Getting Things Done the Cult
In a stroke of procrastination today, I very ironically googled a TLA (three letter acronym). It was GTD, or Getting Things Done. Turns out there is quite a cult around the action management method created by David Allen. It is one solution for not having enough hours in the day, a form of time management.
If you are a process person, and love having a good system to work from I strongly suggest looking into GTD. While you don’t require software to implement the method, I’m 66% geek and 23% dork, so I do.
After a short burst of research I turned up some OmniFocus. Omni makes some great products for osx that I have previously used. While there are some great free alternatives. I decided to stick with what I know, (for once), and focus on GTD. Since I work in the computer field, I was particular taken by the fact that OmniFocus lets you import emails as tasks into projects, then have them organised by context! Yes, there is a little learning curve involved in setting up a new process, but the results will probably be worth it.
After an an hour and a half I’d collated all my lists, into OmniFocus. I’m still having trouble getting Mail.app to work, I never thought I would have a reason to revert to it from Thunderbird, but alas here I am. I’ll have a go at reinstalling Mail and get back to you. But it is all looking very promising.
I now feel like I am well on the way to developing a universal actions workflow. This will tie all my projects and far flung ideas into one system. Whooo hooo! For a person with more ideas than he knows what to do with, this could be a big break through. This way I’ll be able to do a weekly review of all my projects in the same place. I’ve just had so many things on my plate lately that things have been falling out the back of my head. Keep you posted. I’ll leave you with a few “productivity sites” that I stumbled across. Zen Habits speaks to me the most.
p.s. I’m still sticking with a pen and notebook for when I’m not near the computer.
p.p.s. Here is a sexy flow chart that gives you a feel for GTD action method.
Posted on September 16th, 2008 :: Filed under Education, Life, Technology, Tidbits
Tags :: action manager, gtd, productivity, software, task manager, time management, workflow
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October 8th, 2008
[...] your in need of a 5 minute break have a read about a Getting Things Done workflow system. Posted on August 19th, 2008 :: Filed under TechnologyTags :: error You can leave [...]