Back on track for 2007
In his post ‘Back to GTD: do a fast mind-sweep’, Merlin Mann talks about the process of getting back on track with being organised…
if you don’t use a dedicated inbox in the context of a healthy collection habit, your whole house or office turns into your inbox. And that just doesn’t scale. Failing to do so in recent weeks may be why you’ve fallen off the GTD wagon.
So, just as you learned Collection as the first step in implementing GTD (and to subsequently maintain your system), it’s precisely the place to start when you’re trying to properly get back into it.
The first day of the new year is a pretty good time to talk about ‘getting back on the wagon’, I think — unless you have a job that means you have to work right through New Year’s Day, it’s likely that, like me, you’ve spent the holiday period not thinking much about work.
But also like me, you might have had some of those awful moments of waking up early on Christmas morning with deadlines, ideas, and problems running through your head. Remember, open loops = no time to enjoy the rest of your life.
Back on the wagon?
In this article I’m going to talk through what I’ve done to get ready for the start of the working year. I’m managing a project whose first milestone is 29 January, so I’m really going to have to hit the ground running.
To start myself off, I read through the list of GTD triggers (taken from the GTD book). Even as I read through the list, things were occurring to me that I’d been holding in my brain and not writing down on paper. Pen in hand, I began to scribble furiously as I went down the list of triggers.
Here’s what I ended up with:
Three pages of things to process thanks to the triggers — everything from ‘upload Christmas photos to Flickr’ to ‘confirm project deadlines with new client representative’.
At this point I made a bit of a modification to the standard David-Allen—style collection process. I ignored the mandate to do anything that would take less than 2 minutes to do. In this instance I was more concerned with getting things down on paper than actually getting things done.
Processing the ‘brain-dump’
In part because I’m usually pretty good about getting things down to ‘next actions’, it didn’t take me too long to get things sorted out from that list.
A lot of the things that had been preying on my mind were, unsurprisingly, deadlines, so they went straight into the calendar.
My ‘email’ next action list is pretty full, too, but mostly with small-ish emails that should be pretty easy to crank out quickly.
The proof of the pudding
I’m back at work tomorrow morning (terrible thought) and it’ll be interesting to see how many other things come back to me once I’m actually at my desk. I’ll update this post to record how effective the fast mind-sweep is when you’re not actually in the place where you normally work.
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