This year, I decided to plan out my Christmas festivities using GTD.
Tag Archives: Next Actions
GTD Nuggets — Deciding What You Are Not Going To Do
Deciding that you’re not going to do something is a subtle and critical component of Getting Things Done and is one of the most challenging aspects of self-management.
How to Spend an Extra Hour
Sometimes your highest priority is to get some of your lower priority stuff done, especially when that adds to your quality of life.
Some Key GTD definitions
What is a Project? A project is any outcome that will take more than one action step to complete. As a list, the Projects list will represent an index of the current outcomes on your plate. What is Someday Maybe? Someday/Maybe means you are not currently committed to complete it, but you are committed to …
How to send mail to your future self — at a discount!
The Tickler File system is your personalized post office in a file drawer. It’s on sale now in the David Allen Company Store for 25% off the regular price.
David Allen on linking projects and related pieces together
Countless questions have been e-mailed to me asking for the best ways and tools to organize project thinking, or how to relate project pieces to each other and to all the other projects and their pieces. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my answer is: “Do the Weekly Review. If you do, it all works. If …
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Should there be a GTD for Dummies?
In response to our recent Productive Living newsletter, a GTD implementer wrote to David Allen and said: Please provide a less complex version of the basic GTD chart/system for me and the hundreds of thousands of organizationally challenged managers just like me who have tried and failed to maintain the GTD system. Simpler is better. …
Tickler Lite?
The business type paperwork myself.
Organizing actions related to projects
Question: How did you organize your tasks? Am I suppose to have a main Projects category and corresponding action tasks categorized @home, @work, etc? David Allen: Yes, for me “Projects” is a category, just like the action lists of “Calls”, “At Computer” etc. They are simply flat lists, tied together with your review of the …
The GTD Best Practices Series
Do YOU know the best practices of GTD? Although they’ve been recorded for our GTD Connect online learning center, we have been posting the GTD Best Practices series to our free public podcast as well, for all to benefit from. These informal podcasts are a great way to learn the essentials of GTD. Here is …
Managing Projects – Tips from David Allen
Here’s a great Q&A between David and a new GTD’er. To appreciate David’s response, it helps to understand the GTD definitions for projects and next actions: Projects = Your outcomes that require more than one action step. Next Actions = Your next physical, visible action steps. Some are project-related, some are not. Question: If a …
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Still procrastinating about a bunch of things on your action lists?
Still procrastinating about a bunch of things on your action lists? There’s your lists – not small sub-projects about your stuff. -David Allen
How to choose tools for GTD
Looking for a tool for GTD? The mistake we see many new GTD’ers make is expecting to find a tool to “do” GTD. A tool doesn’t do the thinking for you, it stores the thinking for you. So, then does it even matter what tools you use when it comes to implementing GTD? Sure. You …
GTD for Academics
A Community Contribution by Aeon J. Skoble, PhD. He’s a Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State College. I know that David Allen is interested in seeing how people in different sorts of professions use GTD, so I offered to share my experiences applying the methodology in a world that’s generally regarded as a different one: …
A quick guide to GTD and projects
Some of the most common questions we get are about managing projects. Here is how one of the Coaches replied when someone new to GTD was asking how to manage projects and all of the related steps with GTD. There are 3 components to consider with your projects: 1. Tracking the outcome on a Projects …
How David Allen uses mindmaps
Dean, an architect, wrote to David to ask for detail on using mindmaps in his GTD system. Here’s the whole thread: Hi David, I have enjoyed reading Getting Things Done and Making It All Work. I own an architecture firm in Michigan, and have been implementing your GTD system into my work and life plan. …
Podcast on the GTD best practices of organizing
Having a total and seamless system of organization gives you tremendous power because it allows your mind to let go of the lower-level thinking and graduate to intuitive focusing, undistracted by matters that haven’t been dealt with appropriately. – David Allen In other words…get a seamless, leakproof system for tracking everything you can’t do in …
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Looking at those monsters in the closet
In my last post, I challenged you to look at how much you’re choosing to sit in your email inbox versus work from your lists. That sure seemed to strike a nerve of truth with some of you. So WHY can lists start to repel us? Here are a few reasons why and some ways …
Why is David Allen like Einstein?
A GTD Times community contribution by Arif and Ali Vakil What made Einstein an Einstein or Newton a Newton? It was their amazing capability to look at what everybody was looking at, but see something different. The world sees an apple falling from a tree, but Newton notices there’s something greater at work here–it’s gravity. …
How to feel Okay when You're Not Doing Something
When you start climbing up the GTD implementation ladder you begin collecting, processing and organizing every cool idea that you come across. Pretty soon you have a huge list of projects together with an even more colossal list of next actions. It’s tempting to try and accomplish all of them; but what if you …
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