CR Linefeed

I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions as such for the start of 2007. However, I have been re-reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done (GTD).

I read this the first time a year or two back and have put some of its ideas into practice. So now I manage my life using a bunch of index cards, aka a Hipster PDA. (As it happens, I’m not that keen on the term, but I digress…). I have found this useful to keep on top of things. I also started carrying around a single index card in my wallet with a Fisher Space Pen so that I could catch ideas at any time. The problem was quite how to carry around my deck of cards. The standard way to do this is to use a fold-back clip apparently. The problem is that those clips have sharp edges that put holes in your pockets and scratch your phone etc to pieces. So I got myself a PDA case to keep them in. The downside was that it was now too big to fit in my pocket with comfort. So I had to carry it around in a bag.

Fast forward to 2007. Taking another look at GTD, I decided to try again to carry the cards in my pocket so that I would always have them available. The first thing I did was get myself a Jimi minimalist wallet. I ended up having to make myself a card holder out of some thick clear plastic and some elastic I stole from some packaging. So far it seems to be working well. But it would be nice if I had something like the Jimi to hold the cards themselves. I’ll just have to keep looking.

So, what have I picked up from the book second time around? Well it has reminded me of a bunch of things that I had forgotten since I last read it, but there were a couple of things that have made a difference to the way I operate the system day-to-day:

• Projects should be defined by their outcome. I found it difficult to get the concept of GTD projects straight in my head. Probably because I deal with ‘projects’ at work, which are not quite the same thing. But thinking more about the outcomes has made me think about them differently.
• Checklists. I didn’t understand these the first time around. Now I see that they are things like projects which have no finished state. So you can have a list of ‘work responsibilities’ or ‘important people in my life/work’. These are things to consider in the weekly review to see if there are actions required, but there isn’t an end outcome you are aiming for.

Finally I notice that Ben Laurie has “branded GTD as fantastically complicated“. If he can’t wrap his head around that then I think his licence to work on cryptographic open source projects should be revoked. ;-)