Posts Tagged ‘GTD’

Yesterday, while sitting in traffic in the rain, I remembered something I need to do.  Today, now that I am at my computer and could possibly get it done, or at least write it down, I cannot remember what it was.  That, says, David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, is the trouble with time management and that is why our busy lives are seem to be always spinning out of control.  When we keep our to-do lists in our head, our minds throw up random reminders at inconvenient times. When we can’t get it done we have to hold onto it, feeling slightly anxious; we can never be at peace until the item is done.

Having now started a blog, something I want to do, I have created another fairly monumental to-do item.  One that will nag at me at least once or twice each week until it is done.

Managing Crisis

So I will begin my blogging with a discussion of time management.  Time management is an important business start up tool and perhaps one of the first a new business operator needs to master.  As Allan points out, crisis is not as stressful as opportunity. When you suddenly realize you forgot to pay the mortgage, your commitment the action steps necessary to complete the task are pretty clear.  In crisis because your options are limited it is easy to choose priorities.

Managing Opportunity

What can be overwhelming is opportunity. With opportunity, as in the opportunity to create your own profitable business, there are many, too many, options.  What business to start? How big to grow,? What market to serve? What products to sell? To name just a few examples.  With so much potential, it is hard to know where to begin and what to let go.  When you want to do it all and to it all right now, you can feel overwhelmed.

Action  Management

I started my coaching/training career teaching time management.  In those days the standard was Steven Coveys , First Things First.  Covey taught that “Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things”.  The right things, according to Covey a practicing Mormon, are –”to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy”– His systems categorized tasks into quadrants:

1. Important and Urgent (crises, deadline-driven projects)
2. Important, Not Urgent (preparation, prevention, planning, relationships)
3. Urgent, Not Important (interruptions, many pressing matters)
4. Not Urgent, Not Important (trivia, time wasters)

 To manage your time, strive to act in quadrant two.

Fast forward from Covey’s values driven time management model to David Allen’s 2002 book, Getting Things Done, Allen a practitioner of martial arts looks to a karate metaphor, “mind like water” to define a position of perfect readiness to respond to whatever comes your way.

 The Getting Things done model, also known as GTD, rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

The set up for emptying the mind of all the unfinished projects on one’s life is, not surprisingly, labor intensive. Yet many people are committed to the program.  I have already begun by ordering files, paperclips and a label maker. I look forward to getting it all out of my mind.  Just visualizing myself as focused and productive as done a great deal for my focus and productivity. Now if I can just find that clear, empty mind that will propel me to the “stress free productivity” promised by the book.