Getting Things Done, one way of doing it…

So, GTD — after Dave Allens book — is all the rage, and has been for some time now. It’s the anal, hack­ing approach to your own life; how to tweak your setup to deal with the flow of stuff, know what to do and not to do, all to make you more pro­duc­tive and relaxed about tak­ing time off. Fit­ter, happier…

GTD-fans will already know about 43Folders and the 43FoldersWiki (pro­duc­tiv­ity OSX hints, yes yes), To-Done (which at time of writ­ing has some advice on being a more pro­duc­tive blog­ger, how about that) and sev­eral other related sites are start­ing to shoot up.

In short, GTD is very much about man­ag­ing incom­ing stuff; get­ting it done at once, del­e­gated or put some­where where you’ll come back and do some­thing about it. Define what’s the next phys­i­cal action for any given task and you’re good to go. It takes a bit of setup and first of all quite some self-discipline as any­thing that doesn’t go into the sys­tem is pretty much des­tined to get lost — and thereby not done. It is pos­si­ble how­ever, to imple­ment some of it with­out going totally OCD.

Allen’s book, while a lit­tle self-help-book-ish (which is even more the rage), offers some decent ideas for man­ag­ing your flow, but — as it has been critized for else­where — some­what puts ‘online’, ‘at the com­puter’ etc. in seper­ate cat­e­gories from work­ing, not tak­ing fully into con­sid­er­a­tion that a lot of us basi­cally live out of our lap­tops, mak­ing this way of think­ing not quite accu­rate. Our ‘inbox’ pretty much is our inbox (who needs paper?) in the mail appli­ca­tion of choice, ‘online’ equals all work­ing hours just as ‘at the com­puter’ means ‘when we’re awake’. Most can be applied, though.

With the launch of OS X Tiger, more pos­si­bil­i­ties have come to play. Spot­light in addi­tion to Quick­sil­ver can do some good things to your setup.

So far, I’ve actu­ally just done what I should have done years ago; get­ting into the habit of emp­ty­ing my inbox, keep­ing proper lists of things to do etc. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of Delete. I have an Archive folder where ref­er­ence mate­ri­ale, stuff I might need later on, go and a Cur­rent folder for stuff that’s directly linked to next actions in projects. Newslet­ters (the very few left after the rss-revolution) get routed else­where, just as ongo­ing larger projects with heavy amounts of mate­r­ial have got­ten their own fold­ers for easy recov­ery. Incom­ing emails are being dealt with one way of the other — or deleted.

For now, I’m try­ing to use iCal for to-dos; I put in the project name and the next action, addi­tional info goes in the com­ments. I try not to have more than about 30 things lined up and the lat­est ver­sion lets you drag things which is fine for priority-flagging. Impor­tant things go at the top. The list-functionality itself leaves a lot to be desired, but so far I like the fact that it’s bun­dled with my cal­en­dar where Base­camp–mile­stones are inte­grated. The lat­est ver­sion of iCal also offers nested cal­en­dars so I’ve got lots of color-coded cal­en­dars, grouped in biz, per­sonal, pet-project-like groups — the col­ors improve the read­abil­ity of the to-do a lot a well.

File-wise I’ve been run­ning a strict setup with regards to the plac­ing of client mate­r­ial. In addi­tion to that I’m try­ing out Spot­light tags in com­bi­na­tion with Smart­Fold­ers — it’ll let you tag doc­u­ments for easy Spotlight-recovery, so you can place your stuff whereever you feel like. Two Smart­Fold­ers on my desk­top keep track of a speci­fik project and the lat­est down­loaded pdf (I still have my Stuff-folder though). I need to get into the habit, but it might prove very use­ful with projects includ­ing mate­r­ial from other projects, per­sonal dodu­ments etc.

In addi­tion to iCal, I keep the Tickler-file as sug­gested by Allen; it lives out of my usual hier­achy of files but is easy acces­si­ble via Quick­sil­ver. You can append text to any file with­out open­ing it which is per­fect for tick­ling; you just wanna get the idea out of your head and into the com­puter. The trick is to actu­ally review the var­i­ous files you cre­ate this way. I still need to adjust to this.

As far as paper­based mate­r­ial go, I’m still a slug. If you’re into sta­tion­ary, there are lot of pro­duc­tiv­ity porn tricks out there and hon­estly: Who can resist the smooth sur­face of a manilla-envelope? It just breathes con­trolled, orga­nized well-being… Thing is, though, the whole ‘living-out-of-a-laptop’-deal makes me wanna get every­thing into dig­i­tal form which is fine for bills that need to be payed; a sim­ple to-do-entry and you’re good to go. It’s much worse with var­i­ous printed mat­ters that need review­ing, sign­ing or what­ever. A stack of paper trays will do for now, but I have a feel­ing that the mul­ti­ple stacks of…stuff…that’s sit­ting on my desks could be dealt with more effectively.

For project out­lin­ing, there’s Instiki run­ning locally, Base­camp takes care of the most impor­tant (client) to-dos and dead­lines, inte­grated into iCal, I track my hours directly in my online eco­nomic sys­tem which makes billing a breeze (and also means I never have to meet with my accoun­tant — that’s pro­duc­tiv­ity). I’m not hooked on reminders, if I end up that way, I guess my phone or iCal can han­dle that.

I’m sure there’s some­thing I missed — and other things I should just start doing.

Update: Juri takes it one step fur­ther.