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Patching GTD for repeating actions

GTD seems to me to focus very much on helping with a certain kind of thing; it's the one-off project. Roughly;

- You figure out what you want to achieve
- You break it into actions
- You do the actions
- You're done.

But what about those things you never complete? 'Keep the house tidy' isn't something you do once and forget about it. Nor is 'Keep fit' or 'Keep my relationship great' or 'Maintain vehicle'.

So how do you fit the action these goals create into GTD? I don't think it's written into the system - I think it needs a patch.

Anyone got any ideas for how to do this? If you already do it, how are you doing it?

Thanks for any ideas,

Steve

nansense's picture

I discovered the same thing...

I discovered the same thing over the weekend! Check out pp. 178-79 in GTD. David gives an inspiring discussion of checklists. The challenge seems to be keeping them "in your face," like putting them on your computer or physical desktop, moving them to each day's tickler file, or on display on the fridge, wall calendar, whiteboard, bathroom mirror, etc.

Things to keep in mind (in my experience):
You don't want the list to get stale so that you don't even see it anymore.
Don't mix the checklist items with N/A items.
Don't make the checklist too long or too ambitious. If you put things on it that you can't realistically do, you'll lose the trust in your system, and get discouraged because you'll never get around to any NAs!

 
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