Contexts

Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts

Merlin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:46:17 -0400

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple’s MobileMe problems, I’m not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies you can choose to employ whenever a change in access to anything unexpectedly rearranges your day. Because things do break, and there’s no reason you have to break with them.

One of the things that’s most helpful about a system like GTD is the way you learn to think of your work as something that can and should be viewed from multiple angles.

A 90-second GTD primer:

Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
- “Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson’s group on 2008-10-03” is a Project.
Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
- “Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation” is the next action for my Project.
Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
- “@calls” is the Context for my Next Action
- in this case, “@calls” serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
- (See? Different angle.)
The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
- The other three are “Time Available,” “Energy Available,” and (you guessed it) “Context.”

Got it? Contexts are a way to horizontally slice across all of your Projects in a way that lets you do what you can do at a given moment – even if it’s not the thing you want to do or most need to do. Because that’s life. And, sometimes, life is a huge dick.

Like a famous religion and a handy bit of Psychology, Getting Things Done acknowledges that, while you have little or no control over the interruptions and unexpected change in your life, you DO have the power to decide what you want to do about it right now. So, while you can’t run your life by Priority alone, you always have plenty to do. If you’ve learned to think in terms of Contexts. Get it?

So if you forgot your phone, skip “@calls,” and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip “@Boss,” and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip “@web, “and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You’ve already guessed it! Skip “@email” and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

Sure it’s insanely frustrating and annoying to not have access to something you depend on. And, yes, it’s natural to whine about it and even burn a few cycles on a fast, cathartic tantrum. But, friends, if you’re so mad about an uncontrollable change in your life that it takes you off all your work for half a day, then you’re still playing in the minor leagues of GTD. And you’re not doing yourselves and the people you produce work for any favor in the bargain.

Plan in Projects, work in Contexts, and strive to not let anything stick to you more than you’d like it to.

And, seriously. Guys. When one door closes, just open a freaking window. An hour without email is a great time to dive into sixty guilt-free minutes of writing, reading, or even pencil-sharpening. Work the time.

Because it ends up being a lot more fun and useful to ride the wave than to yell obscenities at it for four hours.

”Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 12, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)

Merlin — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:17:02 -0400

In one of the recent podcast interviews I did with David Allen, we talked about procrastination and how he tries to get people – especially knowledge workers – back to just “cranking widgets.”

I love this term, because, in his humorous way, David captures how any thing we want to accomplish in this world eventually has to manifest itself in an intentional physical activity. Seemingly over-huge super-projects like “World Peace,” “Cancer Cure,” or “Find Mutually Satisfying Vehicle for Jim Belushi” all still come down to physical actions, such as picking up a phone or typing an email.

And David is wise, in that interview, also to highlight the importance of what he refers to as a “‘look-into’ project,” which just means that even deciding if a project is interesting and useful to undertake can be a project in itself. It also means that, even with an outcome of “deciding,” that meta-project still consists solely of physical actions. In this case, it’s the physical actions that help you locate the additional information you’ll need to make a timely and wise decision about whether to proceed at all. In sum, no matter what, it all still should come back to widgets and how they get cranked.

Like a lot of you, I’ve struggled with how you turn “thinky work” into physical action widgets, but here are a few of my favorite task-verbs to get you started in the right direction. They’re presented here in a rough approximation of the order in which I use them in my own “look-into” projects:

web-research - Usually my ﬁrst stop in learning the broadest possible information about anything. And, for me, that means I’m primarily visiting two sites: Wikipedia and Google. Go to either or both and just type in the keywords that get you started. Then just follow your nose for a few minutes. If you started every project with 20 minutes of Wikipedia and Google time, you’d already be so much further along than if you’d just sat around staring into space, waiting for kismet to bring you a slice of cake. At least now you have something to start with. Yes, you probably have your own go-to sites for this kind of work; just do remember to use them.
brainstorm - Try doodling, free writing, white-boarding, or mind-mapping to freely generate ideas, possibilities, and connections. Whatever works best for you in your own situation. You must give yourself permission to really cut loose and not evaluate here – as they say, the goal is quantity not quality. You’re just looking to stimulate new nouns and verbs that that can provide hooks into ﬁnding more information. Lightly structured brainstorming is the best way to shape unrelated and seemingly unconnected material into a useful map for further action.
email - Once you’ve given yourself an independent education on a topic and feel that you’ve learned enough to ask good questions, consider writing a short email asking for advice and input from a colleague or people on your team. All the usual rules apply here, but a fast email along the lines of “Do you have a preference in foo over bar, and why?” can be a quick way to bring one honeycomb of the hive mind’s experience quickly into play.
call - Some of the information you need to make decisions is almost certainly available in the brain of someone close to you. When needed, make a short call to someone who you think can help guide your way. This could be anything from the person in the next cube to a customer service line to a library reference desk to that wisest of institutional historians, your Mom. Again, all the usual admonitions about respecting time still apply, but a phone call, used efﬁciently, can be the fastest path to an answer.
agenda - If you have a big pile of a little questions that can wait for now, just capture them all into your list for “agenda-boss,” “agenda-team,” “agenda-spouse” or what have you. You can then quickly blow through them all at one time. (And yes, Professor Grammarpants, this is technically a verb, since it’s just a short way of writing “Ask n person next time I see them…”)
write - Once you’ve gathered any amount of information – and, seriously, don’t go to committee forever on this stuff – try writing a letter, email, one-page-report, or even a theoretical blog post about your topic. No one ever needs to see it, but if you were to explain everything you’ve learned about your new topic alongside how you feel about it, you might be surprised to discover you know, think, and feel more than you had realized before you started writing. My layman’s theory here is that writing puts demands on the left side of your brain to turn mushy clouds of ideas into semi-coherent pyramids of information. (Sometimes those pyramids will end up looking more like they were created by a dog’s behind than having arisen from the dream-visions of Pharaohs, but you’ll never ﬁnd out until you commit that “Shitty First Draft”)

You’ll notice I left off the verb you were really casting about for here, which is almost certainly “**decide**.” This is not an oversight.

This one I can’t help you with, because – unless you own and utilize a jokey “Executive Decision Maker” purchased from the Sky Mall catalog – deciding is most deﬁnitely not a physical action.

Deciding, as I hope you learned today, is actually a kind of project outcome. Trying to pretend it’s an action, as your author has painfully discovered, is like trying to see our notional dog’s yard pyramid as an “@dogbowl” action; that’s simply not how it works and it completely confuses the process and order of thinking vs. deciding vs. doing.

Decisions can only be delivered after you’ve nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information. Once the fetal decision has consumed these sufﬁcient data, a bouncy baby outcome cannot help but be born. You just need to be there to slap it on the ass and give it a good name. Just please don’t call it a verb.

”6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Back to GTD: Simplify your contexts

Merlin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:24:49 -0400

This post is part of the periodic “Back to GTD” series, designed to help you improve your implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

As we’ve noted before, GTD contexts lose a lot of their focusing power when either a) most of your work takes place at one context (e.g. “@computer”), or b) you start using contexts more for taxonomical labeling than to reﬂect functional limitations and opportunities. As you may have discovered, these problems can collide catastrophically for many knowledge workers, artists, and geeks.

Part of what makes the Natural Planning Model so attractive are the decisions that can be guided by contextual limitations (“I’m near a phone” vs. “I’m at the grocery store” vs. “I’m at my computer”). While it’s deﬁnitely a kind of “ﬁrst world problem” to have, facing the unlimited freedom to chose from any of a bajillion similar tasks from similar projects with similar outcomes is not nearly as fun as it ﬁrst sounds. Consider the contextual hairballs of certain jobs and tasks:

Developer - Much of the work is writing new code, ﬁxing old code, or testing code. All of these require essentially the same tools and environment, so how do you apply real contexts?
Writer - Needs to research, draft, revise, and edit manuscripts. While the “Write book” project will break down nicely into multiple sub-projects and tasks, how do you satisfactorily “context-ize” this physically identical work?
Designer - Whether coming up with a print layout, web design, or what will become a physical artifact, how do you segment the work further than “@photoshop” and ”@illustrator”?

This causes many of us to fashion more or less phoney-baloney “sub-contexts” that reﬂect some facet of the parent (e.g. “@computer” might contain “@email,” “@web,” “@code,” “@print,” and so on). While this makes terriﬁc sense from a logical standpoint (and it can certainly have its uses), it doesn’t reﬂect the true meaning of a context, at least in my own mind: “what tools, resources, opportunities, and limitations are unique to this situation?” or put slightly differently from the perspective of choosing tasks at a given time, “what are the things I can’t work on now given where I am and the tools to which I have access?”

More and more, I think the solution may be to toss out or consolidate any contexts that don’t have unique functional attributes. I mean, by all means, keep them if they’re working for you, but if you ﬁnd yourself spending more time deciding where to ﬁle tasks than actually completing them, you might consider dialing your contexts back as far as you can stand. For the geeks in particular, consider having two and only two computer-related contexts: “@online” and “@computer-anywhere.” If you have other contextual needs, add them in with care, then periodically revisit to make sure you aren’t maintaining superﬂuous parts.

If you feel a gnaw about the loss of your old contexts, try to shunt some of the mental load into sub-projects and better verb choices in your tasks. Where you once had (as I did) an “@print” context, consider whether an “@computer” task of “Print Jim’s email” might be sufﬁcient for the job. Remember, maintaining fewer buckets is always a good thing.

As you doubtless have learned, this is ultimately all about choosing valuable work and then tracking it as simply as possible via carefully-worded task reminders. No amount of meta-crap can magically transform junk tasks into stuff you really want or need to do. Contexts can help shape your day, but they’re less than useful if they don’t track realistically to the demands of your work.

”Back to GTD: Simplify your contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 31, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Three cool tricks in Kinkless GTD

Merlin — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:19:58 -0400

Herewith for your approval, a few handy tricks I’ve been discovering for getting the most out of the peerless Omni Outliner Pro/kGTD combo.

And don’t forget – as noted last week – through the end of this month, when you buy any OmniOutliner product from the OmniGroup site, you can use the checkout code 43FOLDERS to get 25% off your order. Disco!

1. “Hiding” fallow projects

In last Thursday’s podcast, “Fallow Projects and the Bread Crumb Trail”, I mentioned how I like to move stalled or clinically-dead projects off my immediate radar screen; it makes it so much easier to focus when only actionable stuff is being tracked actively. Anyhow, lots of people asked for more details on that, so here you go.

In kGTD, you want to create a holding pen for these sick animals by generating a new top-level Project and calling it, say, “Fallow Projects #” (or whatever you prefer, but do include the “pound”) then scooting all those moribund projects thereunder. Cool enough, but, here comes the nifty.

There’s an undocumented feature in kGTD (what, Ethan, now you’re copying a1c0r?) that’s not at all well known. If you type a pound sign (“#”) at the end of a project’s name, kGTD will set that project as “inactive,” meaning that any child tasks – or, awesomely, child projects – will not have their tasks populated into context lists, next actions, or iCal calendars.

This is really useful in practice, because, say you have a project going great guns, with 5 sub-projects and manifest next actions popping up all over the place. But, then, for whatever reason – perhaps the notional rodeo maiming mentioned in the podcast – you need to ﬂash freeze the project in situ for an unknown period of time. This solution lets you move things out of your way – as-is – so you don’t have to undo all your work to date by ﬂipping off individual contexts or, God forbid, deleting the projects and then needing to start over later. It’s all still there ready to be reanimated simply by moving the sub-project out of the inactive parent. Sexy time.

2. Color your world

In “KGTD Settings,” when you ﬁrst set the “Calendars to Create or Sync with,” you select the contexts that you want to appear in iCal as well as the names for each calendar. Handy enough. What you may not know is that, if kGTD is creating the iCal calendars from scratch, you can also select the color of each calendar as it will appear in iCal. Yay, pretty.

Just select the line with the calendar you want to colorify, and hit CMD-1 to bring up the “Appearance” palette. Click the “Background Color” button and select the color you like.

While being semantically useless, it’s a nice way to create visual similarity in related calendars. You could even use it as a kind of meta-category beyond what you do already with calendar groups. Maybe all the things you can do in a parked car are “Seagreen” and all the tasks that require a ﬂat surface are “Darkslateblue.” Be creative. Or, you know, just color for fun.

(NB: this only works when kGTD is creating calendars that don’t yet exist in iCal. Use care when deleting existing calendars in order to play with this trick; remember “calls” can be non-kGTD appointments, right? Right.).

3. That curious “Twin” button

Averse as the average adult human is to reading documentation, it’s perhaps not surprising that every single kGTD user I know (except you, of course; you’re really smart) has no idea what that “Twin” button in their document bar does. Perhaps it generates a doppelganger, phones Hayley Mills, or adds a side-splitting DeVito/Schwarzenegger movie to your Netﬂix queue. Gratefully, “No,” “No,” and “Holy crap, no.”

The “Twin” button is simply a fast way to move back and forth between a synced task’s dual lives as 1) the child of a Project, and 2) a constituent of a given context-based list.

Remember the idea of kGTD is to plan in Projects and then work in contexts. But the occasional moving back and forth becomes a breeze when you place your cursor in any synced task then mash the “Twin” button. Try it. It’s really cool, and now you’ll be using it all the time, conﬁdent of no Schwarzenegger-related media involvement whatsoever.

”Three cool tricks in Kinkless GTD” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 26, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Podcast: Putting Geeks in Context

Merlin — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:50:31 -0400

Putting Geeks in Context

43folders.com - One way around the geek’s problem with GTD contexts? Step away from the computer. (4:37)

More at Odeo.com…

”43F Podcast: Putting Geeks in Context” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 06, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ganging your mosquito tasks

Merlin — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 10:19:44 -0500

Not all tasks are created equal. Our to-dos all differ in priority, complexity, time requirement, and context, so it’s probably daft to always capture and expose them in an identical way. I have a little trick for dealing with this that’s been working really well for me.

Back in the day, my to-do list was an egalitarian nightmare of inefﬁciency — verb-centric “next actions” through they all were, I commonly faced a task list that looked something like this:

call Alice about Foo project
ﬁx line 125 of bar.php
ﬁx line 349 of bat.php
take out kitchen recycling
buy milk
buy index cards
sweep the decks

Now, the problem here might be self-evident to you smarter people, but I was missing an important concept: there is such a thing as too granular a task to track as its own event. In this instance, I was cruftifying my landscape with items that were way too detailed or tiny and, consequently, I’d turned my task list into an undoable roller coaster of un-focus. Just as “projects” are composed of “tasks,” I like to think that “tasks” themselves can often be collected into silos of small “mosquito tasks.” And my solution, as ever: text ﬁles and alarms.

In the example of my sample tasks above, the phone call is the only item that remains intact after this overhaul. The code ﬁxes, chores, and shopping items each got shunted off into their own silos: “bat project code ﬁxes.txt,” “semiweekly chores.txt,” and then the to-buy stuff all goes into the proper lists in Splash Shopper.

Why? Because, by and large, these are tasks that can and should be ganged into focus and completion at a single sitting, rather than being treated as discrete items. For myself, I’d never ﬁx one bug or do one chore any more than I’d clean one hand or buy one egg — these are things I want to collect as they occur to me, and then do them all at a pass on a regular, repeating basis. They’re maintenance projects that must be tended to in a timely manner, but there’s no need to have the whole army of them glaring at me all day as I try to focus on the new and nonce tasks that most demand my A-Game concentration. This gets them out of sight until it’s time to focus on them.

But, is this different from a GTD “context?” You bet it is. For example, I have an “@write” context with a project of “Write Thank You Notes,” but no way do I want to track every single person who gets a note as a separate task. Oy vey. No, I just collect all those folks in a running text ﬁle and then pound through them as time allows. The vertical focus rules (plus this is all very conducive to running a dash)

By capturing and storing my “mosquito tasks” in one place and giving myself a regular reminder — I use the “recur” function in kGTD but you could use Outlook, etc. — I can return again and again to lists like:

Fix broken URLs
Update Firefox extensions
Run monthly Mac maintenance regime
Go to the health food place
Bring these items up with client Foo (a/k/a “Agenda”)

If you’ve been putting off a bunch of crap on your list, try a quick run-through and get an idea whether all your items are roughly the same “size.” If a task seems really big, make sure it’s not actually a project. If a task seems incredibly, annoyingly small (and especially if you discover it has neighbors that are also tiny), consider whether it might be more do-able if you tracked it outside your regular to-do list. Put ‘em in their own silo, and then come back later to knock them all down at once.

”Ganging your mosquito tasks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Mark Taw on GTD contexts and next actions

Merlin — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 13:29:39 -0500

What context do I put my Next Actions in? :: MarkTAW.com

Mark Taw consistently provides some of the most lucid and realistic productivity advice I’ve come across. Today he eloquently addresses a common question of beginning Getting Things Done nerds.

If you have 15 lists, but they’re all full of things that you can do from the same starting point, you have 14 too many lists. It doesn’t matter if it’s a phone call, email, or going to the printers to pick up your business cards, your lists should contain no more detail than that. And don’t complain to me that your list would be too long that way, breaking it up into more lists doesn’t give you any fewer Next Actions, it just lets you procrastinate some of them more by putting them on a list you’ll ignore entirely.

I agree very much with Mark on this. It’s tempting to get super-atomic about your lists or put items everywhere they could be done. That can get hectic to manage, though.

On the other hand, for very large to-do lists, or for people with limited amounts of time at any context (shared family computer that’s always busy or errands to a store that has weird hours), I do think there’s value in ganging activities wherever time or attention are precious. Finding the balance is tricky but can be worth the effort if you are going to the trouble of maintaining any but one list. Make any meta-work you do pay back as extravagantly as possible.

Nice work as always, Mark!

”Mark Taw on GTD contexts and next actions” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 07, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How does a geek hack GTD?

Merlin — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:52:09 -0400

Productivity programs like Getting Things Done obviously have been developed around the needs of managers, sales people, and entrepreneurs. This makes sense given that those are largely the people who are buying the books, listening to the CDs, and attending the seminars (or certainly represent the largest market share of potential customers).

But, one of my main goals with this site was to discuss the way that productivity plans and methods designed for the business world can be reframed in a context that’s useful for developers, programmers, and garden-variety geeks. This is not to say that geeks don’t ﬁll many or all of these managerial roles in their work, but they also tend to have work styles, deliverables, and skillsets that are markedly different from the average, notional GTD user.

The prime example: “@computer.” Man, geeks don’t just use a computer for occasional work or to “look something up on ‘The Interweb.’” They live on their laptop and take it anywhere they’d bring their wallet. They eat wireless like potato chips and crank out code for a living. They have an IM window and an IRC channel running all day. They’re streaming conferences in and live-blogging conferences out. In short, if they follow the stock GTD setup, they will have a very, very long “@computer” list.

So I wanted to start a conversation about how geeks handle their lists, their projects, and their agendas–not so much in terms of the tool they use to store the information, although that’s fair game–as with how they segment the information and decide when to break it into pieces. I’ll start by providing the setup used by a San Francisco web developer who spends a lot of time on his PowerBook: me.

(Please note: since I’d love to see a lot of discussion about this, please post your response on your own site and just send a single trackback ping to this post (hit: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1128456). Comments below are ok for short responses or for posting links to your non-tracback-able site, but please try to limit yourself to a paragraph or so. Thanks.)

My basic tool setup

To get the tool part out of the way, everything I mention here is maintained in the following way (for today, anyway: ask again tomorrow)

all lists in text ﬁles, kept in directory ”~/Documents/txt”
all main GTD lists set to backup automatically on Save to ”~/Documents/txtbak”
PsyncX backs up both directories to an external drive each night
primary GTD lists kept open all day in BBEdit
- Currently running a demo of 8.0, so they’re all in one document/drawer
Finder labels
- primary David-style GTD lists: red
- current hot agendas and contexts: orange
- 43 Folders-speciﬁc ﬁles: yellow
list items usually added via append using my Quicksilver trick
all documents maintained in Markdown for easy HTML conversion

My lists

classic GTD lists

PROJECTS - every multiple-action outcome to which I’m committed
_@nextactions - next physical action toward project completion or resolution (note “_” at beginning pulls it to the top of alpha lists)
@inbox - unprocessed items
@waiting - things I need from other people
@someday - projects and actions for “someday, maybe, later, or on-hold”
@agenda_foo - separate agendas for each client and important person in my life

my additional non-geek lists

@dailysweep - the emergency work pileup ﬁle that I generate when I need to lock-down on the “Seven Things” hack mentioned the other day
@groceries - Although lately, I’ve been leaning toward SplashShopper for the Palm

my additional geek lists

@tech - somewhat similar to a generic “@computer,” but functionally more similar to “@someday.” A dumping ground for any skill I want to learn, tool I want to play with, or setup item I want to tweak. This could be about sites, applications, or what have you. It’s the parking lot for every random item I might want to follow-up on someday. Once I commit to a given item, it gets moved to PROJECTS and a next action is generated.
@geekbench - this is a new project I’m working on to share questions and projects with other interested geeks (think: Ask MeFi meets LazyWeb meets Lifehacks meets advice column…all via RSS and Trackback). More on this in a later post
@palm - stuff I want to play with and experiment with on my newly-resuscitated Palm Vx
scratch.txt - not a list but a great little hack; leave a “scratch pad” text ﬁle open all day and use it as the place for typing odd bits of information you’ll soon put someplace else. (Keeps you from having a dozen Temp ﬁles or “Untitled Document”s)

I also have a bunch of other ad hoc lists that are speciﬁc to a certain context or that I only need for a short period of time. My rule of thumb–and arguably the core of my own system–is to group like items for as long as possible, but then break them into pieces as soon as they start becoming a horizontal distraction.

My approach and where I get value

I suspect that I probably have more buckets than most of you do, but that might be written off to my modest regular expression skills.

But I also believe it’s vitally important to honor the sanctity of the “classic” GTD lists; if anything stays on one list that really belongs somewhere else (or in its own new area), you risk losing a lot of value and trust in your system. I’m rigid about moving “super-TODOs” from “@nextactions” to “PROJECTS”–but only if I really am committed to it as a desirable outcome. That’s the critical distinction over other productivity hacks. You aren’t just shuttling TODOs from list to list; you’re actually negotiating a future for yourself.

This additional layer of refactoring and evaluation has been a terriﬁc aid for me, so I’ve tried to set myself up in a way that makes that examination easy and desirable. I now constantly ﬁnd myself asking whether I really want to commit myself to something, so my TODO list doesn’t feel like a millstone around my neck anymore. It just seems like a series of simple, miniature tasks that get me incrementally closer to the goals I’ve set for myself. And that feels pretty good.

How about you?

So, I guess my questions to you practicing GTD geeks are these:

What additional contexts and buckets have you added to replace or augment “@computer,” “@online,” and the other standard GTD buckets?
At what point do you feel the need to create a new bucket, and how long do you maintain it?
Given that your job may involve an endless series of tiny tasks and bug ﬁxes, how do you use your @nextactions list? Do you use a tool outside your list?
Any other great hacks you’re particularly proud of or ﬁnd really productive?

Important: Trackbacks preferred, please

As above if you have a site that can send a trackback to this entry please post your reply on your site and just ping this entry once. Commenting or linking to your response below is ﬁne, of course, but keep it short, pelase.

So tell me: how are you hacking Getting Things Done?

Edit: 2006-03-21 - Nomenclature ﬁxed: changed “nerd” to “geek.”

”How does a geek hack GTD?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 15, 2004. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"