Toluu : Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done

My experiences with using GTD

The Focus on Now and the Power of ActionSeptember 25

Do you ever have days when you don’t really accomplish a whole lot? You know what I mean, you’re sitting at your desk and your mind wanders off. You idly check your email and your favorite websites for the tenth time today and you don’t feel like doing anything useful at all. Or you’re driving your car and you worry about all the things you still need to do this week or you analyze what went wrong during the long meeting yesterday at the office. Recognize that?

Whenever this happens to me, I try to put myself in a different mindset with two powerful commands: Now! and Action! They bring me back to the current situation, the current reality, and they remind me to be action-oriented in order to accomplish something… anything! These two simple commands I use on myself actually embody more elaborate feelings and principles of course.

Now!
You have tens and tens of thousands of thoughts every single day. Your mind simply won’t shut up. Chances are many of your thoughts either dwell on the past or dream (or worry) about the future. In many cases this is very useful and necessary of course, but to feel really calm and peaceful you need to focus on the present, the now. Really use your eyes to look at things around you. What color do they have, what texture do they have, what shape do they have? Really use your ears to listen to the sounds around you. Use all of your senses to really feel, enjoy and appreciate the present

When Will My Next Action List Be Empty?September 23

Recently I have had the pleasure of teaching and coaching other people (mostly consultants and entrepreneurs) on Getting Things Done. I’ve been using GTD for about 2 years myself, mostly teaching myself how to become better and more effective at it. Occasionally I would inspire friends or colleagues to read David Allen’s book or to start experimenting with GTD in their own life. However, training entire groups of people and coaching several colleagues and clients is a whole different, but very exciting game!

I’ll probably be writing more about these particular experiences in future posts. In this post I would like to discuss one common theme I’ve noticed when ’students’ start asking questions about the newly acquired principles and tools of GTD.

I would frequently get a remark or question along the lines of “What am I doing wrong? My next action list is only growing and never seems to become empty!”

Think about this. Your life is a mess. You start using GTD to organize this mess and to finally get some things done. And then you notice your list of things-to-do is growing at an alarming rate and in fact doesn’t seem to become empty at all, no matter how hard you work!

This frightening observation can easily deter or discourage a GTD ’student’, until I explain there is a logical and simple explanation for this counterintuitive phenomenon.

It may seem overwhelming but you have to accept th

Top 10 of Top 10 GTD ListsMarch 7

Photo by yoppy

Sorry, I simply couldn’t resist publishing this article. You may have noticed that I’m a big fan of top 10 lists; in fact, my previous post was a top 10 list… and this post is a top 10 list as well!

So, just for fun I compiled a top 10 list of top 10 GTD lists! Doing a quick search on the internet, I was pleasantly surprised that almost half of these top 10 lists are actually written by me. In reality, there really are some gems in these lists, so enjoy!

Top 10 of Top 10 GTD Lists

(actually in no particular order)

10 Useful Tips for Optimizing Ubiquitous CaptureMarch 6

Photo by _StaR_DusT_

Perhaps you know the familiar phrase from the field of computer science, “Garbage In, Garbage Out“? Well, the same goes for your GTD system. Here’s a big surprise: if you feed your GTD system incomplete or incorrect input in the Collection phase, you will never get reliable or useful output in the Doing phase (next actions).

Ubiquitous capture is a well-known principle in the collection phase of the GTD workflow. If done well, it helps you to generate useful, complete and correct input for your GTD system. To help you optimize your ubiquitous capturing, I have compiled a list of 10 useful tips from my own experience.

10 Useful Tips for Optimizing Ubiquitous Capture

Before I give you my list of 10 tips, I would like to share the evolution of my ubiquitous capture tool (UCT) with you. I probably forgot some of the things I used as UCT, but here are a few. At one point I bought a stack of expensive Moleskines and used several of them as my UCT. This violates several of the rules described below: it’s expensive and it doesn’t invite you to create quick and dirty notes. Then I started to collect digital notes on my la

Ebook - Best Blog Posts 2007, Final EditionMarch 1

Best Blog Posts 2007, Final Edition Recently I silently added my ebook “The Best Blog Posts of Getting Things Done, Final Edition 2007” to my online shop. However, I didn’t want to let this occasion pass completely unnoticed.

This 112 page ebook contains nearly 40 of my very best GTD blog posts from 2007. As a special bonus it includes my set of GTD worksheets for free!

Now why on earth would you buy this ebook when you can read all of the posts right here for free?
Let me answer that question with the following 11 good reasons why you should purchase this ebook:

Read my best posts offline in one document
Handy PDF document: portable and easily printable
Most valuable posts hand picked by the author (me!)
Find specific content easily (chronological, alphabetical and by topic)
Easy reference and backup
Always access to these articles even if the online version would be gone somehow
Internal and external (hyper)links are all working
No ads or other distractions in blog posts
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