I heard about David Allen’s Getting Things Done a long time ago and I procrastinated in getting it. It sounded like a system I could use, since my day usually consists of handling (and keeping track of!) a thousand tiny tasks. I got the book for Christmas and according to my wife it’s the best $10.00 she ever spent. From time to time I might comment on how my system is working, so here is the gist of it:
You can’t trust your brain, so everything you need to do must be kept in a system outside your brain.
Some of these things you need to do may take more than one step. These are projects.
Put every project in a list and from there, generate a list of next actions for each project. A next action is something that can be done right now or in a given context (an @hardware store list or an @phone list).
Mercilessly complete the next actions.
The revelation of how powerful this is for me came when I realized my previous to-do lists failed because I’d have projects mixed up with next actions and single tasks. “Make dinner reservation” would be right next to “Redesign website.” Instead, making dinner reservations should be next to something like, “choose font for redesign.”
I still get stuck on some actions and in those cases I usually break it out to as tiny a task as possible. Ridiculously so.
Software helps, so I’ve been using ta-da list. Originally I used iGoogle, but their to-do lists looked bad on my phone.
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