How I’m Getting Things Done (part 5)

January 30, 2009

As promised in the previous parts to this series, this post is about how my system handles daily activity.

Inbox processing

My day starts with checking email. I use Outlook at work and GMail personally, but the system is pretty much the same for each. On average, I will have received 30-60 emails overnight, mainly replies from colleagues in the US and UK. These are triaged according to the ever-present 4 Ds: Delete, Do, Delegate and Defer.

Delete: This is fairly straightforward – if I don’t need to keep the email for reference after reading it or if it is spam etc., it gets deleted.

Do: If the email requires an action of less than two minutes, that action gets done straight away. Usually, this is a quick reply or a system update and doesn’t take long at all. Once the action is done, the email is either deleted, or filed away in a reference folder in case it is needed later on. Often, this just involves reading the email, realising there is no associated action and filing it for reference.

Delegate: Not all of my emails require me to do something, often I can pass them along or arrange for someone else to complete the task. Again, this takes less than two minutes and is done on the spot. Once completed, the original email is either deleted, filed for reference or, if I am waiting for a reply or need to follow up on the delegated action, it is moved to my ‘@waiting for’ folder.

Defer: What’s left now are the emails that can’t be deleted, sent elsewhere or will take longer than two minutes to complete. Typically, this will be about 20% of emails, meaning that the 30-60 that arrived have now become 6-12 after just a few minutes – much more manageable. These emails are read and the larger projects and next actions necessitated by the email are identified. These next actions are entered into my action lists on Remember The Milk, which is always available on my second monitor using Netvibes, along with a list of current projects and a lot of other useful information. The email is then moved to the ‘@actions’ folder in Outlook.

Using this system, the 30-60 emails that were in my inbox are usually cleared within about 25 minutes, depending on the day. I am now operating from a zero base again. The psychological effect of this needs to be experienced to be believed – and it’s still only 9.30 in the morning!

A note about my email folders: I only keep my active projects in folders in my main email area, all my old projects and reference materials are stored in PST files. This makes it easy to collapse or close the reference material folders when I need to focus on project work. So, my main email folder view is basically:

Mail
-Inbox
-@actions
-@waiting for
-Project 1
–Subfolder
-Project 2
–Subfolder
-Project 3
–Subfolder

Prioritisation

Now I can start work on my actions for the day. The ‘hard landscape’ is tracked in the Outlook calendar. This only contains the meetings and events that are booked in for specific times or any all-day activities.
I keep a lot of information in Remember The Milk lists, not all of it work-related and not all of it actions. Using the tags function together with smart lists, I can create a list of work actions sorted by date. These may have been entered while processing email, or they could have been quickly entered at any other stage using the Netvibes page. The great thing about Remember The Milk is that it makes it very easy to work with your lists, so I can also enter tasks via SMS, Twitter, email, iPhone or in a number of other ways. In addition to the tasks I’ve manually added, repeating tasks also appear. These may be for things like preparing for weekly meetings and the task can be set to recur after a certain time. Looking at the smart list, I can see at a glance everything that needs to be done today, in the coming few days and also those tasks that don’t have a due date.

Unlike a lot of GTD setups, I have very few ‘contexts’. The vast majority of my work is done sitting at my desk with access to email, the internet and the phone. However, when I need to create context specific lists and tasks, this is easily done by adding another tag to the task in Remember The Milk and creating a matching smart list to display these tasks. In my situation, most tasks are covered by the @home and @work contexts.

I also don’t use any kind of prioritisation when listing tasks. I find that without the stress of a huge list of emails in my inbox or piles of papers on my desk and with the ability to see all my outstanding tasks at once, I have a much clearer view of my next actions and can decide priorities quite easily, based on time at hand and energy available.

Doing the work

Then the task is worked on. I keep my supplies (all work in progress) in a set of labeled folders in a drawer that is swivel distance from my computer. This gets my desk clear and everything in one place. As my desk is kept clear, I can easily tell what I’m working on at any given time and can give it full attention. Once a task is done, the task is marked complete and the work goes back into the folder. The next action for the project is identified and is added to my list of actions. If the project is still in progress, it goes back into the supplies drawer; however, if the project has been finished, I move the folder to my reference material – a set of shelves close to my desk. These shelves are close enough to quickly access my reference material, but far enough away to keep things out of the way. Again, once I have finished working on a task, my desk is clear and ready to start something new.

Using this technique, I can move through each of the tasks on my list and dedicate my time and attention to each one fully. Should I be interrupted, I am able to quickly return to the task at hand as it is the only thing on my desk. I find David Allen’s ‘mind like water’ saying to be quite accurate, and I also like to apply it to my workspace – everything is calm and empty to start, then the workspace reacts to the task at hand with as much paperwork, mess or clutter as is needed. Then everything is restore to the original calm again, ready for new stimulus.

This is how most workdays are run. I use one notebook, a lined Moleskine with a handmade Gfeller leather cover (that I previously covered here), to take all my meeting notes in and any actions that come up are flagged during the meeting. When I return to my desk, these are moved on to my Remember The Milk lists and crossed out of the notebook. This limits the number of ‘collection buckets’ I have to manage.

The Review

Ask any GTD practitioner and they will soon tell you that the cornerstone of any good GTD implementation is the weekly review. My weekly review is scheduled into my calendar at 4.00 on Friday afternoon. During the review, I’ll go through each inbox I have: email, voicemail, notebook, desk, etc and will process everything. Then I’ll look over my calendar to make sure I have all my actions captured for events in the coming week. I then review the list of current projects and add or remove items as appropriate, followed by a full review of every action that I have on my lists, making sure that nothing has fallen through the gaps in my system and renegotiating any tasks that have changed. I’ll also review all my supporting information and move anything completed to my reference files. The reference files are also reviewed briefly, with anything outdated thrown out.

This usually takes about 30-40 minutes and covers the complete system. Once I’ve finished the review, I know that all of my projects and tasks are up to date and safely captured. This means I finish the week with nothing on my mind and can enjoy the weekend without any niggling thoughts about work.

So there you have it, my complete GTD system in five parts. As I’ve said, the change this has brought about in my professional life has been amazing and I still can’t work out how I managed to cope before implementing all of this.

If you have any questions or comments about my setup, or if you would like to share yours, I’d love to here from you in the comments below.

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 4)

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