you will have generated an inbox (either physical or virtual) full of stuff that you have captured. For each item, go through and ask the following question:
Is it actionable? If so, what’s the next action?
This is the key question, and probably the most useful single thing in David Allen’s book. Get in the habit of asking this question for everything. It drives to the heart of what something means and what needs to be done about it. It’s also useful in meetings to make sure that everyone knows what needs to get done and who is responsible for it.
If the item is not actionable, trash it, incubate it, or file it. For incubated and filed items, move on to the “Organize” section.
If the item is actionable, will it take less than 2 minutes? If so DO IT NOW! There is no sense in spending effort to organize something that can be done that quickly.
If an actionable item will take longer than 2 minutes, are you the right person to do it? If not then delegate it. If so, then defer it. See the Organize section for how to keep track of delegated and deferred items.
3) Organize
I used to have partial lists of the “important” things I had to do scattered everywhere. From post-its on my computer monitor, to lists written on scratch paper (usually buried deep under other piles of paper on my desk), to flagged items in Outlook, to a bunch of emails that were stored in my inbox so I “wouldn’t forget them”.
No more! Now, as soon as I have clarified an item it gets put in the appropriate place and moved out of my inbox.
“Inbox Zero” seems to be a buzz word lately. GTD is a way to get to “inbox zero”.
GTD recommends, and I agree, that having 1 comprehensive trusted system is far better than many partial systems.
Trash
If it’s not actionable, you won’t need it for reference, and you never will want it, then throw it away!
This sounds obvious, but when I started putting this into practice I was able to remove a bunch of clutter from my home and office.
Reference Information
It’s not an action item, but you want to keep it for reference…
David Allen recommends a simple personal file system with folders labeled by topic and sorted alphabetically. This seems to work well for me!
For my personal reference system I have a version of this on my computer, and also physical filing systems at work and home.
I think it’s important to keep your computer file synced to Dropbox or some other cloud system so that you don’t lose it all if something happens to your computer. Because everything is on Dropbox I could throw my laptop into the ocean and not lose a single file that is important to me.
Someday/Maybe List (a.k.a. Incubate List)
Many or your ideas will be things that you might want to do at some point, but not right now. Keep a running list of these things and ideas so you don’t forget them.
The key with this is to review it regularly during your weekly review (see step 5). During your review, delete anything that is no longer relevant, and think about each item to decide if it is time to promote it to an active project.
If you don’t review this list regularly you won’t trust that items on it will be remembered. If you don’t trust the system you won’t use it. The key to all these lists (and especially this one) is a frequent review of the entire list!
Project List
Projects (in the GTD sense) are anything that will require more than one step to do.
Pick up the dog poop could be just a simple action. However, if you don’t have a pooper scooper than it just graduated to a 2-step process. The next action would be “go to the store to get a pooper scooper”. Actually picking up the poop would be step 2.
The purpose of the project list is to keep some reminder of all the multi-step obligations you have in your life. It’s not an action list that you will work from. It is a list that you will review regularly to help you think of all your next actions.
Let’s say that you got the pooper scooper from the store and deleted “Home Depot – buy pooper scooper” from your @Errands list. There is now no action item related to the backyard poop on your action list! Fortunately you put this on your project list, so during your next review it will jog your memory and you can add “Pick up dog poop” to your @Home list.
Waiting For
I had never heard of a Waiting For list before GTD. The usefulness of this list totally blew my mind! It’s such a simple idea; I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it on my own! Even if you don’t implement the full blown GTD system, just starting a Waiting For list will change your life.
The Waiting For list keeps track of all the things you have delegated. If you ask someone to do something, put it on the Waiting For list!
You can review this list at any time to see all of the things that you are “waiting for” someone else to do.
I use the following format when recording entries:
[Who I asked to do it] – [ASSOCIATED PROJECT (if applicable)] – [Short description of the task] – [Date I made the request]
An entry might look like this:
Sally – POOPER SCOOPER – Buy a pooper scooper the next time she’s at the store – 11/25
Putting the person’s name first allows you to sort your list alphabetically and quickly see everything in someone’s court (since they will be grouped together). The next time you talk to Sally you can easily see all the things that are in her court. This makes following up on status super easy!
For due dates, since I use Asana, I can assign a due date directly to the task, so there is no reason to put it in the title. If you use a different program you may need to track due dates in the title too.
Calendar
The calendar is the one thing that I do a bit different from what David Allen recommends. I plan on doing a whole post on how I use my calendar (what can I say, I’m a productivity nerd!). For now, I’ll just stick with David Allen’s recommendation:
David Allen recommends that things which must happen on a certain date at a certain time be stored in the calendar. Duh. These are things like appointments and meetings.
He further recommends that if an action item has to be done on a certain day (but not at a specific time), it gets recorded as an all-day event on that day.
Per David Allen, nothing else should go into your calendar.
Used this way, your calendar represents your “hard landscape”, and should be the first thing you look at when deciding what to do.
Next Actions
Finally you have the actual next actions. These are things like “get milk from the store”, or “review the structural details that Jimmy drew for the steel to CMU connection.” Many of these will be associated with projects on your project lists, but others could be just one-off things that you need to do.
David Allen recommends organizing these by context. Where do you need to be, or what do you need to have access to, in order to be able to do it?
I typically have over 100 next actions in my court (I just checked, 178 open tasks as of this writing). If I had to dig through all of those every time I wanted to decide what to do it would be extremely cumbersome. This is especially true since I need to be in a specific place to do each of these. There is no sense looking through my household chores when I’m at work, or looking through my work action items when I’m at home.
The goal with context organizing is to only look at the tasks that you actually could do. This greatly reduces the number of tasks that you need to review at any one time.
The contexts that I use are the following:
- .Projects
- This is my list of active projects.
- The key with this list is to make sure that everything on it has at least 1 associated next action item.
- Try keeping a “FI” project on this list to make sure that you are always moving toward Financial Independence!
- I put a portion of the project name in CAPITAL letters to denote a kind of tag. Any associated actions also get this tag. This makes searching for tasks associated with this project easy.
- Example: Pick up dog POOP
- @@Waiting For
- I use a double “@@” so that this sorts to the top.
- Format: [Who I asked to do it] – [ASSOCIATED PROJECT (if applicable)] – [Short description of the task] – [Date I made the request]
- Example: Sally – POOP – Buy new pooper scooper – 12/3
- @Agenda
- This is a list of things I want to talk to someone about.
- I format similar to @@Waiting for, with the person’s name first and then the topic. When the tasks are sorted alphabetically this will group all the discussion topics for each person together.
- This list (in combination with waiting for) makes you look very organized when you can quickly pull up everything you wanted to discuss with someone!
- Keeping this list is a very courteous thing to do. It lets you cover all your items in one meeting so you don’t have to keep going back and interrupting someone every time you think of something you need to talk to them about.
- @Anywhere
- These are items that I can do anywhere with nothing more than a cell phone.
- Example could be checking into an airplane flight (I can just do that on my phone).
- @Calls
- These are people I need to call.
- Format: [Name of person] – [Subject of call] – [Phone number]
- It’s important to include the phone number in the task name to make it easy to take action when you have the time for the call.
- @Computer
- Actions that I need to be at my computer for.
- This is my most used list.
- @Email
- Emails that I need to send.
- @Errands
- Thing I need to do or get when I’m out and about.
- This list is super useful! I don’t drive my car very often, so when I do it’s nice to be able to knock as many errands off in one go as possible. Having a list of all of them makes this super easy!
- @Home
- Things that I need to be at home to do.
- Example: Rake the leaves in the alley.
- @Office
- Things that I need to be in the office to do.
- I don’t end up using this one that much, since most of what I do can be done remotely on a computer. Sometimes I need to look at hard copies of an old drawing set, or print something, and these end up being the things that go on my @office list.
- @Read/Listen
- I’m a huge fan of books (in case you haven’t figure that out!) and podcasts. This is where I keep a list of things I want to read or listen to.
- @Recurring
- Some tasks are recurring. I keep them here.
- Example: Submit time card every Friday.
- If you are trying to start a new habit, the recurring list can be a great help! For example, I have a daily reminder to text a nice note to my wife from work. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the busy-ness and lose track of time. Having a reminder to stop and and think of the MRS makes me happy, and I presume she likes it too :).
- @Tickler
- Tickler is for items that I don’t need to think about right now, but that I want to remind myself of in the future.
- Example: I discussed grabbing lunch with a client, but they will be out on vacation for 3 weeks. I will create a tickler item with a due date 3 weeks from now. When the due date arrives my software will move this into my inbox, where I can then assess it and move it to the proper context list.
- @Later
- These are projects that are real and happening, but are just on hold. I find it useful to keep these separate from my massive someday/maybe list.
- If I have a project that doesn’t need any actions from me or others for at least a week or two I move it here. This way everything in my project list is current and moving forward.
- I review this list weekly to see if any of these items need to move back to the project list (i.e. they need to have a next action).
- @Someday/Maybe
- Hopes, dreams, things you might want to do or try…
- Signing up for a road marathon, and learning Wing Tsun Kung Fu are a couple of the things on my list. 🙂
- Once again, the key here is to review this regularly. I recommend weekly, or at least monthly. If you know you’ll be reviewing this, then you will trust that items on this list won’t be forgotten. If you never review it, then it’s just a black hole and your brain won’t trust the list enough to keep the things on it off your mind.
4) Reflect (a.k.a. the Weekly Review)
Photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash
This step is crucial! Skip this, and everything above will all just be wasted effort!
This step is all about trust. Does your mind trust the system?
You must regularly review your entire list. Keeping current is the only way for your mind to trust the system enough to not take back the job of remembering everything and starting the squirrel interruptions again.
How often should you do this? As often as necessary to keep your mind clear. David Allen recommends at least once per week. This is what I do normally, although if things are particularly crazy I will throw another one of these reviews in mid-week too.
Ideally I would love to block out a couple hours to do my review every Friday at the end of the day. This way I would be current and worry free going into the weekend. In practice though, the office during the workday is not a place that I can focus well enough to do a good review. There are far too many distractions and interruptions.
For awhile I was doing these reviews on Sunday afternoons. This worked well to prep for the week, but the need for the pending review was hanging over my head all weekend. Lately I have been getting up early on Saturday, getting the review done, and then relaxing worry free the rest of the weekend.
Do whatever works for you, but make sure you do it!
Do this in your review:
- Collect anything that’s on your mind or cluttered on your desk into your in-tray or inbox.
- Reflect on each item in the inbox. What is the next action?
- Organize those actions onto the appropriate lists.
- Review all of your lists:
- Start with the @@Waiting For list and work down through the contexts from there.
- Are any of these done? If so check them off the list!
- Anything here you no longer need to do? Delete it!
- Think of something else you need to do? Add it!
- Do any of these need to move to a different context? Maybe you completed the call and now you need to follow up with an email…
- Review the Project list last.
- Make sure each project has at least one “next action” so that they are all moving forward.
- Saving the Project list for last makes this review easier since your next action lists will be fresh in your head.
- Is there any other stuff bouncing around in your brain that you should turn into a project?
- Start with the @@Waiting For list and work down through the contexts from there.
- Review your calendar for the coming week
- Are there any conflicting appointments? Solve the conflict now!
- Some colleagues have the habit of accepting every appointment that gets sent their way. Calendars often end up double and triple booked all day.
- The stressful “Oh crap I double booked myself!” reaction, and the subsequent flaking on at least 1 of your appointments is not something that needs to happen. You can easily see these conflicts in advance with a quick glance at your calendar. All it usually takes is an email or phone call in advance to solve the conflict.
- Are there any other appointments you are missing? Add it now!
- Are there any conflicting appointments? Solve the conflict now!
- Enjoy a cold beer when you finish and relish the relaxed worry-free feeling of knowing that everything is under control!
5) Engage!
Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash
It is now finally time to get things done! As you go through your day and find yourself with some time to do something, look at the appropriate context list and decide what is the most important thing to do.
At the office? Try starting with the @Office and @computer lists. Have 10 minutes to kill before a meeting? Pull out your @Calls list and make a couple calls.
GTD helps you decide what the best use of your time is based on all the options that you actually could do in that moment.
Line em up and knock em off! Get some shit done!
What about you? Are you using GTD or something similar? Have any tricks to stay organized and tame the chaos? Please share below in the comments!
Wow, this is an epic post, some great advice in here