#getting-things-done — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #getting-things-done, aggregated by home.social.
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Calculated some quick stats for my GTD system:
the current incarnation is 23 months old. That's more than I spent with a paper system.
I abandon 18% of the projects I start.
I realize 40% of the ideas I write down, i.e. out of every 5 ideas, two become completed projects and the other three go to the someday/maybe list.
my waiting-for list is 1.5 times bigger than my projects list.
This matches my overall feeling that the clarification routine is weak and I should drop more stuff early on. This despite the fact that I became way more focused in the last couple years, ruthlessly deallocating time and energy from things that appear less important. About half a year ago I realized that I hamstrung myself by deprioritizing some activities that brought me joy and energy, so I'm bringing those back now.
I suspect that in order to improve my clarification routine I should go to higher horizons and formulate a better understanding of where I'm heading. I tried bottom-up approach where I assign each project to an area of focus, but that didn't bring me any insights yet. Would love to hear how others approached their higher horizons.
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Calculated some quick stats for my GTD system:
the current incarnation is 23 months old. That's more than I spent with a paper system.
I abandon 18% of the projects I start.
I realize 40% of the ideas I write down, i.e. out of every 5 ideas, two become completed projects and the other three go to the someday/maybe list.
my waiting-for list is 1.5 times bigger than my projects list.
This matches my overall feeling that the clarification routine is weak and I should drop more stuff early on. This despite the fact that I became way more focused in the last couple years, ruthlessly deallocating time and energy from things that appear less important. About half a year ago I realized that I hamstrung myself by deprioritizing some activities that brought me joy and energy, so I'm bringing those back now.
I suspect that in order to improve my clarification routine I should go to higher horizons and formulate a better understanding of where I'm heading. I tried bottom-up approach where I assign each project to an area of focus, but that didn't bring me any insights yet. Would love to hear how others approached their higher horizons.
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What's my favorite to-do list manager? Trello! Here's why.
#productivity #ToDo #GettingThingsDone #kanban #favorite #Trello #review
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What's my favorite to-do list manager? Trello! Here's why.
#productivity #ToDo #GettingThingsDone #kanban #favorite #Trello #review
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I'm planning to uproot my life and move, but I don't feel stress from the explosion of things to do, because of #GTD. I have a long list of things to do. I keep having more ideas.
There's on the list. I'll get to them. I won't forget anything important. It'll be fine.
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I'm planning to uproot my life and move, but I don't feel stress from the explosion of things to do, because of #GTD. I have a long list of things to do. I keep having more ideas.
There's on the list. I'll get to them. I won't forget anything important. It'll be fine.
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Ok, got to inbox zero AND didn't add any new tasks to my bullet journal.
Moving away from using my inbox as a to-do list was probably my biggest take away from reading #GettingThingsDone
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Wichtig: Alle Jahre die ToDo App wechseln und wieder bei Null anfangen. #GettingThingsDone
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What's my favorite to-do list manager? Trello! Here's why.
#productivity #ToDo #GettingThingsDone #kanban #favorite #Trello #review
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What's my favorite to-do list manager? Trello! Here's why.
#productivity #ToDo #GettingThingsDone #kanban #favorite #Trello #review
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Die App 'Tasks' von Alex Baker, die wiederum auf dem Code der Android-App von 'Astrid' beruht, ist zu einer flexiblen App für Aufgabenmanagement angewachsen. In den vergangenen Jahren hat sie mir tolle Dienste geleistet, auch wenn ich sie für GTD verwendet habe, wofür sie gar nicht konzipiert ist.
Jetzt habe ich mit 'Mindwtr' eine echte GTD-App gefunden und werde wohl Abschied nehmen von Tasks. Erstmal stehen nun aber Migrationsarbeiten an.
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Die App 'Tasks' von Alex Baker, die wiederum auf dem Code der Android-App von 'Astrid' beruht, ist zu einer flexiblen App für Aufgabenmanagement angewachsen. In den vergangenen Jahren hat sie mir tolle Dienste geleistet, auch wenn ich sie für GTD verwendet habe, wofür sie gar nicht konzipiert ist.
Jetzt habe ich mit 'Mindwtr' eine echte GTD-App gefunden und werde wohl Abschied nehmen von Tasks. Erstmal stehen nun aber Migrationsarbeiten an.
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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Why I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be the most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
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Why I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be the most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
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Thrilled to share that I’ve had an incredibly productive day crushing milestones and closing out a significant volume of tickets! 🚀 It’s all about that relentless drive for excellence and delivering consistent value. Grateful for the hustle!#Productivity #Efficiency #GettingThingsDone #GrowthMindset
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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To everyone who did get sth. done today:
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Du haderst mit deiner Tagesplanung?
Hm, hast du schon 'Interstitial Journaling' probiert: Lern es kennen in meinem Blog und Mini-eBook (kostenfrei) - damit erkennst du 'schwarze Löcher' im Tag und kannst sie eingrenzen https://doschu.com/2026/01/interstitial-journaling/
Du brauchst nur Stift und Tageskalender oder Notizheft 🫶
#journaling #gettingthingsdone #gtd -
How do you manage your task list? If you're not happy with your current setup, give #Taskwarrior a try---it's a really lean, simple yet powerful and extensible tool for managing tasks. It also includes in-built syncing features so that you can use across multiple devices.
Recently, I needed to split tasks into smaller tasks. I came up with a quick script:
https://ankursinha.in/2025/07/05/splitting-taskwarrior-tasks-to-sub-tasks.html
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How do you manage your task list? If you're not happy with your current setup, give #Taskwarrior a try---it's a really lean, simple yet powerful and extensible tool for managing tasks. It also includes in-built syncing features so that you can use across multiple devices.
Recently, I needed to split tasks into smaller tasks. I came up with a quick script:
https://ankursinha.in/2025/07/05/splitting-taskwarrior-tasks-to-sub-tasks.html
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gibt es Empfehlungen für eine #todo-liste (zB nach #gettingthingsdone) in Open Source, gerne CLI mit strukturierten Exporten oder so? Microsoft Todo mag zwar gut sein, ich würde das aber gerne sinnvoll machen ;)
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gibt es Empfehlungen für eine #todo-liste (zB nach #gettingthingsdone) in Open Source, gerne CLI mit strukturierten Exporten oder so? Microsoft Todo mag zwar gut sein, ich würde das aber gerne sinnvoll machen ;)
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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Why I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be the most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
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@FreitagsFrage Zum Sortieren nutze ich Ansätze aus #gettingthingsdone, also kategorisieren und in einem priorisieren. Ich habe eine 1/3/5 Regel: Arbeiten kann ich nur an einer Aufgabe, Dringend sind maximal 3, Wichtig maximal 5. Um das zu erreichen priorisiere ich zyklisch neu. Das nutze ich privat und im Job und wende es auf Mailclients / Posteingang genauso an, wie auf Projektmanagementwerkzeug und Todoliste.
#openproject #todoist #jtxboard #thunderbird #outlook #selbstmanagement
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I quite like Oliver Burkeman’s “3-3-3 method” - for planning your day, you can realistically only do three hours of focussed work before you’re worn out, then choose three maintenance tasks to keep things ticking along, and three todo items so the wheels don’t fall off the bus.
Except that on days like this, it may turn out to be “2.5-1-can-I-go-back-to-bed-please?”
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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Again, I’m having a strong feeling of “How on earth is it possible to do all the things that need doing, in each day?!”
Why do I never seem to make progress*; why does The Immense List Of Things never seem to go down?
Is “Getting Things Done” only a tantalising dream?
* I do, yesterday I finished a small part of the Link code on my Transputer emulator, and continued sorting out my new laptop, so “never” is a bit of all-or-nothing thinking.
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Has anyone here good resources to dive deeper into #GettingThingsDone and #OmniFocus? I want to revamp my task management and feel like my current implementation can be improved A LOT...
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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My "daily GTD review" didn't hold up quite as well as I expected. There were a few problems with it:
"must dos" were useful as often as they weren't. I ended up moving the truly mandatory stuff to the calendar instead, and when I need to concentrate on a handful of projects or actions I just create a new project and put everything there
the more projects I had, the longer the daily review took me while providing less value. I find that if I have many projects, it's a bit less important to have each one in tip-top shape all the time. Nowadays I just do a weekly review and then chug along, feeling assured that I have enough tasks to last me a week
such a detailed daily review made it easier to skip weekly reviews, since the lower horizons were taken care of and I didn't feel all that stressed about them. This kept me from working on higher horizons, impacting my overall happiness and motivation
I think daily reviews served their purpose as a crisis management tool, but I should have reduced them as early as possible.
Today, my daily review consists of processing the few choice inboxes and glancing through the calendar, waiting-for, and projects list. All the other stuff moved back to the weekly review, which expanded to also include periodic work on higher horizons.
We'll see what I think of this in one more year :)
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How can you continuously improve your work life? Designing and conducting a regular work life review can work wonders.
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Why I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be the most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
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I never could finish this book lol
#ADHD #ADHDMemes #Productivity #SelfHelpBooks #SelfHelp #GettingThingsDone
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How I work productively: including Getting Things Done, work environment, reliable backup, and working in sprints rather than marathons
#PersonalEffectiveness #working #productivity #tips #breaks #GettingThingsDone #OfficeEnvironment #pomodoro
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Why I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be the most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
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A cup of tea
These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
~ Arnold Bennettslip:4a1171.
#ArnoldBennett #GettingThingsDone #Quotes -
Yes and no
Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.
~ Josh Billingsslip:4a906.
#DecisionFatigue #GettingThingsDone #JoshBillings #Quotes -
Keeping you small
The trick is: You bite off more than you can chew… and then you still chew it. Your mind always believes it can do less than it actually can. It will tell you it’s too much, to stop, to take a break, to cancel this or that. But your mind will lie to you to keep you small.
~ Will Smithslip:4a901.
#GettingThingsDone #Perspective #Quotes #WillSmith -
Small asks
The world expects that its requests will be accepted. That assignments, lunch dates, new projects, and even favors will get a yes. […] It’s just a small ask, the person thinks. Responding or reacting to incoming asks becomes the narration of your days, instead of the generous work of making your own contribution.
~ Seth Godinslip:4a841.
#Focus #GettingThingsDone #Quotes #SethGodin -
Consistent, Current and Context-driven
The podcast episode, Consistent, Current and Context-driven, is a scant 5 minutes and 43 seconds long. You’ll probably want to pause and take some notes. After it widens your eyes, go revisit your copy of Getting Things Done—or omgbecky buy a copy, …how do you not own a copy?
Everything I have ever accomplished is because I have systems within which I can think and operate; our brains are for having ideas, not for remembering things [such as: to-do lists, dates, reminders, etc.]
slip:4c2ge2a.
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#DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #GreatPodcastEpisodes #KnowledgeSystems -
If I had a clone
I only wish for more hours in the day and a clone to do adulting chores while I enjoy [insert speaker’s preferences here] without interruption.
Who hasn’t expressed such a sentiment at one time or another? I certainly have, and it’s a pleasant diversion to imagine being unloaded of all the small stuff that seems to weigh me down. There’s plenty that can be said—and which I and others have already said—about the importance of the smaller things and “adulting chores”. But today I’m going in a different direction.
When that sentiment comes to mind, I use it as a thought experiment: If I had a clone, that would then obviously be me. It would be literally this same me that I am today. This same me, who doesn’t want to do those small things and adulting-chores. How do I expect to be able to convince the clone to do all the stuff I don’t want to do? If I could convince the clone, I’d be able to convince myself. So I set about thinking about how to convince the clone.
Because then I’d be happy to get that stuff done, wouldn’t I?
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#GettingThingsDone #Motivation -
What you are not doing
There is always more to do than you can do, and you can do only one thing at a time. The key is to feel as good about what you’re not doing as about what you are doing at that moment.
~ David Allenslip:4a386.
#DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #Quotes -
Some thoughts on file organization
Within the team that creates the Movers Mindset podcast, we assign numbers to our projects. We use “R42” for our 42nd recording project, then R43, and so on. This enables us to start naming things from day one, in a way that we don’t have to change later. If you’re putting your files in a folder, what would you name it, that you could be sure wouldn’t change?
We also use our podcast’s initials on file names, “MM.” When we see files whose name contains,
MM-R42…we know what it belongs too. It’s part of the Recording-42 project for Movers Mindset.We also exclusively use people’s family names on files. So a raw WAV file from an interview is
20200423-MM-SMITH-TR1.wav… April 23, 2020 recording for Movers Mindset, of someone named “Smith”, and this is track one [a recording from one microphone.]20200423-MM-SMITH-TR2.wavis track two, and so on. No matter where you toss that file, it’s going to make sense.Eventually, a recording project might lead to one (or more!) episodes of our podcast. They get assigned episode numbers, EP56, EP57, etc. Then we have filenames like
MM-EP57…and it’s always clear what that is.Sometimes we have a dozen files to keep track of in a podcast episode and we end up with
20200423-MM-SMITH-TR1.wav20200423-MM-SMITH-TR2.wavMM-EP56-INTRO.wav(introduction recorded after interview)MM-EP56-OUTRO.wav(outro recorded in post production)MM-GCORD.wav(a little music ‘button’ used when joining bits of interview)
…the final episode is thenMM-EP56-SMITH.mp3Since I’ve typed this much, here’s another thing we do: We use consistently numbered folders to store the files. Every project has a folder,
2020.04.23 Bob Smith R42/EP56— we create2020.04.23 Bob Smith R42in our archives when we do the raw recording, and at the very end we add the/EP56to make it easier to find things. In side each project we create five folders1 assets,2 recording,3 episode,4 publication, and5 social— the leading number ensure they sort in nice order in various displays. 1 contains anything the guest gives us (photos, writing) or any photos we take during recording. 2 is the raw original recordings, 3 is everything to make a podcast episode (intro, outro, whatever we have to assemble, AND the finished MP3), 4 is anything we create as part of publishing the episode (transcript, articles, highlights ) and 5 is anything that’s ok for social media and sharing. And then we have a multi-terabyte file server with a “few” files on it:ɕ
#GettingThingsDone #MoversMindset #Podcasting -
Is it a process?
Not everything is a process, but much of what you do each day is a process. How much of what you do each day is a process, but you don’t realize it is? Because you’re wasting your life in that gap.
Two examples to illuminate my thinking, then you’re on your own:
Groceries. You know there’s a process for this. Get in car. Travel to store(s). Move through store in the usual pattern. Select things. Pay and leave. Travel home. Exit car. Move purchases into domicile and put them away.
Laundry. Move dirty clothing to the washing machine. Load machine with clothes and detergent. Start machine. Return later. Flip laundry to drier or to hang-dry. Return later. Fold or organize clean laundry. Return clothing to domicile storage.
Every detail of those processes will be different for each of us. You know your exact process very well, and you could tell me your process, just as I’ve done above. But these processes are actually closed loops which you are going to repeat a huge number of times. I could append, “Wear clothes. Repeat.” to the laundry process, and I could add, “Consume food. Repeat.” to the grocery process.
You know you can optimize things, but the entire process can be optimized—should be optimized. If it’s a process, you’re doing it by rote. (Yes, you can focus on what you’re doing and enjoy it. But you’re not doing anything creative.) So optimize the entire process. Is a car the optimal way to go get your groceries? Where do you keep the grocery list? How do things get put onto that list? Where do groceries etc. get stored in your domicile? How do you prepare and plan meals to use the groceries? Where do you store your dirty laundry? Where do you store “wear this again” clothing? How do you store and rotate seasonally changing clothes? How do you replace items that wear out? If it’s a process, you can optimize it and then you can spend less time on it.
Groceries and laundry are simply my examples. What other things do you do in your life that are processes which you haven’t considered at all? If you thought about them, and organized and optimized the process, how much time would it save you? Aren’t you always wishing you had more time? How much better would your mind work if it wasn’t trying to remember, and struggle through poorly-designed, (or worse, figured out on-the-fly each time,) processes?
What could you do with all that extra time?
Could you use that free time for things in your life that are not processes? Read a book… Spend a day relaxing on a beach… Have dinner with a friend…
To me, “life balance” is about how much time I spend on things which are processes versus things which are not processes.
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#GettingThingsDone #LifeBalance -
Artificial constraints
A lot of my thinking, and sometimes even my problem solving, revolves around juxtaposition. What would the inverse of the current this be? Can I gain useful perspective from the other position? Big/small, loud/quiet, perfuse/sparse, etc.; there are many obvious qualities that create striking changes in perspective. However, I find particularly rewarding juxtapositions in unusual dimensions, and there’s one dimension in particular that pays off more than all others: Time.
Have a problem? …how would I solve it if I had 100 years? …what would have to be the case if I were going to solve it in 5 minutes?
It’s become common to talk about “minimum viable product” in the entrepreneurial space, and that’s a form of time constraint. (But it’s a useful idea because it also includes other constraints such as resources and people.)
The famous Getting Things Done system has many critical components. One in particular is paying attention to the next action for any given project. (And in GTD everything you do in your entire life is a ‘project’.) This too is a form of time constraint; it’s not, “I’ll move this project forward at some point in time,” (the perspective of unlimited time,) rather it’s, “if I was going to move this project forward in the next minute…”
Where in your life might a shift to expectation of greater or lesser time yield a huge benefit?
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#Apogee #GettingThingsDone #MinimumViableProduct #Perspective -
Creating an administrative day
Once I reached a point where most of the administrative and maintenance things were under control, I found that I had a steady stream of small things to do every day. Certainly, having things organized saves time, but things still need to be done—I can’t organize and optimize everything to zero-time required. The next step was to grab a trick from time-blocking: Set aside a chunk of time to focus on those administrative and maintenance tasks in one long go.
I’m not going to bother you with which day of the week I picked. The point is simply that I have a day—the entire day—set aside to do all the things that must be done. Laundry, occasionally changing the house air filters, stacking firewood, scheduled appointments (if I can get them on that day), banking and bookkeeping, special errands and shopping trips for home repair items, and on and on. The point is that I’ve moved all the things which feel like they aren’t directly related to my goals and aspirations—although obviously they are directly related, they just don’t feel related—to one place; one big block of time; the admin day.
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#GettingThingsDone #TimeManagement -
Getting things done
GTD
The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of you psyche will continue to hold you accountable.
~ David Allen from, Getting Things DoneI talk often about David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. It’s one of a few books which I keep extra copies of on hand to give to people. There’s a Wikipedia article, Getting Things Done, but it talks more about it rather than describing what/how to do it.
I recently found a talk given by Allen which has been repurposed as a short podcast; Getting Things Done: 55 – Removing System Drag is well worth the few minutes it takes to listen.
Aside: Learning when and how to “go deep” is an important part of what you gain when you understand GTD. If the thought of spending five minutes listening to someone teach you something abhors you, you may need GTD more than you think. /preaching
If, however, what Allen said interests you, a fellow podcaster named Jey Jeyendran, (of Productivity Heaven,) is working on a mini series of podcasts on Allen’s GTD. They’re bite-sized, inspiring and you should check them out. https://productivity-heaven.simplecast.com.
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#DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #JeyJeyendran