The GTD system, proven over years of practice

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Our reader Oleg Bondarenko shares his proven GTD system for organizing affairs and all life. It's no secret that we know almost everything about GTD and similar mechanics, but rarely are able to use them for a long time. We are sure that the success story in this field will be of interest to you.

The following is a summary of a personal GTD implementation in a form that has stood the test of years. Perhaps it will help someone.

I divide incoming tasks, ideas, thoughts as follows:

• What can be shoved immediately onto another performer, I immediately shove it. I add a reminder task "Check execution".
• What can be done right now in 5-15 minutes. I sit down and do it.
• Which takes more time or cannot be done right now. This also includes reminder tasks of the "Check the status of project XXX" type. Immediately I drive it into the list of tasks on my phone or Google Tasks - everything is synchronized.
• What is interesting and may be promising. I drop it in a bunch into Evernote. I review it about once a week, sort it by notebooks. Something grows into tasks.

More details on the 3rd point.

To successfully maintain a list of tasks, strict formalization is required, minimizing the costs of managing and obtaining data. This is achieved in the following way.

Each task has a structured name like: Project | Object | Action

Project - this is a large grouping of tasks, an abbreviated code of the type HOUSE, OFFICE, CLIENT1, … For each Project, there should be an average of 1-10 tasks. If there are consistently more tasks for the Project, I allocate a part to an additional Project. Thus, the grouping of tasks is always one-level. As practice has shown, a more visual grouping of tasks in the form of a multi-level tree is actually unnecessarily time-consuming and reduces the motivation for effective use of the system.

Searching for tasks within a Project is done with basic functions: searching or sorting is my favorite way.

An object - this is an object or person on which you need to perform an action. Everything is simple here.

Action - an elementary action that must be performed over the Object.

Another overriding point: each task contains due date … If you are not sure about the deadline for the task, set the current one. If you set the current date and do not do anything else, tomorrow the task will be on the list of overdue and you will have to make a decision on it. For example, remove from life notes.

Sometimes, for a certain Project, a list of tasks appears, the timing and sequence of execution of which are not clear at the moment. In this case, I am looking for a general task of the form: Project Tasks. In the comments I list the list of tasks. Over time, the situation becomes clearer, something is deleted, something is being fulfilled, something grows into a separate task. In any case, even from such a group entry, I determine the date - when it is necessary to refer to it and conduct an audit.

And the last thing. In my practice, approximately 50% of tasks are not executed (or cannot be executed) on the selected date. Much does not depend on me. Tasks of the "Project status check" type are generally lengthy and require periodic attention. Something is being specified and supplemented. Such tasks are constantly postponed to later dates. This is normal (by the way, this is a huge plus of electronic organizers). The manual labor of postponing deadlines is also useful in the sense that it sometimes leads to important thoughts.