Getting Things Done

A GTD tip: When you’re sorting things at home and you come across something that should be in a different room, resist the urge to take it there straight away. That disrupts your flow. Instead put it in a pile of things to take to another room, and take them there later.

Perhaps each room should have an inbox in case you know that it needs to be in that room but you haven’t decided exactly where yet. Just remember to clear the inboxes as soon as possible!

I have spent the evening wading through piles of documentation and putting it into my new GTD alphabetical filing system. It feels good to have one place for all reference material. I started off analysing everything, putting it into date order, deciding what to throw away, but quickly decided i couldn’t manage all that. For the first iteration i have simply been putting things into folders.

I’ve chosen SimpleGTD.com as my preferred online GTD system. It’s really easy to enter actions and move them around and assign them to projects if you want to, but you don’t have to. Nicely AJAX-ified to make things faster. For times when i’m offline i have a little notebook to act as an inbox for thoughts until they can go in the online system.

It’s pretty cool to see how the online and offline can integrate. My sweet husband placed a £5 off Boots No 7 voucher in my inbox today. I created an action “Use No 7 voucher” under the context “Winchester” and the project “Actionable”. In my physical filing system i made a folder called “Actionable” into which i placed the voucher. So when i’m next going into town i can look under the context and remember where to find the voucher!

Well, that’s the idea! Let’s hope it works! I’ve always liked the idea of being super organised … just never really known how to do it. I really think GTD might work for me.