International Mac Podcast

The wagon, or bandwagon, as it is called, is a notoriously slippery and narrow thing. This means that it’s incredibly easy to fall off of it. It’s easier than falling off a log, in fact, because before falling off a log you become concerned about how much it will hurt when you hit the ground, while when falling off the bandwagon it doesn’t really hurt at all, at least not at first.

Overstretched analogy aside, it is a fact of life and of GTD that you’ll stop doing it at some point, whether it be intentionally or not. Even David Allen, the man who started it all, admits to falling off the wagon frequently. Naturally, he being who he is, he’s probably come up with strategies to get back on. However, I’m not here to tell you about him, I’m here to tell you about me.

I’ve also fallen off the bandwagon several times, and in fact am off it right now. To describe what falling off the bandwagon means is like to describe what spicy food is; a bit different for everyone, but generally deemed to be the time when you stop being able to cope with it. For spicy food, this is the time you run to the nearest source of water, and gulp it down, even if you know water doesn’t really help. For GTD, this is the time you take one look at your task list and say “There is no way I’m doing all that.”

Now that we’ve described the problem, it should be easier to remedy it. Note that I said easier, and not easy. If it were easy, you could figure it out on your own, and I’d be out of a job and couldn’t pay the bills, which I’m too young to do anyway, and seeing as I don’t get paid for this I don’t know why I bother saying that. The point is, it ain’t gonna be easy.

The Tools

If you’ve read my articles before, you all know how much I love playing with new toys, so of course I’m going to find a few to use for this. I have come to believe that playing with a new toy is a good way to get you to start doing what you’re supposed to do, provided of course that the toy is related to what you’re supposed to do. For example, I’m taking advantage of my recent hard drive corruption and subsequent migration problems, which caused me to have to archive and install, to get another trial period of WriteRoom. (Now that I actually have money and a way to get it out on the internet, I may buy it. It’s inexpensive enough, and gets the job done very well if you ask me, which you didn’t, so I apologize for the tangent.)

The reason for a new tool is so you can start out with a clean slate. This uses the old theory that you’ll have far more left if you take everything you don’t wear out of the closet than if you take everything out and put back what you do wear. Due to the drive experiences I mentioned above, this has become clear to me in terms of applications installed on my system.

If you haven’t already, or even if you have, this is a great time to try out SimpleTask, which I recently reviewed, and which is sadly not up for download as I write this. Here’s hoping Apple approves the iPhone counterpart soon, because that’s what they’re waiting for to take the product out of beta. If you didn’t download it then, you can get SimpleTask 1.0 by direct download in the interim.

To populate your SimpleTask database, first think off the top of your head what you need do do. Enter it in, prioritize it by reordering the tasks with drag and drop, and scan it to find the items that need to have been done already. (Multiple tenses are hard, but read it over and you’ll find it makes sense.) Using SimpleTask’s excellent Important checkbox, mark everything immediately important as such. Then fire up whatever you’re using to manage (or mismanage) your tasks normally. Skim your Today list in the same manner, and prioritize accordingly.

Emergency Do Mode

Then you enter what I call “Emergency Do Mode.” Part of what makes it so helpful is its important-sounding name, so you can feel like you’ve gotten something done just by saying you’re going to start it. Emergency Do Mode is simple. In a way, it’s like GTD but stricter. Define what tasks you are going to do, when you will allow yourself a break, and when you’ll stop for the day.

After that, all you pretty much have to do is complete those tasks, but here’s the kicker: After you’re done with that SimpleTask list, go in to your main task manager, check off all your completed tasks, and do it again. Repeat you’re—and here’s the other kicker—more than caught up. There is a reason for this, and you will like it. The reason is, after you’re done with this, you can allow yourself a day, and make sure it only lasts a day or two, of rest. Trust me, you’re going to need it to get back in the loop of your email (if it’s not part of your task system), RSS feeds, and various other things.

As with the rest of GTD, this doesn’t only apply to work, it can apply to personal projects as well. Take me, for example. I do work, but it consists of filing a backlog of papers and I don’t have any tasks to deal with. The problem I’m dealing with right now is gross overbooking of my summer, and I need to whittle down my projects to a cope-able level.

Parting thoughs

If you’re one of those guys that makes use of the Inbox, as I do, putting ideas in there to flesh out later, you should keep doing that. The way I am able to do this is with a three-part solution: A calendar named Inbox with which I sync my THL inbox, a small application named Anxiety which allows you quick access to iCal calendars, and a custom made Applescript, set to activate on command-return via Spark, which does some thinking based on whether THL is open to allow me to add a task in the most transparent way.

The way to handle all these ideas is simply to add a task to the end of your SimpleTask list saying “Handle inbox.” From there, you can perform the same Emergency Do Mode setup that you would with the Today list, or handle the items differently, depending on how you work.

Finally, please try not to use this as an excuse you make to yourself for falling off the wagon. “Well, I know how to get back on” is not a valid reason to fall of a log, so why should it be one for falling off a wagon? Your subconscious may do this to you, but that’s excusable, as you have no control over what it does.

And with that, I bid you a fond farewell until the next time I see fit to write an article, and hope that by that time both you and I are out of Emergency Do Mode and back on that wagon.