Category: Productivity

In a previous post I mentioned how David Allen touts the Two-Minute rule as one GTD change you can make that will put you ahead of 90 percent of homo sapiens, and how it can make your team more productive even if you are the only one using it.

Some GTD purists would say you aren’t really doing GTD if your weekly review isn’t up to snuff. I agree to a point. But I had an experience this week that reminded me of how even imperfect implementation of GTD, or only doing parts of it, can still put you miles ahead in the race to excellence.

One thing I have done really well in these last 51 weeks is sort through my email to get my inbox to empty, as I described here. My weekly review, on the other hand, has frequently been lacking. And sometimes I get messages moved to my @Computer, @Calls or @On-Line context folders (which means I have decided the Next Action that I want to do as soon as possible), but I don’t always act on it as quickly as I would like. The message can languish there for weeks (or even sometimes months), as other, more recent messages are piled on top.

That’s certainly not ideal, but it’s still an improvement over 11,000 messages in the inbox, for two reasons:

First, sometimes the person on the other end of that message will call me or otherwise get back in touch. By having the message in an appropriate context file, I’m able to find it more quickly to be able to respond.

Second, I do sometimes work my way through those context folders and make it all the way to the bottom. I did it just this week with someone with whom I had decided to do an informational interview about positions open in our department. When I had put the message in @Calls several months ago, the positions weren’t open yet. Now they are. So in a sense it was mediocre, in that I didn’t get in touch as quickly as I would have hoped, but at least the marker for the open loop wasn’t completely buried. Better to be buried under 20 calls than beneath 5,000 undifferentiated messages.

So, we’re doing the information interview on Friday. In my pre-GTD days, that message could easily have been lost forever.

I am convinced that doing a mediocre job of using GTD still has made me immeasurably better at handling the onslaught of email and other inputs coming into my life. And just the taste of the empty inbox spurs me on to do better in the Review and Horizons of Focus parts of GTD. But even having just the Collect, Process and Organize phases working pretty well has made a huge difference for me.

Technorati: GTD, David Allen, email

After reading Getting Things Done on that fateful plane ride a year ago next Wednesday, one of my first steps was to throw away some of the books on organization that had previously guided my personal organizing efforts.

Among these was Stephanie Winston’s The Organized Executive, henceforth known as TOE. I recycled it because it had counseled something directly counter to the David Allen GTD system.

It’s probably bad manners to link to a book you don’t recommend. “If you can’t say something nice…” And TOE probably does have some good advice. But one of Stephanie’s points that had stuck with me was the idea that you should create file folders with broad enough categories that they would typically be about a half-inch thick, so you can ideally find what you’re looking for in 30 seconds or so.

David Allen, conversely, says you need to be willing to have a file folder with just a single sheet of paper, if that’s what will help you find it.

That’s a serious difference of opinion. Which way works better was obvious me when I had to re-file energy rebate forms for my new furnace and air conditioner. The utility company had kicked my application back to me because one of the model numbers and its efficiency rating weren’t matching the database, so I needed to find my receipts and get the forms corrected.

Because I had followed the GTD model (including buying the label machine to make filing fun), I was able to find the documents, go to the utility office, get the form corrected and return home…all within less than 30 minutes, and my $500 rebate was on the way. That’s getting things done.

The problem with the TOE method is you artificially try to create categories, or shoehorn documents into an existing folder, and then when you’re trying to find it again you ask, “Now, what category would I have chosen for that?”

I suppose it’s conceivable that under the TOE method I might have filed these receipts under “Utilities” and been able to locate them fairly quickly, but I’ve had enough experiences when I couldn’t put my hands on documents several months later because I didn’t know whether they were under “Household” or “Home Repair” or “Utilities” or “Misc. Receipts” or one of several other broad categories.

TOE’s problem, or rather my problem with TOE, is you have to try to recreate the complex filing decision process at retrieval time that you used when you first filed the document. And if you guess wrong, you end up digging through a relatively thicker file, only to come up empty-handed and frustrated. I may not have been doing the TOE method correctly. I may have misunderstood how to do it. But I didn’t have the same problems with GTD.

With the GTD system, using one simple A-Z general reference paper filing system, it was easy to guess that the receipts would be filed under “Air Conditioning” or “Furnace.” I had used “Air Conditioning” so I found it instantly. But even if I had used “Furnace” the paperwork would have been in the second place I looked, and it wouldn’t have been packed in with several months of utility bills or other irrelevant papers.

I guess this is my way of saying, “Trust the system.” Start out by trying to follow it to the letter. The recommendations David Allen makes are based on a couple of decades of experience with people whose lives are a lot more complicated than mine, or probably yours. If it can work for them, it can work for you.

Then, after you get confident with the proper form, you can improvise and jazz it up if you’d like.

I’m sure Stephanie Winston’s new and improved TOE that takes modern technology into account has some good advice. I had an edition that was probably 15 years old, so it was probably good to toss based on its vintage alone.

But GTD works well with paper files and index cards, or with the latest gadgets. I’m a geek. I love how blogs, for instance, can be used as a quickly searchable general reference file. To the extent you can use electronic systems and indexing utilities on your hard drive or blog to quickly retrieve information, you could cram everything into the same virtual folder, as long as you can remember any key phrase in the document.

But paper isn’t going away. That’s why the GTD system, complete with electronic label maker, is well worth following.

Technorati: GTD, Productivity, Filing, David Allen

If you were sick with a fever and felt awful, you would take a couple of days off to get plenty of rest, drink lots of fluids and otherwise take care of your body so you could come back both feeling good and also more productive.

You wouldn’t be getting much done anyway with that all-over achiness, and you’d be running the risk of infecting your coworkers, too. And when you came back to work, the business would not have disbanded and been forced into liquidation because of your absence. Somehow, everyone would have muddled through.

So why is it you think you can’t possibly take a couple of days to do the GTD mindsweep and get your filing system organized?

Let’s face it: if you’re like most people (and like I was), your filing and organization system is sick. It’s causing lots of discomfort and inefficiency not only for you, but for everyone around you. You’re operating way below your capabilities.

So, I’m not suggesting that you call in with a fake illness, but that you find a way to set aside the time to get a good start at implementing GTD. Block two days for vacation so you don’t have any meetings or appointments scheduled, but then show up for work and spend that time clearing your psychic underbrush.

That’s what I did last year, just as I was getting started with GTD. I had previously scheduled a four-day getaway weekend with my wife, Lisa, for our annual Christmas shopping trip. With six children, it’s nice to get away for a few days, just the two of us, and wrap up our shopping all at once.

But then Lisa got the idea that instead of buying our offspring a bunch of smaller presents that collectively add up to a triple-digit price tag for each child (but yet six months later none of them would likely remember what they had received!), we should get them each an iPod or something of similar significance.

I quickly agreed. That meant:

1. Our shopping was done, so we didn’t need the shopping excursion
2. I could sell my vacation time (and use the money we would have spent on the getaway hotel) to pay Steve Jobs and my fellow Apple stockholders for the iPods, and
3. I had a couple of days without appointments scheduled that I could devote to establishing my GTD system.

It also means they’re getting a lot less for Christmas this year.

I’d recommend you consider following our 2005 example, and not just because I own 0.00000012 percent of Apple’s outstanding shares of common stock. By giving an iPod, this year’s present won’t just blend into what you’ve given other years, unless you have a habit of being extravagant. And if you take the two days to clear the decks in implementing GTD, you will feel more refreshed than you would have if you had taken the time off.

You’ll also be off to a healthy start on 2007, with less stress…which may (along with your flu shot) keep you from losing time to illness.

Technorati: GTD, Filing, Organization, iPod, Apple, Flu

David Allen says following it will make you more productive than 90 percent of the planet.

What is it?

The Two-Minute Rule. And I have an emphasis I think will make you not only more productive, but also more popular with your support staff, direct reports or colleagues. And it will make your team more efficient, too.

David’s Two Minute Rule says that as you are going through your Inbox, whether physical or email, and you decide there is a next action for a given item that will take two minutes or less, you should do it right then instead of putting it on a list for later action.

Why? Because for actions that take less than two minutes, the “overhead” of deciding where to park it, disengaging and then re-engaging at a later time may be more than what it takes to “just do it.” In essence, by doing it right away instead of putting it on a Next Action list, you’re increasing your efficiency by up to 50 percent.

Why the two-minute cut-off? For actions that take more than two minutes, doing them right away can get you off on a bunny trail so you’ll never get to empty. You’ll spend your whole day working out of your inboxes and never reach the bottom. So something urgent, or at least time-sensitive, may have arrived in “in” but you won’t see it until it’s too late.

So what’s my popularity-producing emphasis? As you go through your inbox and ask “Is it actionable? If so, by whom?” in making your Do, Delegate, or Defer decision, think about whether you can do it in under two minutes…even if it’s really someone else’s job.

For example, I sometimes get email messages that could properly be delegated to someone on our team to answer. At first, that’s just what I would do, sending it along to the responsible person. Then I got to thinking, “If I want our team to be most efficient, and if I know what to do with this in two minutes or less, why should I send it along to someone else and make him or her go through this whole process of deciding what needs to be done, and when?”

So I started just answering these emails, with a cc: as an FYI to the person to whom I formerly would have delegated it. The erstwhile recipients of my delegation appreciate that the issues were resolved (but that they got the heads up to keep them looped), and the people who had sent the original message looking for answers appreciate the quick response.

I wouldn’t do this for really important things, for which the other person may have a strong sense of ownership. This isn’t about playing in someone else’s sandbox. This is for the mundane “stuff.” And by clearing it out quickly instead of letting it gum up not only your system, but also the workflows of others on your team, you can all have more time to focus on the bigger priorities.

This may be exactly in line with David’s interpretation of the two-minute rule, that if you can do it in two minutes or less that should generally take precedence over whether a task could or should be delegated to someone else. Maybe I was the only one who missed it. But then again, maybe not.

And by the way, you can get a lot done in two minutes. Like reading this post.

Technorati: GTD, email, two-minute rule, David Allen, delegation

Before reading GTD, my email was a mess. I didn’t know it was a disaster, though, because this was the only way I had worked. I did have some colleagues who sorted their email into folders, but that seemed like way too much work. I just left it all in my inbox.

As a result, I got messages like this twice a day from our IT department.

Of course, I set up a Mail.app Rule to automatically put those in my Trash. 😉

Part of the problem was I didn’t know how much extra work I was making for myself by not making decision about what to do with messages on the front end, so my Inbox had become a huge conglomeration of Reference, Actionable and, frankly, quite a few messages that had no value to me at all.

My total Inbox message count at its peak about a year ago was more than 11,000.

Within a week or so, I was able to whittle it down to zero. Empty. And while there are lots of elements of the GTD system in which I regularly fail miserably (like in most people’s problem area, the Weekly Review), I have seen fantastic benefits from getting my Inbox empty almost every day…or at least by the end of each week.

How did I get there? And how can you?

Organize your inbox by sender, and you may be able to delete large numbers of messages easily. You know what they are: alerts you get every day, or e-mail lists to which you have subscribed. You may want to consider unsubscribing to some (or seeing if the information source has an RSS feed instead.)

If you have several months worth of messages in the backlog, you may want to consider deleting everything older than, say, six months. This is a variation on the theme of email bankruptcy, but without the mea culpa to all those to whom you haven’t responded. And if your email is as much of a mess as mine was, you may not know which ones still need a response.

Now organize by Subject or Thread. As you work down the list you will see the related messages grouped together, and there will be some threads you know are resolved and can safely delete. This is another way to churn through a big stack quickly.

After working through these tactics, my Inbox got down to this look…

…which is where I’ve been able to keep it for nearly a year.

Archiving messages on my laptop’s hard drive also keeps me from getting those “mailbox over size limit” messages from IT. When I am working through my Inbox to get it to zero, I move all my project support and next action messages to my local hard drive so I can work on email on the bus. Now, instead of digging through a monstrous inbox and not knowing which messages are actionable or what the next action is, I simply go to one of my project or context folders.

Of course, for the first 10 months I was using Mail.app and the wonderful, free add-on call Mail ActOn, which let me move messages to the right folders with a simple two-key combination. Now I’m using Entourage, so it’s more work to get to zero, and moving messages feels a lot clunkier.

If anyone reading this post has an elegant quick-keys solution to filing messages in Entourage, similar to the Mail ActOn functionality, I would be delighted to hear about it.

Technorati: GTD, email, Entourage, Mail ActOn