Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

As the title might suggest, I’ve begun my reading of Getting Things Done in earnest as of today. I set aside part of my afternoon for that purpose, and after I completed my reading, I started trying to implement some of the basic concepts that Allen discusses in the first chapter.

Allen’s basic premise (as far as I can tell so far) is that the multitude of tasks we have floating around in our mind and our various ‘collection devices’ (email accounts, mailboxes, note pads, etc.) become overwhelming and distracting because we don’t analyze and categorize them properly, nor do we spend time deciding exactly what we should do with each task.

No, it’s not rocket science, but I’ve certainly not ever thought about things that way before.

During an average day, I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I remember need to be done, trying to remember things that I know I’ve forgotten need to be done, or suddenly remembering something I needed to do and had forgotten about (which invariable needs to be done RIGHT NOW BY GOLLY … or even worse, needed to be done yesterday).

What Allen wants to do for me (or anybody that reads his book) is help them come up with a process to manage everything that I need to do … from the most mundane thing like "put the outgoing mail in the mailbox" to "start work on the new web project."

Why should we try to do this? Well, I’m glad you asked … here’s a simplistic example.

Imagine you have a monolithic task list. I’m talking about just a list of tasks … no order by priority, etc.

On your task list, you have "start new web project" … and let’s assume it’s an e-commerce web project. Well, there is a lot to do … gather requirements from the client, plan the database structure, select the proper database software, select the platform to develop the application on, etc. That one item on your to-do list is going to be distracting … because it’s big, and you haven’t really decided how to start it.

Now, say you change that item to "gather requirements for new web project from client". Well … that’s more manageable, right? Yes … because you didn’t just note that you need to do the project, but you actually decided what step needed to be taken first, and made that step a to-do item. Mentally, this helps you take control of that project.

That’s just a start … there’s more to this than I can adequately describe right now. But … I was inspired enough by what I read that I went out and made my first business purchases. I bought some note cards, and a few associated items to help me file those; plus I bought a software package called Inbox (after poking at umpteen different applications) that helps Mac users implement the Getting Things Done process by ‘hooking’ in to the desktop folder, the email application, the calendar application, etc.

Once I got home, I started entering my various tasks into the collection system, and then started processing and organizing them. We’ll see what happens next …

Tomorrow, I intend to at least start on chapter two.