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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Getting Started with GTD

The problem when I began reading GTD was that the sheer volume of all of my open items came piling down on me and I froze. The book seemed to get heavier and heavier until I finally put it down.

I knew I had a problem (open loops out the ying-yang), but the book wasn't going fast enough for me. I needed to start addressing my open loops now. What was I to do? Google! Ah, Google --- the cause of and solution to all the world's problems (Simpsons reference). So off to the webernet I went, searching for GTD tips and GTD examples. What did I find: blogger after blogger telling me just read the book. One blogger even wrote that I should read the book twice. Damn you bloggers!

I went back to GTD, but this time I went with a new attitude (Just Finish It) and a stack of 5x8 note cards. In my googling, I did, however, purchase the $10 Outlook PDF, because I knew this was where I would be headed or maybe because I was just too hyper.

I'm not going to lie to you, it's slow and painstaking, but after a few hours of reading and absorbing GTD and taking over 50 cards of notes, I've reached page 44.

At work today, I jumped the gun and organized two folders @Next_Actions and Projects. I even started dropping some action items into each (open loops in the Project folder).

My problem, if you've made it this far, is this:

I have a project called ABC Department. ABC Department has come to me with several (okay, many) reports that no longer function. The reports are the Red Report, Green Report, Blue Report, etc. Each report has several actions items and a few action items even have their own sub-action items. It would look like this:

Projects
- ABC Department
-----Red Report
----------Action Item 1
----------Action Item 2
----------Action Item 3
---------------Sub-action Item 1
---------------Sub-action Item 2
---------------Sub-action Item 3
----------Action Item 4
-----Blue Report
----------etc
-----Green Report
----------etc
-----etc
-DEF Department
-----White Report
----------Action Item 1
----------Action Item 2
----------Action Item 3
---------------Sub-action Item 1
---------------Sub-action Item 2
---------------Sub-action Item 3
----------Action Item 4
-----Grey Report
----------etc
-----Purple Report
----------etc
-----etc

Should the Reports stay as a subset of their department or should the move up a level? What have you found that works? All said and done, I can imagine that their may be a time that I might have up 200 Projects at different levels. Are there limits?

Thanks in advance.

Chrome47's picture

There are some really great...

There are some really great PDF charts and diagrams on Davidco.com, and they might help you a bit. Granted it makes a lot of sense once you've read the book.

For me the crucial points are these: Get it out of your head -- write it down. Stick to the practice of "Do it, delegate it, defer it, drop/delete it." And do the Weekly Review weekly, or as often as you need to, to keep the big picture in mind.

And it's obvious by now that I haven't really stuck to the desired outcomes thing, so that's probably something I personally need to work on.

 
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