{"id":537,"date":"2009-05-13T22:08:42","date_gmt":"2009-05-14T03:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poojanwagh.opalstacked.com\/poojanblog\/2009\/05\/gtd-seminar\/"},"modified":"2009-05-13T22:19:29","modified_gmt":"2009-05-14T03:19:29","slug":"gtd-seminar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/gtd-seminar\/","title":{"rendered":"GTD Seminar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I got to go to the David Allen Company&rsquo;s &ldquo;Mastering Workflow&rdquo; Seminar. I&rsquo;m glad I did. The seminar resolved several misconceptions I had about how GTD works, despite my owning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0142000280?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=poojanblog-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=0142000280\">Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=poojanblog-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=0142000280\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/> in both text and audio form.<\/p>\n<p>The seminar was lead by Chris McIntyre. He was an impressive presenter. I noticed that he immediately asked who had read the book and was implementing the system. He asked those who raised their hand what they liked about the system. Very smart: I&rsquo;ve seen many a presentation get derailed by &ldquo;experts&rdquo; who want to either show their knowledge or derail the presenter. By identifying the &ldquo;experts&rdquo;, Chris recognized their expertise and brought them into the fold.<\/p>\n<p>The seminar isolated several reasons why GTD wasn&rsquo;t working as effectively for me as it could be:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Processing: I (for some reason) didn&rsquo;t get that one should process all inboxes <em>once a day<\/em>. I was tending to do it as part of the weekly review, which left me feeling very behind. I thought I was deviating from the system when I processed more often. In addition, since I wasn&rsquo;t sure I was going to process daily, I tended to try to process things as they came&mdash;which disrupted my focus.<\/li>\n<li>Collecting: Ask, &ldquo;Do I need more collection buckets or less?&rdquo; I tried my best to have just one bucket. However, that&rsquo;s a bit unreasonable. There&rsquo;s an optimal value for each person (and it probably changes from month to month).<\/li>\n<li>Someday\/Maybe: I never could figure out whether I should put more or fewer items on the S\/M list (versus the next-action context lists). The answer: are you repelled by the number of actions on your next-action lists? If so, move some of them to the Someday\/Maybe list.<\/li>\n<li>Multiple Someday\/Maybe lists: There&rsquo;s no reason to have one. If there&rsquo;s a major project you want to do sometime in the future, you can have a separate list for that.<\/li>\n<li>Email: I try to follow <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/software\/top\/geek-to-live--empty-your-inbox-with-the-trusted-trio-182318.php\">the 3-folder <\/a>arrangement (Inbox, Follow-Up, Archive). However, what I didn&rsquo;t realize was that instead of <em>processing<\/em> things in my inbox, I was deferring them by putting them in the &ldquo;Follow-Up&rdquo; folder. When an action needs to be performed on an email, it should go in the Follow-Up folder, but the action needs to get recorded somewhere (@Email for example).<\/li>\n<li>Action Support: If something wasn&rsquo;t in my inbox, it was either in trash or in a Reference file. I found myself creating new filing folders for even the smallest things. Instead, Chris recommends having an &ldquo;Action Support&rdquo; folder for active things. This <em>really<\/em> simplified my filing. I didn&rsquo;t need to create a &ldquo;tuition&rdquo; file just so I can pay the tuition. Technically, my wife came up with this idea before I went to the seminar, but I didn&rsquo;t listen.<\/li>\n<li>Ticklers: I could never figure out how to separate between a tickler file and a Someday\/Maybe. Chris cleared up the confusion by pointing out that the Someday\/Maybe list gets checked every week (during your weekly review), while the tickler gets checked on a specific day\/month. I asked whether I could use a calendar for this purpose. The answer was yes, except that a tickler file is useful if you want the actual object (bill, concert tickets, etc.) to be the reminder.<\/li>\n<li>Managing No&rsquo;s (Someday\/Maybe): The Someday\/Maybe list is a way of <em>not<\/em> making an agreement. Trick to managing your next-actions is to figure out how much you can do this week.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I had a few other random, non-actionable thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Did David Allen come up with the runway, 10,000-foot, 50,000-foot model due to his consulting relationship with Lockheed-Martin? Perhaps it was the best metaphor for the clientele. Perhaps their nomenclature inspired him.<\/li>\n<li>Capture everything: I always thought GTD was compulsive in the habit of capturing everything even if it&rsquo;s not important. However, I think the reason for this is that there are things that we just don&rsquo;t want to do (we want to procrastinate) and leaving the decision of what to capture to your intuition can be dangerous. It&rsquo;s better to retain everything and analyze it clearly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The biggest thing I learned from the seminar was that I need to experiment more. I had taken the GTD methodology to be a mandate. However, during the seminar, Chris McIntyre makes it clear that the GTD recommendations are merely practices that have been found to be effective. I&rsquo;ve found that my ideal GTD system as the following traits (personal preferences):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Very little setup: things such as contexts, etc., should not require setup. I should be able to add\/remove contexts on demand.<\/li>\n<li>Printing: I find it hard to organize work (that&rsquo;s usually on a computer) with a computer. It&rsquo;s nice to have a printed checklist.<\/li>\n<li>Computer automation: I find it tedious to do things (such as match a project with an action) that can be automated.<\/li>\n<li>Paper capture: &hellip;however, I can draw diagrams and capture information much easier on paper.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>GTD isn&rsquo;t for everyone, but I&rsquo;m getting much more value out of it now that I understand it better. Before, it seemed overly complicated. Now it seems a simpler and effective.<\/p>\n<p>In a future post, I&rsquo;ll describe the GTD system that I&rsquo;m using now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I got to go to the David Allen Company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mastering Workflow\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Seminar. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m glad I did. The seminar resolved several misconceptions I had about how GTD works, despite my owning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0142000280?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=poojanblog-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=0142000280\">Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=poojanblog-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=0142000280\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/> in both text and audio form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gtd"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":545,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojanblog.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}