GTD

It’s that time of the week again, and since my list for the weekly review was pretty slim, I thought I’d share one of my productivity gems. As the name suggest it’s a weekly process where the activities of the past week as well as the coming week is reviewed and processed.

The goal

Like a few of my other habits this one is an adoption of the Getting Things Done. It’s probably not following the recipe from the official GTD methodology, but it works for me. It’s a way to try to gain some control of the daily life and have a little stress-less workday.

It took just over a year, but I’ve finally done it. My inbox contains zero messages. It is a little bit scary, since it hasn’t been empty for the past… well since it was created over a decade ago. I’m not sure it’ll stay there on a daily basis, but I’m quite sure it’ll never reach the thousands of messages ever again. I’ve have been toying with GTD, and while it would probably be more efficient to dive in and go completely native (in GTD), I’m taking the slow adoption curve and try to adopt practices one step at a time and letting them prove to me, that they actually work.

With email, instant messaging, texting and mobile phones, we’re always reachable. Being available always can be a problem. Here are a few tips on how to detach your self sometimes and get a little time to get work done. Your email client doesn’t need to be running when your computer is turned on. People sending email doesn’t expect an instant answer. Turn you mail client off, and start it when you switch to ”mail processing mode”. Turn it off again once your done. While the little pop-up notifications may be practical, they do break the attention away from the task being done, when the mail arrive.

Make a small list every day of the items you need to do. Use checkmarks and track your progress throughout the day an notice which thinks out side the list, eats you time away. Run with the system a week and use the result. First the list helps you notice how much you get done throughout the day. Most people seem to work more by the clock than by tasks. By planning tasks and noticing the task progress, you learn how much you handle on a day and hopeful get better at guessing how much time a task actually takes.

Every workplace seem to have a certain fondness for mettings, and some organizations seems to have so many meetings that they hardly have time to mind their business. There are a few tricks, which can help you make the most of meetings – or at least lessen the pain. If you’re invited to a meeting…

As a general rule expect at least two days notice before any meeting with more than 3 participants. Meetings arranged with a tighter deadline (unless some current event is the cause) are too often a joint coffee break than a meeting.