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Getting Things Done (GTD for short).

First things first, if you don’t know what GTD is read this book!

A little background first, this post has been in draft for almost a month now, I keep putting it off which is a little ironic, but the great thing about GTD is that you just need to renegotiate with yourself and it’s all good! The other strange thing about me blogging about GTD is that I’m probably the least organised person you’ll meet for a long time! Hopefully my post will inspire others like me to get a little bit more organised, it’s worth it!

Having said all of that I’m still terrible at practicing GTD and I really do wish I was better at it, but enough about that here’s the grunt:

Why a post on GTD?

That’s easy to answer (and yes I know every man and his dog blogs about GTD), it’s great, it works, and it has saved my skin many times already.

Why use GTD?

I’m not going to try and convince you that GTD is the best thing since sliced bread since it took me quite a while to really take to it, and even now I’m not “black belt” but I’m getting better. Once upon a time I used to work for a boss, life was great all I had to do was show up at work, do some stuff and I get paid, sometimes I didn’t do stuff and I still got paid. Now that I’m running my own software outfit life is a little different, if I don’t do stuff I don’t get paid! This of course creates a need to Get Things Done…

I’ll explain why it took me such a long time to really take to the concept first. When I was working at my last employer I started to read “Getting Things Done” because I was bored and had no work to do (again the irony is not lost on me). So naturally I got all excited about the prospect of actually getting things done, so I set my trusted system up did the whole go around the house and find everything that needs doing (if you read the book you’ll know). So that was step one done, I collected all my “empty loops”.

Then came the processing bit, now suddenly I had a whole lot of boring stuff around the house to do and some stuff at work to do. I never got round to doing most of the boring house stuff – some of it is still on my list (other things I’ve conveniently dropped off). The work stuff got done though, but there was a problem.

I was paid a whole heap of money each month to do some work, it turns out I didn’t actually do that much work, using GTD I got all my work done for the week in 4 hours (whoops!!), it turns out that you can bulk your time easily by surfing the web (then once the admins block your favorite sites, you can easily eat up 40 hours a week by playing nethack – no-one even knew!). This left me with a moral dilemma, do I use GTD and realise how little work I do, or do I go back to my old ways and pretend that I didn’t know (a little note about this though, being fairly efficient at writing code and knowing when to generate code and when not too does help a lot with the amount of work you get done – I still out produced the other developers in the company).

So naturally I started spending a lot of time playing with all the different GTD tools available to me for free to try and find the perfect one (I spent more time playing with tools than doing any actual work!). I also ended up dropping GTD due to a guilty conscience! Eventually the lack of doing any real work got to me and I quit my job, started contracting and I’ve not looked back yet!

Here’s a list of systems I’ve tried:

• lo tech – paper based (this was too much effort for me!)
• Monkey GTD and other GTD systems based on tiddeleywiki
• Thinking Rock (this one is quite nice actually – very functional)
• Things (It was great to start with but I reached it’s limits very quickly, never tried it with the iPhone app though!)
• iGTD 2
• Midnight Inbox (it was only in beta though to be fair!)
• PyGTD (Not sure if you can still find this, it’s a python script that operates on text files – good fun but again too much effort)
• OmniFocus (My personal favorite)

So how did I get back to GTD? Well as I progressed in my life as a consultant I ended up roping in a few of my good old buddies to help me out with the work load and I somehow ended up having to manage people and tasks and I started context switching like it’s going out of fashion. Naturally I figured GTD would help with the problem I’m having, again I started looking at tools and I kind of used it. It was still a struggle though and I only actually used GTD when I really needed it, this usually meant that I’m about to drown if I don’t do something about it and quickly too. So in a way I did learn something from reading the book but obviously I did not get the main point behind it, GTD is meant to be stress free. I only practiced it when the stress levels were so high that I’d have a mental breakdown unless I used GTD.

So why is it so difficult to get into GTD? For me the answer is simple I move around a lot and I’m not always at my computer where I keep my trusted system. This means the system only works some of the time and the time I’m “off line” it breaks down – the mental set back from this is actually a lot worse than I realised!

I finally bit the bullet and bought OmniFocus (both for the Mac and for the iPhone). OmniFocus is by far the best GTD tool I’ve ever used, and I don’t even use it the way it’s intended to I’m still not really using contexts the way they are supposed to be used. OmniFocus for the iPhone is a different beast and I would not use it on it’s own (even though a lot of people do this). The iPhone counter part is not that easy to use and will put you off GTD if that’s your primary GTD system. Using OmniFocus for the Mac in conjunction with the iPhone is as close to perfect as I can find at this time. It’s great I can take my system with me where ever I go and I usually do most of my task entering on the Mac, synchronization over wifi seals the deal! Now when I’m out and about and I need to capture something quickly I shove it in my inbox (which practically lives in my pocket) and I process it later when I get to the Mac and sync! All of this means I can tick my tasks off as I go on my iPhone and really keep on top of things.

So thanks to OmniFocus for the Mac and iPhone I can actually say that I’m practicing GTD (and I say practicing because I’m still really bad at it, but at least things are moving forward). If you’re a Mac head like me, you own all the hardware and you’re keen on GTD but you are struggling – I suggest you buy the software and start getting more productive!

So when I say that I’m suck at GTD it’s not because I don’t use my digital system, it’s because my system is virtually non-existent in meat-space. I’ve got an inbox, and a filing cabinet but it gets used only when it absolutely needs to be used – this is of course bad. The only thing saving my bacon in meat-space is the digital reminders of pressing issues in meat-space.

I do realise that each person has their own preference for GTD software, this is my preference. I do not suggest you drop your system, if it works for you then stick to it! You can take away from this post what ever you wish – read it with a grain of salt since I’m naturally Biased towards anything Mac and iPhone and I do not expect others to be that way too (then again if you’ve talked to me in person I’ve probably already tried to convince you to buy a Mac and some of you probably already have!). I just wanted to share a little bit of my experience using GTD with you and I hope you found it interesting if not useful.

Please leave comments if something is unclear or I just missed the whole point! 

Thanks for reading!