Getting Things Done

The original one, the one that can be seen as starting it all, is GTD, conceived by David Allen in a book of the same name. GTD has several key principles, which can be boiled down to micromanaging your life—if you want to see it that way. It really would take too long to describe it fully, and since I already have a series going, you can take a look at my previous posts about it.

The Pomodoro Technique

This is one of the newer models I’ve come across, but it’s been around since 1992. It centers around the idea of a measure of time—one Pomodoro—in which you are working on a large task. Once that time is up, you take a break, then return to your task. Repeat this, with breaks of increasing length, until the task is done, then take a break before starting a new task.

The handy organizational chart allows you to write all the tasks you need to do, in order of priority, then make a check for every pomodoro you spend working on it. You can get more complicated, logging each distraction and whether it came from outside sources or yourself.

In its purest form, following the Pomodoro technique is highly disciplined, with rules about what you’re allowed to do on break, voiding an interrupted pomodoro, what you can do when you finish a task in the middle of a pomodoro, and reviewing your logs to see how you can improve. All this and more can be found at pomodorotechnique.com in their instructional PDF.

Pomodoro, by the way, is Italian for tomato, the shape of the kitchen timer in Italy that inspired the system.

Autofocus

This newer strategy takes the guise of a procedure. You need a piece of lined paper or notebook, or an electronic equivalent. You first create the “Backlog” with everything you have to do. When you’ve put down everything you can think of, draw a line separating this from the Active List. You always add tasks you think of to the end of your Active List. Start doing the things on the backlist one by one, skip anything you don’t want to or can’t do, and cross off anything you finish. (It might be helpful to integrate the time management portion of another system.) Once you go through the Backlist once, turn around without proceeding into the Active List and keep going. Only when you’ve made a pass through the backlog without doing anything are you allowed to move on to the active list.

Repeat this until you make a first pass through the backlog (right after passing through the active list) without completing or canceling anything. Once that’s done, draw a line at the end of your Active List, turning it into the Backlog. Your old backlog is now up for review. After continuing down your new backlog until you make a pass without completing anything, return to your Review list. At this point, cross off tasks you aren’t going to complete, and re-add the rest at the bottom of the active list. Think whether you need to reword the task to make it more likely to get done.

This is the idea of Autofocus 1. The creator has come out with several alternatives, and you can take your pick.

(10+2)*5

This is the opposite of Autofocus – a time management strategy without task management. The idea is simple – you take 10 minutes of your task, then take a 2-minute break. Repeat. (The times five is to make it add up to an hour, and to make the name a little less mundane. Or to make you work longer.) It was either developed or stolen by Merlin Mann (probably the former).

Roll your own

This is what the majority of people would probably benefit most from. Combine any of these or other strategies that work for you, but remember to stay on them. I’m not so good with that—I just mentally switched to combining Autofocus with (10+2)*5, and even though I haven’t written a backlist, I’m probably going to end up not doing my current system for at least the rest of the week.

Then again, I just had an idea to keep a list on the chalkboard beside me, and combine that with Autofocus and (10+2)*5. There’s an old saying: Do as I say, not what I do.

Software!

I wouldn’t be me if I couldn’t recommend some software you can use to help you keep on track. For time management, I’ve already suggested The Hit List, and you could use any similar system that you could adapt. What I’m actually trying to get at are timers. At first, I found this (10+2)*5 timer, but it requires Yahoo Widgets, which are pretty clunky and way too much for just a timer. Then I stumbled across Focus Booster It’s an Adobe AIR timer that was designed around similar ideas as the Pomodoro Technique, excepting the increase in break times. It counts down working time, then counts down break time. You can stop a timer, but you can’t start over—you have to go to your next break/work session. This same rule is present in the two time management strategies. The only downside to FocusBooster is that you have to change its defaults (of 25 and 5 minutes for work and break respectively) every time you open the app.

Paper

You might notice that most of these systems suggest paper, but mention that they can be adapted for electronic use. Ever wonder why the professionals use paper? It’s more motivational. Having a tangible list makes it seem more important to your brain, so it’s more likely to get done. Experiment with that if you feel you need to get more done.

Enter the concept of actions. An action is anything you wish was not the way it was now is considered an action, no matter how big or small. Those you can actually do something about are called actionable–you can take action on them. All actionables are actions, but not vice versa. Some actions you need something out of your control to change before they come actionable. Often you can create some other action related to these unactionable ones, e.g “Tell Bob I need him to finish the cabinet construction first, so I can paint them while he fixes the counters.” You have to wait for Bob, but you can tell him so and make him aware of it.

Many of the actions you perform throughout the day are connected to a project. (Projects simply are tasks that contain many steps inside them, such as “Remodel the kitchen.”) I personally call Tasks those small, one-step things like “Add more paint to the shopping list,” or even larger one-step things like “Paint the cupboard.” Projects always contain tasks, tasks are not always contained by a project. If I am at school and happen to notice my pencil is getting small, I simply add that to my ubiquitous capture system and it eventually becomes a single action.

Thus we have a hierarchy. Action is the term for anything you wish to change. Single tasks are small things not associated with any project. Projects are series of tasks all working to a specific goal. The next layer is Areas of Responsibility, which I do not believe are part of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, the book that actually started off GTD. However, it is in Things, one of the great new GTD applications out there, and in a particularly good implementation in my opinion. I will be getting into that and its differences from projects in the next post, so stay tuned.