Last week I challenged myself to go back to “pure GTD,” and to work on achieving a black-belt level with it. I have decided to give you a status report on how that is going.
As background to those who are new here, I have for several years championed a combination of Stephen Covey’s
First of all, in some respects I now feel very good. For one, I know that everything that was in my head is now in my trusted system. (For the time being, I am using Outlook and a Palm to keep track of my next actions, my projects, my Someday items, and my Maybe items.) I was doing a decent job of this before, but I made sure I did a good “core dump” (a thorough mindsweep) at the beginning of last week. So, I feel good about that.
The Right Stuff?
One downside, though, in looking over the list: it has a bunch of chicken sh*t items in it. On one hand, I know that such is life. We all have our share of that stuff to deal with. On the other hand, I am increasingly aware that life is short. Many of you have heard me say that before, with reference to my late wife. But, there is another personal side to it now: I am almost 59 years old, and considering the average life span in the US, I probably have no more than 15 years left. Probably less, given my lifetime of smoking and eating whatever I wanted.
So, as I look over my list and see that this trivial stuff seems to outweigh the worthwhile stuff, I wonder to myself if I am looking at the right stuff. Yes, it is everything that was in my head, but what if I haven’t had the right stuff in my head? What if I have a purpose that is going unfulfilled because I haven’t realized it and put it on my lists?
Well, of course GTD allows me to deal with this existential angst. I have a project called Identify Purpose, and need to assign next actions to it to work my through answering my question. (I have had this open loop for a long while, though, and have still not found anything that “feels right.” That is not a fault with GTD, though.)
Nonetheless, dealing with this in “pure GTD space” is a bit different than when I dealt with it years ago with Covey’s principles, back when I thought I knew what my purpose was.
Priorities? What Priorities?
I may never get the hang of GTD’s prioritize-as-you-go approach. I like knowing what I am going to do for the day, and dislike having to look at my lists periodically. And, if I have @Home work that is intrinsically more important than @Office work, I want to focus on the @Home work.
- Note: For me, the following contexts are all within feet of each other: @Computer, @Home, and @Office, so I can always work on whichever I want to (which may not be the ones I need to).
I conceptually understand the GTD approach. It’s just that I have not gotten to the point where I can trust it, or where I can trust me to implement it as intended. Maybe part of this is because I know we cannot trust our brains to always handle lists correctly. For example, if you do a Google search for anything, it has been shown that you are more likely to click one of the items near the top of the list, or at the bottom of the list, than ones in the middle of the list. That is, if one of my web pages shows up as #10 on a Google search list, it is more likely to get clicked than if it shows up as #7.
David’s whole point about getting stuff into lists is that we cannot trust our brains to handle things on its own. Turns out we cannot trust our brains to always treat lists properly either.
So, to tie this example to my lists: I am concerned that I might have put together my lists in such a way that the #7 item is intrinsically more important than the #10 one, yet I go for the #10 one.
Then, there is another issue with daily planning: I am accustomed to laying out my day, at least some days (some I “wing it” … I am retired, after all). This goes against pure GTD, too, and I am uncomfortable with not laying things out.
Will I ever overcome these “problems” with GTD prioritization and daily planning? I’m not sure: we’ll have to see. I do expect that I will wind up using my !Focus category, as I have in the past, to overcome my problems with GTD priorities, but I will give the pure GTD contexts a few more days to see if I can make them work.
Wrap-up
Clearly there isn’t anything earth-shattering in my initial efforts to go back to pure GTD. As you can see, I have some hesitations. But, I also know that my past schemes had begun to feel stale to me. Maybe that’s not reason enough to change them, but I have decided to try to make pure GTD.
What are your comments and what concerns do you have with implementing pure GTD?