I was talking with Nate yesterday about a presentation of sorts I was hoping to give to my fellows at Rock River Star next week, and once again the topic of Getting Things Done came up.
Getting Things Done is a book by some guy that talks about a process of organization that helps produce results. I have a copy of the book, which is currently in the trunk of my car, and I haven’t read the whole thing. Mostly this is because I got so far and the book and agreed with most of the premise, but the process that he dictates probably isn’t the best one for me.
For example, my office, although it does have some paper and a printer, is relatively paper free. There are very few papers around, and never really a pen when I need one. But that’s okay, because I do most of my work in the computer, and I have some applications that help me keep track of things like notes from phone calls and appointments. The book primarily focuses on paper-based methods for organization, including using multiple folders to store to-do items, and I don’t even have a place to put file folders in my office. Still, even with those applications, I could probably stand to apply some of the organizational discipline to my routine.
Anyway, I would like to come up with some way to streamline the process that I have for my day-to-day life, not just for work. Not that GTD pertains exclusively to the work environment, but just that I’ve been thinking more recently that the days are getting any longer and there are so many things that I would like to do, and it seems like I’m not getting any of them done.
One problem I had, was that the process of GTD (and I’m sure I’m getting this wrong and need to reread the book in full) encourages you to accumulate ideas that you can act upon at a later time. Of course, my ability to create new ideas far exceeds the time I have much to accomplish them. And sure, I’m discarding ideas that after a while just don’t seem as good as they did when I first thought of them, but I’m still ending up with a whole lot of ideas that I am never able to act on. I see that long list of ideas and think how great any of those things would be to do and yet I’m still stuck on the first or second idea that I ever came up with.
It’s not simply the idea that I’m not accomplishing anything, because I’m definitely accomplishing things. I just have a lot of ideas.
What I need is a small team of oompah-loomphs to do all the work for me.
Anyway, with this new topic that I’m hoping to talk about next week, DTD should factor in at least partially, giving me an excuse to pull the book out of the trunk of my car and give it a good going through to see what I missed. Hopefully I will uncover something that I didn’t see before and it will help me solve this problem as well as better organize my personal time so I can accomplish some of those great ideas.
