International Mac Podcast

My topic is GTD, right? Right. Everyone in Tech knows what GTD is, right? Maybe, probably not. Everyone in Tech knows all about GTD? Wrong. GTD is not a universal concept. Even if every techy knew what it meant, GTD is not only for techies. Out of this is born my series of GTD Essentials: one concept per post of GTD reasoning, methods, terminology, etc.

This time I’m focusing on a pretty simple one. This is one of the big ideas GTD revolves around. David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, has an analogy to present. He says that your memory is like computer memory, which makes sense when you look at the names. He believes, as I think the non-techy simplified explanation of it does, that a CPU is like your brain. You have a limited number of RAM, and a limited amount of CPU. These are flexible, unlike in computers, but still not infinite. Each thought takes up space in your RAM. I have heard it said that humans can only keep seven things in active memory. David Allen says that you shouldn’t have to. He presents in his book the idea that every item you keep in RAM, instead of paging out to the disk of your trusted filing system or removing, slows down your performance. Anyone who’s ever run Leopard on 512 MB of RAM will understand this analogy. The first way to speed up your performance, and therefore increase your productivity, is to get those thoughts out of your RAM.

Now, this is not as simple as having your Operating System (mind) tell your RAM to get rid of it. You can page it out to disk if you want to, but it will not be deleted until your subconscious feels like that it will get done even if you remove it from your active memory. Therefore, you must develop a Trusted System. This system must be universal, you put every idea you have into it, and it should be universally accessible for you to read, not only write. This is why so many GTD applications have both a desktop and iPhone client, and sync between each other, and why webapps are so suited to the task as well. You should be able to input any idea from any stimulus whatsoever that hits you and stick it in your system without it having time to burn itself too deeply into your memory, and you should be able to get things done wherever you are. This leads nicely into contexts, but I’ll save them for my next or so post.

This basic concept therefore is to get every thought that relates to a task (task: the verb associated with anything that you wish to be different) out of your head and into a system that your subconscious trusts to be able to act as a replacement for itself and get the task to where it needs to be, which is checked off in some sort of archive. Head to Inbox is the stage we’ve talked about here, and we’ll resume next time to talk about Contexts. Thank you, and now go get something done. I’ve just checked “IMP Post” off my task list, what have you done?