Greetings and Felicitations:

How do you handle a collection of projects that share an action that can/should be consolidated into a single action?

For example, I’ve three different projects: Hang quilt on wall, Fix ceiling fan at Mom’s, Replace refrigerator at Grandmothers. Each involves the action “phone handyman and arrange time to X”, where X is different for each project.  read more »

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I’ll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven’t felt the need for a to-do app at all. It’s an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it’s turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.  read more »

Hello fellow GTDers!

I have recently devoted myself to the GTD system after listening to the seminar audio recording, and spending a lot of time reading most of the book/43folders.com/other personal productivity blogs.

However, I still am not quite clear on everything. Here is an example:

After processing, let’s say I have a new project, so I put it in the projects folder. It is “Clean Apartment”. I realize that that could easily be broken down into sub-projects of Clean Kitchen, Clean Bathroom, etc.  read more »

A lot of times, when defining the next action for a project, I think of other things that I MUST do sometime later in the project, but I can’t do it yet, for whatever reason. Let’s call these “potential future next actions”.

How do you guys manage these potential future actions within a project (note: these actions are not someday maybe projects) WITHOUT creating a Gaant chart like system?

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I’d scan through my context lists and I’d see things like:  read more »

In implementing Getting Things Done, you’re wise to understand that words are powerful things. And the king of words in GTD, as in life, is the verb.

How you articulate an activity or how you choose to frame a project within the context of your larger life and work will say a lot about how successful you can be in turning all your “stuff” into atomic actions that will work in support of valuable outcomes. This starts with simple things like beginning next actions with a physical verb, but there’s actually a lot more subtlety (and potential confusion) to it.

In fact, one of the hang-ups that many people encounter in planning their work in GTD is that, no matter how hard they try, they can never seem to get the distinction between single-action verbs and the larger “look-into” style projects that may require sub-actions. This comes up a lot, and it can lead to frustration and untold friction.

Well, if you’ve ever shared this affliction of not knowing your verbs from a hole in the ground, I have some rare and unexpected GTD gold.

Buried in the companion booklet for the Getting Things Done FAST! CD set (currently out of print) is one of the more useful bits of GTD instruction I’ve seen outside the book. It’s a list of “Project Verbs” versus “Next-Action Verbs” and, man, is it ever useful.  read more »

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:  read more »