The Bog of Lost Scholars

Here’s my other big GTD gap: reviewing my tasks.

Once you’ve got all your next actions and projects organized, you have to actually look at them often enough to keep in mind what you need to do. Ideally you should look at your “home” projects when you’re at home, your “work” projects in the office, your “errands” projects when you’re going to be out and about, your “phone calls” projects when you’ve got a few minutes and a telephone, etc.

I’m not at that point yet. When I put my son to bed in the evening and have an hour and a half of quiet time ahead, my first thought generally isn’t “let me boot up Life Balance/check my printout from it to see what needs doing that I could work on now”; it’s “let me collapse with a glass of ice water and see if anything inspires me in the next hour”. When I’m at work, I don’t have a habit of scanning my “action” email folder or my Life Balance “Work” list to see what needs doing; I tend to go for whatever project has the nearest deadline, or whatever project I’m in the mood for. (Last week I spent at least an hour correcting HTML coding errors on the book page content for my workplace’s website. It’s something that needed to be done, and it certainly wasn’t a waste of time, but in retrospect it wasn’t the best use of my work time that day.)

Now, when it comes to going over my task lists every week or so, I’m getting fairly good at that; I have Life Balance open anyway, so it’s pretty easy to scan down the list and see what I’m reminded to do. But as far as day-to-day efforts go? I’m not there yet.

After you process your collected items, you need to distribute them into places where you can find them when you need them. Things to file go in your files; things to do go into whatever organizer you use.

For my projects and next actions, I use Life Balance, a to-do list on steroids. Life Balance lets you assign to-dos to various areas of your life and rate the areas on how important they are to you; then it sorts your to-do list accordingly. It also lets you assign “places”, real or conceptual, to your to-dos — real places like “home” or “bank” or “work”, or conceptual places like “when I’m tired” or “errands”; this meshes well with Allen’s recommendation to sort your to-dos by where you can do them. I’ve had the program ever since I first got a Palm OS PDA, and I really enjoy using it.

My paper files at home are organized in a way that works well for me; I know where any given paper goes. My work files are in lousy shape because I need to rearrange the office to get the usable file cabinet by my desk; that’s a whole project right there. But as far as stuff I need to refer to regularly goes, I’ve got one desk file drawer that holds all the immediately important materials.

Overall, this is one of the stages that I’ve got down very well. It’s all there, easy to find — if I actually go looking for it.

I’ve got room for improvement in all five stages of Allen’s Getting Things Done program, but the collection phase is in pretty good shape. I actually do have notepads and scratch paper scattered around the house, so I can write down ideas when I have them, and those slips of paper do end up in places where I’m reminded to do the tasks or enter them into Life Balance or email my boyfriend or whatever. At work when I get a “hey, I should do X” thought, I’m more likely to hare off and start working on it when I should pause, write it down, and go back to what I was originally working on. (I get a lot done at work, but process on a single task is usually very fragmented.) But again, the idea generally doesn’t get lost.

The processing stage, on the other hand, has extreme potential for improvement.

In the processing stage, you gradually work through all the items you’ve collected in your In box/area and decide what they are, whether you need to act on them, and if so what that action is. For example, taking the top layer from my home catchall:

• Notice of the date for the next bulky trash collection. I’ve already marked this on my calendar, but there’s an action involved: I need to haul some stuff to the curb by that date.
• Instructions for one of my son’s toys. No action here, but the paper needs to be filed in my manuals folder.
• Printed-out email about a recent online auction. I need to contact the recipient. This falls under Allen’s two-minute rule — if while processing you come across a task that you can do right now, and it’ll take less than two minutes, go ahead and do it. So I’ll take care of that right now. (Hauling the trash, on the other hand, is at least a ten-minute task.)
• Instructions for another toy. Goes in the same file as the previous.
• List of Greek vocabulary words that we didn’t have to learn for tests in my class last semester. No longer relevant — trash.
• Schedule for local massage school’s student massages. I’ve already scheduled mine; the dates are on my home calendar, but I need to put it on my Palm Desktop calendar at work too. A two-minute action that I can’t perform right now; this goes in my backpack so I can take it to work.
• Maturity date notice for one of my CDs. I don’t have to act on it now, but I have to go to the bank on that date and check rates and renew this. Allen would put this in a tickler file; for my purposes, a note on the calendar is sufficient.
• Orientation flyer for a training class the special ed department of my city schools is offering. No action required now; they’ll contact me when they’ve scheduled a time for me to take it. File, and make a specific folder for this program as I expect a lot of pieces of paper from it.
• Note from my ex-mother-in-law that accompanied a gift to my son. Action: put a date on it so I’ll remember which year it’s from, then file in the memorabilia box.
• Birthday card to my son from my parents. Ditto.
• Church magazine. I’ve already read what I wanted to read from it; now it goes in a folder where I keep stuff to give my folks, as I share these with my mom.

And so forth. It’s not hard; it just takes some time and thought.

Which is probably why this is one of the big holes in the system for me. It takes me as much effort to get five minutes to think about my projects as it does to do the actual thinking. I definitely let stuff pile up in my In areas for a long time before I process them.