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The system - getting set for 2007

David Mackay
30 December 2006, 13:07

Originally posted on davidmackay.net, cross-posted here for completeness’ sake.

For the new year, I’m getting my paper-based organisation system under control. It’s based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, with a few adaptations for the way I work, and where I work.

I’ve tried lots of things in the past – PalmPilots (yes, plural), and online options like Basecamp and Backpack and other open-source systems — and the fact is, paper is what works for me.

The online solutions are lovely, except for the fact that I’m often not online! When the phone rings when I’m out and about, or if I’m travelling, needing to find a computer to log in to my online organiser is a complete pain, and the single reason that they don’t work for me.

The PalmPilot is a nice idea, but it’s too fiddly for my tastes and, without a serious improvement in both screen resolution and UI design, I can never see enough on one screen for my liking.

As a result, I’m using the venerable Filofax, in the A5-format ‘Hampstead’ binder. I bought this in 2003 in the Filofax store in Covent Garden, and it’s still going strong.

The system setup

I’m going to borrow Patrick Rhone’s list of ‘system bits’ — and I’ll be mentioning a couple of his ‘moleskine hacks’ later on, too.

So, here’s what I’m using so far:

All in all, the stuff I take with me now looks like this:

Let me quote Patrick Rhone again on the ‘dash/plus’ system for marking up lists in Moleskines:

- (Dash): Undone Action Item.
+ (Plus): Done Action Item.
<- (Left Arrow): Delegated (with a note to whom and the date).
-> (Right Arrow): Waiting – (i.e. for another action).
^ (Triangle): Data Point.
O (Circle): A circle around any of the above means that it has been carried forward, moved to another list or otherwise changed status – i.e. a “Waiting” item has now become an Action Item elsewhere (with a note about where that item has gone).

In practice, this looks like this for me:

How it works in practice

The system works something like this for me:

  1. Capture Information. This can be anything from getting a phone call or an e-mail to sitting in a meeting to having a corridor-conference with a colleague. However they arrive, they get captured into the Moleskine (or my large notebook) using the metadata markup described above.
  2. Process. This is where things get turned into next actions, and placed into contexts. If I’m lucky, I have the time to do this each time I sit down at my desk; otherwise it tends to get pushed out a bit, which isn’t so great. I’m a big fan of the David Allen ‘do, defer, delegate’ rule of processing, which helps to get things filed or done quickly.
  3. Organise. Items are placed in the calendar, or on context lists, and I get started on actually doing the job. This bit’s important, as it guarantees things like paychecks and so forth.

I’ve tried to simplify my contexts as much as I can. I use tab dividers and to-do pages in my Filofax to manage contexts. Currently, I have:

All of these should be pretty self-explanatory — the ‘agendas’ tab includes a page for each of the people I have regular meetings with (my director, team etc), and I list things I need to address with them there.

I also have tabs for:

... although I’m not really using the ‘reference’ tab as well as I should be. Watch this space, I think.

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