I use GTD to clear the decks for creativity. I run my own business and my creativity is all about how to run the business better. I work from home and it is very hard to separate work from pleasure. I love it!

I have found an @afterhours context and an @during hours context… After hours just means non-client time to me.

I always used to get worried that when an idea bubbled up during the day I might lose it. Now I religously stick those ideas, web pages, emails etc into my Evening context.

When I have ‘evening’ time I start by mind mapping a problem, blog post or strategy. That gets me in the right frame of mind almost instantly. It’s amazing the connections you can make with maps. I then can use this frame of mind to exercise whatever creative need I have.

I also have to say that once I get into blogging later in the evening I find it incredibly hard to stop the flow of creative thought and then I can’t sleep!

Thanks

I’m an information architect. Although my job is highly technical, it is also wildly creative. It is my understanding that the point of GTD is to provide a “Mind Like Water” state that is naturally relaxed and creative.

In practice, I don’t divide my work by creative or not creative, I think of it as being divergent thinking or convergent thinking. GTD is great for managing the convergent thinking activities and leaving free undisturbed time for the divergent thinking activities.

The only next action I’ve been able to come up with for divergent thinking activities is to set aside time and see what come up. I actually have a number of contexts, such as @R&D and @Design.

I also like Covey’s idea of roles. I think of it like GTD’s areas of responsibility. It’s a good way of organizing my goals and emptying my head.

Jesse,

I had a similar experience. I had a really hard course project with an impossible deadline. Writing down “next actions” allowed me to stay focused on the project, but it, being such a high priority - didn’t leave time for anything else. And since GTD was really good at making me not procrastinate, a few days before the due date I found myself on a verge of a total breakdown!

It turns out, there is a good side to procrastination: it keeps you sane! So, I still haven’t found a way to use GTD for projects with unreasonable expectations and deadlines…

Jesse,

Your entry is provocative for any of us who truly aspire to create. And to do so in a sustainable, continuous way. GTD is not an end in itself, it ought to free you up to let go to do your work, not be a “good GTD’er”. At the same time, I think being conscious and using good tools ought to help ultimately.

First of all, once you get in the flow of a real creative endeavor it is good to accept the nature of this beast. You used GTD well to parse the project when applicable. And when the “animate” part came, it took over, as it must. You wore a nice shirt to your date, but why complain if it gets shredded when making out later?

Most of us know the state of minimal maintainence in the heat of really working & I dare say that state is in some way the heart of the matter—the flow state of creating is its own reward. When your pet dies and you are wearing the least filthy item from the laundry basket THEN there is cause for concern. Until then, let the to-go containers fall where they will.

The real task then is how to pick up the pieces once the project is DELIVERED & you collapse!

Since you know now that the culmination of a project is a snowball of unparsable action you can, in some sense, plan for it.

One suggestion is to know that this is likely to happen and figure some triage for post project starts. A timed sweep to physically grab all the laundry into a gigantic garbage bag, furiously scrubbing the kitchen sink til it gleams even though you have created a swamp of squalor, making a friend go running with you no matter what—those are all good starting points toward a post-project mindsweep. I personally recommend The Specials first album as the soundtrack to any timed sweep of this kind, though your milage may vary.

Thanks for your sincere comment—I am in the same boat myself (visual artist). I hope at the least that these commments help you to re-frame this part of the battle.

Solo

My best trick for writing is probabely a separate user account with no net access and no distracting programs. Just a word processor, a pim, and some extras like media player, a timer (if case I just have to timebox), and a backup script (so I don’t have to relogin before I can go to sleep). I reckon I’ve read this trick at 43Folders, so thank you. I write after my salary job is done and on weekends. Being a junkie material, I must say that it’s so much calmer without the lure of The Net. As for the home part of drumming practice, the bulk of which don’t require much time to tune in and, basically, can be done in small bites, the best trick is stepping away from my computer every so often and chopping at my pads for some 10 minutes. Those intermission are good for both my drumming and my @net tasks. Moreover, I’m trying to make a habit of not sitting back down at my computer before I decided on the next task - or at least on the list to take it from. It’s only too easy to get lost.

My novel-writing process is heavy on next actions and 3x5 cards.

In order to crank out fiction on a strict schedule, I use Syd Field’s “56 Cards” system (described in his Screenwriter’s Workbook.) In the canonical version of this system, you build up your plot by writing a brief scene description on each of 56 3x5 cards (14 scene-cards each for Act I, Act IIA, Act IIB and Act III.) Then you tack the cards up on a wall and debug your plot by moving and replacing cards. (I’ve done a portable version of this with the small-size Post-It Notes and an accordion-fold Moleskine.)

Once you’re satisfied with the scene outline, you can stack the cards and use the card-stack as a next-action stack: When you sit down to write, you just pop a card and focus on that one scene. You know the structure is already taken care of, so the decks are clear and you can focus on the scene at hand. I find that this system breaks the large, scary novel-writing project into a sequence of discrete, non-scary scene-writing next-actions. It takes the fear and loathing out of novel writing.

(The card-system I just described will sound extremely familiar to Extreme Programming practitioners, right down to the push-pins. I take this to be a case of parallel evolution.)

Reading the past couple of posts, I see a common thread appearing. Where does GTD stop and your project management/planning process start? I find GTD super for clearing the decks but often worry that I am asking the system to do too much project management. How do you handle the interfacing of GTD with your project management processes?

I’ve found that creativity needs to be applied to a task at hand (i.e., just being in a “creative space” doesn’t often lead to concrete results in GTD). Having deadlines or rigid times to be creative is a good limitation; once you have a target to aim for you can focus your attention on it.

A good trick to being creative is understanding the problem, and leaving it alone, then coming back to it. During the “absence” you’ll still be background processing it. So, to schedule creative time, I’d suggest scheduling 2 sessions: the first to understand the problem and a later time to start solving it.

I guess I’ve been mis-using GTD and never realized it. When I was first introducted to GTD, I immediately set up a context called @Studio to cover the times I did fiber arts. But @Studio for me could mean my actual physical studio where my looms live, or it could mean in front of the TV knitting, or spinning, or on the computer creating a pattern draft, or in front of my bookshelves, paging through magazines, and books for ideas on my next project, or even riding in the car knitting, or sketching out kideas.

By creating an @Studio context, I always know that my fiber art projects are tracked, and captured even if my vocational (i.e. paying work) life gets in the way of my avocation (fiber art), for months at a time.

So for me my organization looks something like this (all tracked on a Mindmap on my mac)

List of Current Projects New Shawl Design Sweater from Klondike Fiber Katmandu Purse

My next Actions for @ Studio could be the following Review yarn samples for the new shawl Card Klondike’s fiber for spinning Finish front panel of the Katmandu Purse

And @Studio would be any time I can squeeze from my farm, and work, and in fact there I times where I have to get creative on finding time to be creative (for example, knitting while exercising, taking a spinning wheel to a barbeque, etc.).

Jesse,

I sympathize with your persistant “animate” task. Being a graphic designer I’ve struggled with the same issue.

The problems are a lack of specificity and progress. “Animate” (or “design”, etc) could apply to any part of the animation you’re doing. And checking off one “animate” task only to have twenty more exactly like it isn’t exactly energizing.

Perhaps you can take another swipe at breaking it down further, to absurdly tiny pieces if possible. Maybe one task is to complete a rough pass, or to rough in five seconds of run time, or even better 00:00:00 to 00:00:05. This creates a unique task that reminds you of exactly what you should be doing right now, and lends a little more satisfaction at completing it. Plus you can more easily track your progress to see if you’re on track.

I would love to hear anyone else’s ideas on how to break up blob tasks like “animate” into crankable widgets.

I am in the creative business as I work in an ad agency. I am an Art Director and I also take care of various things for the company, like training designers, maintaining the computers and more.

For many years, since before the desktop computers, I have chopped every project I am faced to into manageable pieces that is easy to visualize and easy to execute. Then I rearrange the pieces in a priority order (in GTD lingo called Next Actions) and from that point I can see if I need extra help with the project.

I used and still use for paper jotting, a very simple system. I write down the actions needed to be done on a paper, using indented lines for sub actions and so on.

Through the years I have found software that make this process easier to manage. Outliners like More, Acta and then later OmniOutliner is the software I have found most useful as they dissolve the boundaries of plain paper and make shifting paragraphs (Projects with their Actions) and subsets a breeze.

My old system of marking down the progress of any sub-action of an project is simply this way: In front of each action I write down is a circle. Kind of a white dot.

When the job is started it gets a diagonal line across the circle. (A started work is half done.)

Half way done; safely on it’s way or waiting for a reply to finish I fill the right half of the circle.

Fully done; no more worries; written off, I fill the other half of the circle. Black dot.

I still write a lot down on paper and any note I make gets a circle (or a white dot as I see it) in front of it. It’s easy to see the status of a project — even without the glasses.

I have tried out various ways of implementing GTD to the creative field. In the daily routine of an ad agency I have to admit that GTD for the usual projects simply does not work. The work turnaround is too fast, the projects are to many.

But using methods of GTD or at least keeping it in mind and pulling out the useful aspects of it helps a lot. By using tools like iGTD to collect the other fields of business and life, like personal things, home, interests and hobbies, books to order and read, personal evolvement, travel etc…. any thing that comes to mind and using it to chop down those projects into smaller doable actions helps to compile it into one trust system and free the mind from being distracted repeatably while trying to work on projects that need focusing as creative matters do.

Being creative or not is not bothering me as such. Why should it? In iGTD I have a few contexts that relate to creativeness but the creativeness is not the real issue. It’s simply to get a thing done in a field you are at and keep the customer happy. The customer can be a paying one or it could just be yourself.

I don’t really see a point of using @Creativity context. At least in my case it covers too different things that I rather split it into more precise contexts.

@Brainstorm. Here someone (It could be me) is asking me to come up with a solution to a project.

@mac Design. Here I need to make something visual. I could be an ad or a brochure; it could be my yearly calendar poster I give out at my blog.

@mac Fonts. Here are projects that relate to a special interest I have. Font designing or problem solving.

@mac Write. Ideas for my blog or it might be a report on a special project my boss or a customer wants me to solve or at least give an input into. It could also mean preparing for a lecture at work or offsite.

For those contexts I do and enjoy using GTD methods. Basically I am doing it the way I have done before but all the GTD discussion for the last two years or so has really given me some ideas to impove many aspects of it.

Creatively the most important thing is to get the idea out of your head as soon as possible. An idea out makes space for the next one.

I find the best helpers to be a small notebook that can follow you anywhere even to the beach when you don’t have a computer (I use the thin lined Moleskine). At the computer(s) I use iGTD synced via .mac to grab any idea or thought that comes to me. Processed later.

As a furniture maker, poet (oh, yeah, and software engineer), I’ve used GTD mostly for clearing the deck. Mind like water is essential for keeping my creative energy up.

Ubiquitous collection is essential. Keep a journal. It’s the collection point, the inbox for creative work. Write/draw whatever thougts come to mind. I’ve been using a Circamagine notebook for this, with great success. Pages go in, come out, rearrange easily, so there’s no mental barrier to using it. I wish Levenger would bring them back, but at least I can still get refills.

For more purely composition-based creative work like writing, I need to establish a firewall, and make sure the people around me respect the firewall. Outside of that context, when I learn about a new lit journal seeking submissions, for example, Next Actions are great: review journal content; get submission guidelines; select pieces for submission; package and send submission.

For other creative work like furnituremaking, Next Actions are essential. After the initial composition stage of a furniture piece, when I have most of the problems solved and the steps planned out, I’ve found next actions essential for driving the piece to completion.

Doing my creative work after my work day, it’s essential to be able to step into my @creative context and crank widgets. Even when I come home with little remaining energy, I can spend 15 or 20 minutes to move my creative projects forward, and feel great for having done it.

GTD for creative work, particularly when creative work constitutes almost all of my day job, is difficult. It makes me cross-eyed just thinking about it. Using my HPDA in order to clear my mental RAM, and then routinely processing my inbox(es) by way of OmniFocus, are incredibly important parts of my GTD routine. I think I use GTD more to take care of the things I’m really bad at taking care of, the non-creative jazzmahoolie that’ll seriously screw up my life if left unattended. I suppose I already have an @creative context heading, under which fall @thinking & planning, @designing, @writing (creative work, not @emailing).

GTD is very effective for the active musician. Projects I have cover a wide range of musical activities, for example: “Create a new mini-set” which describes the project of constructing approximately 15 - 20 minutes of new material, practicing it and getting it to be performance ready; or, “Arrange new A minor sus4 thing into a tune” which describes a composition project; and another - “Implement Band In A Box as a viable practice tool” which is more of a computer based project. You can have entire practice-oriented projects such as “Learn Pat Martino’s Linear Expressions material”, and cycle through the chapters one at a time on your next actions list.

Contexts for holding next actions for these projects include @guitar, @bass, or @percussion depending on what instrument I’m choosing to practice. For the technical work, it would be @audio_workstation.

The nice thing here is that it’s very easy to construct effective practice sessions from the next actions list. Just pick up your list and bam! you’ll always have four or five of the right things to work on.

Useful caoture lists to support these projects include things like “Tunes I want to write and record”, “Tunes I need to practice”.

And, in the spirit of GTD, you can always chose to put aside the action lists and have free-random-spontaneous jam time without feeling guilty.

Focus improves using GTD - a critical factor for musical activity.

I think this post really only scratches the surface of what’s possible.

SS

guys he asked about creative work not web development :)

I use gtd to capture ideas and block out some dedicated time to smoke pot in my studioabd get to work (I’m a musician). I don’t use gtd to organize the flow of work in my studio. When I do capture ideas, its like Steve wrote, except about production elements instead of performance ones. GTD is great for capturing fleeting ideas. That would be a good track title or that would be an interesting textural shift. I have a project for each album and subprojects for each track. Keeps ideas organized without turning the creative process into cranking widgets is the operating principle.

I use a kind of implicit GTD for my creative work.

I break down work into projects. A project is a series of images or a version of a piece of software.

Each project is pursued on a task and next action basis. So the next task might be to complete a particular image or add a particular feature to a piece of software. An action might be researching some source material, drawing or colouring or formatting up an image. It may take more than three minutes, but won’t be more than a few hours.

With creative work you need to get into the flow, so some individual “actions” can take hours.

At present my projects are “Like That” (Processing applets), Ironised CC Licenses (Inkscape drawings), “draw-something” (a Lisp image generator), and some LaTeX maths work. I know what I want from each and what the next actions are for each to reach those objectives.

I don’t use folders or pieces of paper but I do have some .txt files of TODOs and series of actions for projects. And I do have sketches on paper than will be translated into finished electronic versions. And I have placeholders in electronic files (.svg or .tex or whatever) where more work needs to be done. So the current state and next actions for projects are either on paper as sketches, in files as TODOs or in files as placeholders or empty sections.

I’ve read GTD but I didn’t realise how much I’d internalised it. Because of how my life is I’ve had to break creative projects down into chunks that I can complete when I have the time, so maybe I should just go the whole hog and have project folders for sketches and paper TODOs. I’ve got a label printer. ;-)

Well there’s creative and there’s creative…

I have a variety of experiences….

On one hand…GTD is really great at making you feel really busy and organised and completely aids the process of avoiding creative work.

It’s fabulous at that.

Creative work for me comes when I finally overcome my GTD activities and discard them in a mighty fuck-it that opens up space for me to actually do something new.

One cool thing about GTD is that it’s really easy to pick up where you left off and so you can always rejoin the responsible part of the world with relative ease.

On the other…

If I have to grunt out some design or write something… that sits in my @Mac_Creative context.

But that’s just stuff I have to do.

Not stuff I must do in order to actually think of myself in any real way as creative.

That’s always disruptive.

I tend to use GTD to clear my decks when I know I have something big coming up on a project. For instance, when it comes time to sit down and rewrite a screenplay, I will do my weekly review (even if it’s off-schedule), so I can clear my head and get to the business of focusing on my rewrite, knowing that everything will be ready for me when I come back. This really helps me let go of everything else and get into a creative flow that can be sustained for upwards of 2-3 days. I know many people here have day jobs that get in the way of this kind of flow, but this is what works for me. Really I only let sleep, showers and meals get in the way, and those are useful breaks to get some perspective before coming back to tackle a rough patch, etc. If I didn’t have GTD to “clear the decks” and create some sense that everything has been captured for review when I’m done with my writing session, I would go back to feeling scattered and anxious that things are not getting done, and thus would not be able to delve into my work as fully as I need to.

This topic is something I struggle with as a freelance graphic designer. I know it is heresy to suggest this but I find myself wanting to interject something into GTD from Stephen Covey’s work - roles. I have a context labeled “@designer.” that I use to set aside distraction free time for tasks that are purely creative. I specifically segregate this from “@production” which is the brainless production work required once I’ve laid the creative foundation in the “@designer” context/role. I am curious how other people use the idea of “roles” in the realm of GTD. Thoughts?

For me I have simplified things by moving all creative endeavors to one day of the week (usually Friday). I refer to them as “Creative Fridays”. This is where I give myself permission to ignore contexts, tasks, etc and focus on stuff that would require me to get out of my normal elements and explore other things that require my creative juices. I also find that if I am creatively tapped out throughout the week, my brain can relax knowing I have Friday to deal with those issues.

Rysum,

I too find Covey’s notion of ‘roles’ useful.

I use it solely to ensure that my brain dumps are thorough and, hopefully, complete.

I might put personal stuff such as calls to the Doctor in the @Calls folder along with work ones.

But when I ‘mindfully’ go through my call list ‘using my best instinct’ I place calls for personal roles at appropriate times.

I found GTD difficult to used when I was in the middle of a creative project for school last semester. I had to create an animated short in approximately 4 months. At the start, GTD worked great. It helped me balance the many, varied tasks that made up a bulk of the project: drawing storyboards, recording dialogue, writing documentation, and so forth.

The problem came towards the end of the semester. For the final few weeks, I had one major task in the project: Animate. It could be broken down a bit — animate scene 1, animate scene 2, etc. — but the reality was that animating was ALWAYS on my task list. I couldn’t schedule it away, since I couldn’t always predict how long it would take. After a while, when I could predict the time required, it simply took all the time I had. Everything else got shifted into my “when I get time” priority. The house didn’t get cleaned, the pets barely got fed, and exercising was a joke. By the end of the project, I didn’t even bother to look at my to-do list because I knew I’d be animating for every moment that wasn’t occupied by my “hard landscape” items like class and meetings.

Even though the project has been finished for months now, I haven’t recovered my GTD mentality because it broke so completely. Has anyone else found a way to use GTD to deal with a task that expands to fill all available time?

I’ve had nine suspense novels published; my most recent, FEAR, was a top 5 bestseller in the UK. I’ve also done some rewriting work for a major film studio. I use a simple GTD set up, paper-based, to both clear the decks so I can deal with the administrative side of being a full-time novelist and get my creative writing done.

I use an @Studio context for all my creative writing work. If I need to write five pages each day in completing a draft, then “write the next five pages” is a next action and it repeats until the draft is done. Not glamorous but it keeps nose to grindstone. If I need to devote an afternoon to brainstorming, I will block out that time on my calendar, to be as sancrosanct as a business appointment would be. If I have more than one project—say a rewrite on a novel and writing a film treatment—I may divide the day between the projects, just as if I had two appointments that split my day. So some example Next Actions for @Studio context might be: —write the next five pages —rewrite character bio for Lucy —brainstorm on how James can steal a gun in Chapter 13 —rewrite murder scene from new notes on blood splatter or in the case of film work: —reread Act One to find a more dramatic way to introduce the character of Fred

This sounds uncreative, I guess, but this keeps my focus on what I need to accomplish to move the book/film forward. If I have a brainstorm I capture it and deal with it later if it’s not relevant to what I’m writing at the moment. If I feel like surrending to distraction (say I’m writing and I suddenly feel I must get on the internet to research some obscure data, a common way for writers to avoid working), I add that as an action for @Online so I remember it, but I don’t let it derail me from what I’m doing at the moment.) If I’m not worrying about what to do next, my brain is free to concentrate on the art. So my writing next actions tend to be different depending whether I’m writing first drafts or rewriting.

For research, I will use a mix of contexts—@Online for web-based work, @Errands for when I need to go to the library or the bookstore. If I’m interviewing someone, the context depends on if it’s face-to-face or more likely, through email or phone. I don’t have a lot of phone calls to make in a normal day, but I do use an @Office context for calls and administrative stuff—filing and research I’m doing via phone. I use an @Home context for normal family life.

When I’m on book tour, I create an @Tour context just for that period of time, although since my publisher handles the details of touring for me most items land on the calendar (radio interview or book signing or print interview), but I feel better having the context when I’m out of the office—although it could be argued it’s a project not a context, but I don’t want to think that much.

I now have a part-time assistant and quite a bit of those next actions that used to crowd @Office and @Errands are now delegated. I use Someday/Maybe lists for things I’d like to do in the future, but NOT for forthcoming book ideas—those get captured and then processed into a notebook where I keep such musings.

I used to try to do all my simple GTD via my Mac and my Palm, but I found it distracted me from writing (mostly when I’m at the computer, I just want to write). I also never found an electronic way to manage projects that I liked. So I now use a Filofax Classic A5 to hold all my project notes, my To Do lists, and my calendar. It lays open on the desk all day. I keep a lot of blank pages in there for idea capture and I find the paper approach is easier to review than on the computer. Again, not at all sophisticated but simple and it gets the job done. The tabs on my Filofax read: PROJ—for all project notes, and also includes a vertical year planner with due dates for projects so I can see my year at a glance DO—my next action lists IDEAS—whatever I need to capture LISTS—books to read or buy, movies to see, music to buy MAYBE—a Someday/Maybe section REF—reference that’s useful to have always—phone numbers, sources, the last time I had my oil changed, etc.

I do think GTD is very useful for ensuring forward movement on creative projects, but I think there is a big danger in fiddling overmuch with the system instead of doing actual work. I keep thinking an electronic way might be better but I haven’t found one yet, so I’ve happily stuck with paper. Hope this is helpful.

I divide my work contexts into “Short and Easy” and “Chunk of Time.” Short and Easy tends to be the widgety things, while Chunk of Time is a little less defined in terms of next actions. The verbs tend to be things like “try” or “investigate.” The way I see it, certain parts of my workflow don’t need to be broken down, because they don’t cause me anxiety and I’m not procrastinating on them. I sit down in my chair, and I know what to do. (Jamie said this better above — it’s like breathing.) For example, if I’m working on proving a theorem, I might be trying a bunch of different things, going and doing some side reading, drawing stuff on the whiteboard, but all I really need to keep track of in my system is my starting point for the next Chunk of TIme. It’s only when I start procrastinating on something that I think, “Ok, what is the next physical thing I can do to move this forward?” So I guess I disagree a bit with the statement you made in your Google talk about everything in the system needing to be the “same size.” I think things need to be broken down only to the point that they prompt you to actually get to work.

One thing that occured to me over the weekend that hasn’t come up yet is the Someday Maybe file. This simple agreement to stash ideas for later continually saves my sanity and helps me continue to make progress on my current work.

I can generate new ideas, knowing I can get back to them without feeling the weight of them. Not only does it help me focus, it gives my creativity license to produce ideas at a rate that’s independent of my ability to implement them.

Once I’m ready to pick up a new project, there’s a pipeline to choose from, based on my enthusiasm for an idea, and I don’t have to suffer the blank page staring back at me.

My wife and I both do web and graphic design and have discovered that the best and least stressful way to do creative and custom work for clients is to start with the proverbial “wireframe” and work with the clients from the very basic look and work from their instead of trying to create the whole thing from the beginning and then get feedback. Working from a very basic look slowly.

For those times when I need to fill in the wireframes I need to get away without distractions or do things that are not creative but mindless like walking, cutting the grass, taking a shower and of course working out at the gym.

Great posting. I agree this is a fascinating topic with how GTD works in regards to creative endeavors. I think one thing that appears to be missing from the discussion is the issue of improvisation in creative modes of thinking. Perhaps this is where some people hit a wall with GTD in their creative process, as widget cranking would appear to be the natural enemy of the kind of play and mental dexterity used to come up some creative material. GTD is great for getting the head clear and organizing time for doing this stuff, but beyond this I find I just don’t need to use it in any more detail for creativity. I work in music/sound and I find that GTD becomes more useful once an idea begins to take form and I have had time to reflect on what I’ve done and where I might like to take it- the standard drafting process. So stuff like, “make a new nasally synth patch for riff in middle section.” comes easily once the ball is rolling.

This whole discussion reminds me of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies” which is something I tend to reach for from time to time when creative solutions are required, but not forthcoming. They were designed to reduce the tendency for the mind to wander away from a creative mode when other pressures begin to mount - shortage of time generally being the key driver.

Eno says:

“The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case - it’s just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt that attitude.” “

There are many software adaptations of the original card system that Eno and Schmidt used. It’s one of the few things that I think actually makes a great OS X widget.

May I commit heresy: there’s a piece missing from GTD: volitional contexts. That’s contexts created not due to physical constraints, but self-imposed limitations you impose on yourself to do certain things only, even though you could be doing other things (checking email, reading RSS feeds, responding to 43folders postings, etc). As you said in your recent talk, contexts don’t really work so much for desk-bound information workers.

This hit home to me when I realized I’d be running my web dev business (how you said dripped such involuntary contempt when you said “web designer” during the Google talk!) much better if I split the workday into two: maintenance and improvement of current live sites, and development on new ones. Without the separation, I’ve always tended to neglect the former for the latter, which is really not a very moral way to behave.

I thought of a term for this: chrontexts. But that’s horrible. Then I came across this recent article by Steve Pavlina, “How to Create a Personal Productivity Scaffold” at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/07/how-to-create-a-personal-productivity-scaffold/ and I thought, wow, that’s it: Scaffolds!

Isn’t that the answer to your question?

Creativity for me comes at certain times of the day. These times are very dynamic. I am a fitness consultant and do freelance scripting and web development, so my time (barring project deadlines) is mine. I do what I love. So, I recently started a process called “biphasic sleep” where I sleep in 90 minute increments (90 mins, 3 hours, 4.5 hours, etc.). I find that time after waking from “biphasic sleep” and time after a morning run are my most creative. I don’t schedule my creative time. It hasn’t been as fruitful for me. But, I do schedule a run every day and my sleep is biphasic, so I can always count on attacking my @creative agenda daily.

I’m not sure the system needs a new structural term since the power of contexts is that you define your own, as in the @creative example.

To me, the strongest part of GTD for creative work is the emphasis on ubiquitous capture. Part of the nature of creative work is that you can get ideas at any time, not just when you’ve parceled out time for them; it’s important to remember that you need a capture system that’s with you when you’re walking around, waking from fever dreams, out fighting crime etc.