Get Everything Done

Since I've fallen off the Lenten challenge bandwagon, I thought I would reflect here about why.

In trying Time Surfing, I came to the conclusion that it was a clever and effective distillation of the fundamental mental processes that are discussed in GTD, with the addition of some good stuff on processing and dealing with the emotional elements that are involved (which I daresay David Allen wouldn't be able to risk putting into his books, but as maybe hinted at more personally).

I also just didn't feel like I got much value from *not* using a list. Unlike some, I guess I have never felt the same level of angst around having lots of things on my lists, and I have a clear enough restriction on my incoming work that I don't have a long list to begin with. All of that means that the visual clarity I gained by having it all written down seemed to outweigh the theoretical benefit of not having to "worry".

That being said, I still really enjoy the Time Surfing process, but I think I enjoy writing stuff down and playing with lists too much to simply do Time Surfing strictly.

That left me with the conclusion that I wanted some sort of long list system, but I wasn't happy with the level of review that I would end up having to do with the current long list systems. What I then realized was that I ought to give GTD a try again, with a slight twist, in that I'm greatly simplifying my systems down to a three notebook system which essentially has me working off of a single context for next actions.

I think my theory is that I have really internalized the GTD process a lot, even when I'm *not* doing GTD, and that means I should probably just try to use GTD again and see if I have matured a bit in my use of it and if I will enjoy it more or less than I did in the past. I think I've become better at executing tasks, and that might be the key thing that I needed to make GTD work.

I also found it almost trivial to set GTD back up for myself, and I was back up and running with a more or less full system in less than a day. So, I don't buy into the idea that GTD is highly complicated or too much work.

So far, the biggest thing I'm loving is separating out my Waiting Fors, Agendas, Outcomes/Projects, and next actions into their own lists. I haven't done that in a while, and I have to admit that I really like it. I've also taken a bit of long list theory from Mark to enable me to essentially ensure that i have a nice daily checklist that is "workable" that can live right alongside my Next Actions lists, which then means that pretty much all of my work is visible on a single page or only a few pages, in highly actionable form, which is something I didn't figure out how to do in my previous application of GTD.

It's still way too early to tell how well this will do moving forward, and my plan is to action my next actions list using a long list algorithm if the thing becomes too unwieldy, but otherwise I guess the short version of the story is that I like lists and I'm going to be sticking with them. :-)

I have currently:

1. Daily planner: Calendar; Next Action; Inbox; Daily, weekly, monthly checklists
2. Reference: General notes, references, long-running checklists, Horizons of Focus
3. Project Support: General notes and thinking
4. Lists: Waiting For, Agendas, Projects, Someday/Maybe

Originally, I had #3 and #4 together, but I split them out as I liked having the lists separately enumerated.

I've changed this again to only 3 notebooks:

1. Daily Planner: Calendar, NA, IN, Checklists, Waiting For, Agendas, Projects, Someday, Horizons
2. Project Support
3. Reference and Contacts