Productivity Zen

Mind like Water

The most powerful analogy in Allen's treatment of productivity theory is "mind like water." When you toss a stone into a pond, the pond doesn't toss the stone back at you. It accepts the rock, grows because of it, and regains equilibrium. If too many rocks are thrown in, the pond adapts - the water doesn't dwell on the material it was once or will be given. The purpose of GTD, life in the present, paralells Buddhist teachings of mindfulness. Attention is a form of social economic scarcity that gives value to social interaction. We may not be able to control time, priority, or due dates, but we can control our attention. Because of this, the focus of a GTD system is the management of attention before the management of time, priority, or due dates. When your mind is as clear as water, it will tell you what to do next -- your to-do list shouldn't have to.

David Allen's method can be summarized in less time than it takes to eat a (perhaps large) burrito, but it's still a good idea to go ahead and buy the book if you're interested in starting up with this method of attention management. This process follows three steps: collect, process, and action, which become habits quickly through practice. It's easy to drop out of the habits when it comes to crunch-time, but it's just as easy to pick them up again when you have room to breathe.

To setup a system like this, minimally you'll need a small notebook to track things. I use that same small notebook I mentioned in last year's GTD article, but only for a mobile inbox. I keep most of my system on my laptop, using a combination of OmniFocus, iCal, and VoodooPad. There are good GTD applications for every platform, though, including web-based systems and Microsoft Windows and Outlook.

Domains

The largest unit of organization in my GTD implementation is that of the domain, but these only exist to make sure my life stays in balance. These domains are Artwork, Business, Health, Household, Productivity, Relationships, Research, Software, Websites, and Writing. I don't mean to keep an equal number of active projects in each of these, but the number of projects in each reflect how much attention I'm paying to any one aspect of my life in isolation of the others. So long as these ratios are where I'd like them to be, I can consider that I'm "doing the best I can" to keep things going forward. In my take on GTD, then, domains contain projects while projects contain actions.

Projects

Similaly, a project is anything you do that takes more than one step. "File taxes for 2007," "Defend dissertation," and "Register company domain name" are all projects, regardless of how many steps it takes to complete them. You'll notice that these aren't simply nouns: "book deal" is not a project - it's a thing with no action. Don't write "book deal" when you mean to say "attend book signing" or "negotiate printing contract." The crux of this system is effective action, and you'll do your implementation a great disservice by accenting things in absence of the active path required to finish those things. Keep in mind, though, you don't do projects, you work on projects and do actions. When someone asks what I'm doing, it would be as presumptuous to anwer "building a company" as if I were to claim I "did" Philadelphia because I had a cheesesteak sandwich at their airport on a layover.

My current GTD setup has no fewer than 132 projects among the ten domains, ranging from "Attend Christa's bookwarming in July" to "Finish business plan for new LLC." Almost all of these projects have a definite end-date: when I come home from Christa's bookwarming in the former, and when the business plan is finished in the latter. Some of my projects are maintenance projects, though, which don't have such an ending date. "Keep household finances organized" doesn't end any time soon, but does have a large number of actions associated with it. I track these maintenance projects alongside the finite projects, though, to make sure my life-domains remain in balance. If you don't keep track of maintenance projects, you'll end up having to lump a large amount of actions in a "miscellaneous" folder, which does nothing to answer the question "In the grand scheme of things, why am I doing that?" By keeping everything in a project of some sort, you know immediately what aspect of your life an action benefits. Likewise, you know that why you do what you do, such as "I'm going to dinner with Nicole (an action) to maintain my relationships with friends and family (a project), which helps fulfil my social needs (a domain)." If an action doesn't fit into a project like this, make sure you know why you're doing it.

As an example, these are some of my projects across all ten domains:

• Most Important Today (project)
• Artwork (folder)
  • Design new theme for Fragmented Zen (project)
  • Read books in personal queue (maintenance project)
  • ...
• Business (folder)
  • Binary Spring, LLC (folder)
  • Implement democratic controls¹ (project)
  • Make suggested updates to business plan (project)
  • ...
  • ...
• Health (folder)
  • Find an exercise partner (project)
  • Maintain family health insurance (maintenance project)
  • ...
• Household (folder)
  • Prepare 2008 taxes (project)
  • Keep the downstairs areas cleaned (maintenance project)
  • ...
• Productivity (folder)
  • 30 Day List (maintenance project)
  • Lent / Borrowed List (maintenance project)
  • Maintain GTD system (maintenance project)
  • Someday / Maybe Lists (folder)
    • Articles to write (maintenance project)
    • Everything2 features to implement (maintenance project)
    • Languages to learn (maintenance project)
    • Software to write (maintenance project)
    • ...
  • Thought Garden (maintenance project)
• Relationships (folder)
  • Fix Sunil's computer (project)
  • Maintain social networking presence (project)
  • Run Russian-language DnD group (project)
  • ...
• Research (folder)
  • Determine MIT OpenCourseWare courses to take (project)
  • Support Computational Prosody Lab (maintenance project)
  • Support Cognitive Psychology Lab (maintenance project)
• Software (folder)
  • Integrate associative memory subsystem (project)
  • Publish new neural net engine (project)
  • ...
• University (folder)
  • Find a good graduate school (project)
  • Publish journal articles (maintenance project)
  • UTA Summer Session 2008 (folder)
    • Complete Linguistics conference course (project)
    • Complete Online Economics course (project)
  • UTA Fall Session 2008 (folder)
    • Complete Sociolinguistics course (project)
    • Complete Social and Political Philosophy course (project)
    • ...
    • Prepare for UTA Graduation (project)
    • Attend UTA Graduation (project)
• Websites (folder)
  • Fragmented Zen (folder)
    • Clean up sidebar links (project)
    • Integrate Gravatar icons with comments (project)
    • Write new articles for Fragmented Zen (maintenance project)
    • ...
  • Everything2 (folder)
    • Maintain leadership structure (project)
    • Write registry feature (project)
    • ...
• Writing (folder)
  • Adapt "Owning Conversation" into a book (project)
  • Publish book "The Visceral Society" (project)

¹ - Ref. Owning Conversation

There are a few projects in here with special meanings - those that don't correspond to actual projects in any normal sense, but help maintain the structure of GTD in my implementation. The first of these is the Most Important Today project. Leo Babauta with Zen Habits calls these "Most Important Tasks", but this is the project I use to remind myself of what I plan on focusing on in a given day. With more than a thousand actions spread across 132 projects, it would otherwise violate the two minute rule to figure out which project to work on next: nothing shorter than two minutes should be in your system if you're in the context to process it then and there. During my weekly reviews, I go through my calendar to figure out what I should be working on that week, then populate this project as necessary. In this project, the "next actions" are names of projects themselves. If I need to have a new web design finished by Wednesday, I'll have a "next action" of "finish the new web design" with a due date of Wednesday in here, knowing that the breakdown is stored in the project itself. University due dates go here as well, as do deadlines with work, but most frequently they're simply dated entries along the lines of "Continue (project name) today." These are the major things that I don't need to be forgetting.

In the Productivity domain, all of the projects are GTD-related. The 30-day list contains entries for things I want to buy, but want to wait 30 days to ensure it's not by impulse. The lent / borrowed list contains things I've lent to or borrowed from people along with dates those are "due" back to or from them. "Maintain GTD System" is mostly for periodic reviews, but can contain links to GTD-related articles I wouldn't mind reviewing again later, whereas "Thought Garden" is for ideas I've had that haven't had the mindspace yet to sprout into full projects. The Someday / Maybe folder contains each of my 12 "I'll do it later" categories: "articles to write", "books to write", "companies to build," and "software to write" are all Someday / Maybe maintenance projects.

Next Actions

The center of Allen's productivity theory is the next action: whatever immediate next step is needed to complete a project. Recall, a project is anything you do that requires more than one step. Next actions are always describably doable things, though in much finer detail: they also begin with a verb, but contain enough contextual information to remind you what you were thinking about when you wrote it down. "Read Quinn's thesis proposal" is a good example of a next action, as is "pick up two pounds of Swiss cheese for fondue on Sunday." You'll notice something else about next actions, too: they all have definite endings. When you keep your actions finite like this, you know when things are done because you've either read the thesis or bought the cheese.

This system makes university work particularly straightforward: every class has a syllabus, and every syllabus has a list of asssigned work, and every assignment should have a due date. These are already mostly broken down into projects and actions. For each course, the project is "Complete (course name)," with next actions drawn directly from the syllabus.

Problems with Actions

Breaking projects into actions quickly becomes a habit, but it's one that many have to work hard at building. When you're beginning with GTD, it's easy to write notes to yourself like "learn Haskell," then let them linger in some queue that you only look at during your weekly review. Once you look back at what you've finished for a week, though, you'll quickly also notice what fell through the cracks. In my system, I've noticed that these issues typically fall in three categories:

Ill-defined actions: More often than not, stale actions that I should have finished during a week lack enough definition for me to be able to pick them up in context. Perhaps, in haste, I wrote something like "get the associative memory subsystem integrated" where I really needed to sit and think a few more moment on how exactly I was going to integrate it. Likewise, actions like "get Danica flowers for her birthday" are ill-defined if I don't know what her favorite flowers are. This would actually be a three-step project: Ask her husband what her favorite flowers are, buy those flowers at the florist, and bring her the flowers.

Ill-defined endings: This used to be my "brainstorm" context, but I've since renamed it to "breakdown." There are a large number of actions that I simply don't yet know how to do, and it takes energy to research which next steps are appropriate. This context is reserved for those "next actions" that are down the road a stretch: I don't know how to do them because I either can't know or don't need to know how to do them yet. Naturally, most of the projects in my "research" domain end with a breakdown-context task. Likewise, when you know most of the actions of a project, but not the last steps, some actions will fall here. "Upgrade wordpress on weblog," a project, begins with the usual "download the new version of wordpress," "setup wordpress on local server," and "examine database schema for changes." After that, though, the only thing I can "do" to move it forward is necessarily vague: I can't know what the remaining steps are until I know what changed in version 2.5. As you would imagine, most of the entries in the "breakdown" category begin with verbs like "figure out," "examine," "evaluate," "brainstorm," or "break down."

Creative projects: Some projects simply can't be broken into actionable tasks, which violates a basic premise of this productivity theory. While you can control attention, and you can invest your time wisely and move between contexts, you cannot typically make yourself be creative. "Write undergraduate thesis" and "Wireframe layout for new website" are examples of creative projects. I address these by figuring out my creative triggers. "Write integration section of thesis" may not be easily actionable, but "describe corporate political climates in absense of rationalist epistemic" certainly puts me in the right mindset. Likewise, "wireframe navigation bar for website user experience model" may not be straightforward to tackle, but "make sure the user can get back to the project page from anywhere" certainly gets me back into the flow of where I left off on a project. David Wax with Stepcase Lifehack has a good article on how to handle these. He doesn't mention this mental trigger method, but I find it most effective in my system for getting into a project's mental space.

If you use a repeated trigger like this to get into a project space, though, be sure to watch out for classical conditioning. When I need to clean up the apartment but dont have the energy to do so, I put on Radiohead's album Kid A, stand up and get started. Nowadays, though, whenever I hear the song "Everything in its Right Place," I automatically want to start cleaning things - even if I'm at a store, at a university, or in the car. Hilarity ensues.

Contexts

As you would imagine, where you are at any given point in time governs what you can do at that time. It's been established that all actions belong in a project, but contexts are equally important. A context is any place you need to be to finish a specific type of action. If you're at the grocery store, having "Start literature review on the effects of abstinence-only education on teenage sexuality in the bible belt" on your to-do list does you absolutely no good: it refers to something in the wrong context. The grocery store, in my system, would be a part of the "errands" context, whereas literature reviews are typically something you'd see in the "internet" or "university" contexts. This is why, once you've broken down each project into actions, you take the second step of organizing those actions into their relevant contexts.

As an example, my current contexts are:

• Agendas: Actions go here if I have to be face-to-face with someone to accomplish them. "Discuss household expenses for last month" goes here.
• Breakdown: The only actions that go here are those that are actually projects, though I don't precisely know what steps are involved. "Attend High School Reunion in October" is here because I haven't received any information on it yet, other than the month.
• Email: Anything that requires access to email goes here. Emails that take longer than a few minutes to address go here. If the person's email address isn't in my address book, or it wouldn't benefit me to store that address permanently, that address is recorded with the action here.
• Errands: Things that I have to do outside the house, typically trips to stores or other places around town.
• Home: There are some things that I just have to do at home, such as sealing the foundation leak by the door, cleaning the kitchen, or taking out the trash.
• Internet: For the things I need to do online, regardless of where that access is available. Things go in the internet context if I can do them equally from my laptop at home, from a terminal at the university, or from a connection at the local public library.
• Mac: Most of the things I need to do are on my Mac, so this is a fairly big context in my system. These are things that I can do regardless of where I am - without the assumption of having an internet connection, any external devices, or more power than the battery can hold.
• Phone: These are the relatively few things that I need a phone to take care of. This applies equally to my cell or to a Skype connection.
• University: Things for which I need to be on campus. It's pretty straightforward when things go here.

If you work in an office, it may be useful to keep an "office" context. If your work involves time spent both in a lab and at a desk, it may not hurt to have separate contexts for each of these - specifically if one is governed by different time and attention scarcities than the other.

Your domains, projects, contexts, and actions will doubtlessly look different than mine. These are simply examples of how I handle things. My setup isn't perfect, but it works very well for my needs. The biggest difference between my system and "canonical" GTD is that I have neither a calendar nor a "tickler file." Since OmniFocus allows me to optionally store recurring due dates with every task, I keep all calendar-related entries in that application. Making the car payment goes in "Maintain the Volkswagen" (maintenance project, household domain), remembering the rent goes in "Keep household finances in order" (maintenance project, household domain) and birthdays and anniversaries go in "Stay in touch with friends and family" (maintenance project, relationships domain). If you're using a pencil-and-paper GTD system, though, or have a digital implementation without due date management, you'll probably need either a calendar, a set of folders for a "tickler file," or both.

The other main difference between my implementation and Allen's system is that I use maintenance projects. These hold actions that blur the lines between things that go on a calendar, and single-step things for which you're in the wrong context at the moment. The calendar is only for things that can't happen on any other day, not for planning what you'd like to finish on that day. "Defend thesis to committee" goes on the calendar, as does "Attend Grant's wedding." "Buy more dog food on Saturday" is not calendar material, though it's also not clearly something done in multiple steps. Certainly, you could break it down to "find car keys," "find car," "turn on car," "put on safety belt," "drive to cat food store," "buy cat food," and "come home," but all of these actions happen in the "errands" context - there's no benefit to having them broken down past simply "buy cat food."

The biggest reason not to have a calendar or tickler file, though, is that everything is in one place. This lets me see, at a glance, where I'm investing most of my effort in a given week, and makes data backup trivially easy. Like I mentioned previously, though, if you're using a pencil and paper system, this shortcut probably won't work very well for you.

Step 1: Collecting

The first step is to collect everything that's in your mind into one physical location. If something is intangible, either enter it into your digital system then and there or write it on a piece of paper and put it in the same stack with the rest of your things. This includes articles to review, notes to yourself, receipts you want to track, ideas for a book or research, mail you haven't processed: anything that comes to your mind when you're not expecting it. The goal here is to remove anything from your mind that blocks you from thinking about what you want to be thinking about.

Once you've got all of your stuff in a giant messy pile on your desk or living room floor, you'll need to identify all of your inboxes. Inboxes are those places where you habitually collect things to do. These are email addresses, physical mail boxes, voicemail systems, that place where you throw the mail on the way in the house, and any place you keep notes to yourself. Once you've identified all of the routes through which information enters your system, figure out the minimum set you need to function. Having too many inbound flows of information can be overwhelming, especially because you'll want to collect and process all of them every evening. Currently, my system has four inboxes: a cardboard box on my bookshelf in the livingroom, a pocket notebook, an email program (Mail.App), and a digital inbox in OmniFocus input through Quicksilver.

After collecting everything and figuring out your minimally necessary set of inboxes, it's time to start processing your things.

Step 2: Processing

Processing something in GTD parlance has a very specific meaning: you're going to pick something up, decide what to do with it, then either do it (if it takes less than two minutes) or file it into your system for things to do later. It's best not to dig through the pile looking for what's easiest to process - pick up the thing on the top and process it:

• The first step is to figure out if it's actionable. If it's not actionable, it's either reference material, a project seed for later, or trash:
  • If it's reference material, file it in your "read / review" stack for processing when you have filler time.
  • If it's a seed for a later project, write it down on one of your "someday / maybe" lists and file it with your "someday / maybe" stuff.
  • If it's trash, throw it away.
• If it is actionable in less than two minutes in this context, do it then and there. This is the two-minute rule.
• If it's actionable, and takes more than two minutes, first determine how many steps it requires.
  • If it's more than one step, write it on your projects list, first break it down into actions.
  • Once it's broken into actions, record those actions on the context pages, and file away any project materials
• Finally, if it has a single hard and fast due date, write it on the calendar. If it has a recurring due date such as a birthday, anniversary, vehicle inspection, or mortgage payment, put it in your tickler file.

Repeat this for absolutely everything in your pile. When I've got a few weeks of buildup in my inboxes, this process can take up to two or three hours. When I'm on top of things, though, it typically only takes 30 minutes or so to collect and process every weekend. If new things come to you while you're processing your stack, write them down and put them on the stack.

Step 3: Action

One major change I've adopted from last year's article is that I no longer track priority. Going by the book, the GTD system lacks any function for recording priority anyhow. Your instinct will tell you this -- your pieces of paper shouldn't have to. Because of the number of projects I keep active, I use the "Most Important Today" list to gently guide me in the right directions. Once your mind space is clear, flip through your Most Important Today list or the contexts available to you and start taking action. When ideas come to you during the day, write them down on your inbox page (or the appropriate context, if it's a single-step action), knowing that you'll process it at latest that evening.

This is why I always carry the little notebook. Anything I need to do goes into the book, knowing that anything that goes in the book gets done. This keeps my mind space from trying to remember "now what was it I was supposed to be doing?" so I can live in the here and now.