[gtuckerkellogg]

I was on an America West flight to Phoenix in 1999 when David Allen sat next to me. The passenger compartment was bare bones -- no overhead vents, for example -- and I was in a pissy mood. Allen was not. He immediately struck me as the most seasoned, at ease traveller I had ever seen. After he got himself adjusted I asked him if he travelled a lot. He smiled and showed me his United frequent flyer card. It had his name, and "Five Million Miles" embossed on it. I asked him what the hell he was doing on this crappy America West flight. He was flying from Geneva to his home in California, and had missed his connection, so United put him on the next available flight.

He was a "CEO coach" at the time and, while I normally don't badger strangers on planes with questions, we ended up talking for a good part of the flight. When his book came out, I recognised his picture on the jacket, and wrote him an email. He remembered me, and offered to get together for a glass of wine when he was in Boston.

Of course I got his book, and of course it changed my thinking. I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't. I have ADD, and am also deeply suspicious of self-help literature. I couldn't stomach the moralizing of Stephen Covey and his ilk. But GTD, and Allen as a person, work just great for me, and work with my ADD. I've tried variants, electronic and paper, but everything that works for me is within the GTD ecosystem.

[redmaverick]

So, what is the current system that you are using for GTD? I need to be more organized and productive but I really don't have the time/patience to read the book. So, if you can give the tldr; of your system or a web app that forces one to use GTD without all the theory would help as well.

[gtuckerkellogg]

My current system is emacs org-mode for my inbox and all computer-based action lists, and Todoist for anything I need to carry with me. Since much of my work is done in emacs, org-mode makes the most sense for me. But honestly, the GTD ecosystem has gotten a bit polluted by really good team-based apps.

At the time GTD first came out, there was more of a hard line between personal task lists and team-based responsibilities, or maybe it at least seemed that way because the technology was so limiting.

That said, technology is not the solution; a decent process is. Google image search "one page GTD summary" or "GTD workflow" and the key features are technology-agnostic: a single inbox for actions, a good decision making process, and context-dependent action lists so you don't wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about something you forgot when you had the opportunity to do it. In the last 15 years, my favorite GTD systems have been a Moleskine notebook and my old Palm Pilot. I've changed my systems over time, but not because the current systems are particularly better in general; they are better for me in context.

[peteretep]

    > So, what is the current system that you are using for
    > GTD?

Back when I had a job with responsibilities (team of 40), I did the following...

First of all, I used "Things.app", for the iPhone and for the Mac, although really any of the many tools should do - the important thing for me though was that anywhere I could read email - or have a random thought - I needed to be able to access my organization system; I wanted to get it out of my head and out of my Inbox in to a real organization tool as QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE so I could stop thinking about it.

I'll talk about three separate places here: Email Inbox, Things.app Inbox, and Things.app Today.

At the beginning of each day, I would go to my email inbox, and scan through. Normally about 100 items:

* 50% could be deleted because I was CC'd, but there was no action item for me

* Anything that could be done in under two minutes, I'd do; this was generally Yes/No type answers, or quick clarifications

* Anything that would take longer, I would - IF AT ALL POSSIBLE - attempt to delegate. Quick two minute email to someone else, trying to get them to do it, and then I'd add a todo list item: "FOLLOWUP: Did John send Dave the RFP for Acme corp", and then ask Things.app to schedule it to remind me (by placing it in Things.app Today) in x days, where x was task-dependent. Trying to get new managers in my team to delegate ruthlessly was always very difficult - but if they couldn't do it, they'd get swamped quickly, and no-one would win.

* Anything that would take longer that I couldn't delegate, I would add a Todo item for today with a brief summary of what it was to Things.app's Inbox list; incidentally the Inbox list is also where I'd put absolutely anything that cropped up during the day - my boss asked me for something, I remembered I'd promised someone something I hadn't delivered yet, or I had an idea that would take 6 months to do but was worth thinking about.

All email would be archived in this process.

This process would get me to Inbox Zero, but I would still have items in Things.app Inbox - generally about 8 - 14 items - that really needed my personal attention. First pass I'd try and make sure each was actionable; "Sort out team development plan" not in the least bit actionable. However, giving it 10 seconds though led me to realize that our HR Business Partner could probably help, so he got a quick email "Please could you schedule some time with me to sit down and talk about team development?", at which point, it becomes a "FOLLOWUP" item as above. This generally got rid of 4-5 items. Remaining items I would then drag to the Today list. These tasks could be pretty diverse: "Reread James' email about data governance", "Fill out ATR for new DevOps person", "Disabuse Neil of the idea that we should be using Docker".

The Today list was often 3 - 15 items long; generally about half were "FOLLOWUP" items, as per the above, and these could be ticked off very quickly by hitting reply and sending a slightly more urgent or threatening message, and I'd then reschedule the "FOLLOWUP" item to the next day.

Of the remainder, I would attempt to sort them in order of importance. Anything that was a multiple hour task, I would create an appointment in my calendar to do it, as well as a "FOLLOWUP" scheduled to make sure I'd done in - "Prepare salary review spreadsheet" was going to take 5 hours, so I'd block 5 hours off, book a meeting room where no-one could find me, and then forget about it until the appointment came up.

Of what remained - generally 30m - 90m tasks, I'd then take all but the top five, and reschedule them to the next day. This was a struggle to get my managers to done - people are hopelessly optimistic, and think they can get through more administrivia in a day than they can. If you restrict yourself to 3 to 5, it'll force you to delegate more aggressively, and you'll also be surprised how many items that keep getting kicked down the road take care of themselves.

The process up to this point took 20m to an hour depending on how conscientious I'd been in keeping up to date with it.

I'd then try and blast through the top five, generally managing two or three of them. I would attempt to get ALL of these things done in the morning each day, and set aside the afternoons for important meetings and for large blocks of work that needed doing.

The key features of this:

* You need a system where you can TRUST that if something goes in to it, it won't fall back out of it again. The scheduled FOLLOWUP tasks for me were that

* You need to be able to add items to this super easily - whenever you think about it. That way, you're not carrying around items in your head, which is when you get snowed under

* Your email Inbox is a very shitty Todo system, and it'll stress you out. Get items out of your Inbox and in to a real Todo system as quickly as you can. If you're stuck on Outlook, and so don't have an Archive function, create a folder where a copy of every email gets duplicated to so you can aggressively delete from your Inbox and still go back to emails that had important information in.

[nileshtrivedi]

Good point about delegating. My filter chain for all incoming tasks is: Discard -> Delegate -> Delay -> Do. Works nicely.

[jaimebuelta]

I just check my copy of GTD. It's just 250 pages, which can be read in a few hours. I'd recommend to read it. I'll be worth it.

[afarrell]

I too am interested in what particular system you use. I found that it was a useful framework for thinking about tasks, but in college I was never able to use that framework to implement a system and then keep up with it.