My Evolving GTD System: Part 1

February 2nd 2007

GTD

As previously promised here is the first part of my discussion regarding how I have implemented Getting Things Done over the last year and a half, and how my system has evolved into what it is today. Hopefully this will give you a few ideas for your own implementation of GTD and help show how to improve your system.

What I like to consider my first iteration essentially involved an A5 ring binder and a set of dividers. These dividers were named as ‘current tasks’, ‘undefined’ (basically a someday/maybe before I came across the term) and ‘archive’ (I also had a ‘misc’ divider for various other bits and pieces but this was largely unconnected to the system as a whole). It was A5 because this was a compact size without being too small and fiddly and it also made it a lot easier to carry around with me.

The system was originally formulated from reading various information from the internet as I did not initially have the GTD book. It worked as follows; each task was put on a seperate piece of paper which would have the start date, the context, a tick box and then the task and details relating to it. When a task was completed I would write the completion date, tick the box and move it to the ‘archive’ section. The beauty of it, at least to start with, was that completing a task and moving its sheet was very satisfying, because not only was I ticking it off as complete I had the physical action of moving it out the sheet to the ‘archive’ section.

While a lot of this approach involved made logical sense, in practise it was really a lot of bureaucracy and unecessary fiddling and as the system started to bed in and get used more it became a niggling issue. Everytime I needed to write out a new task I would have to take a blank sheet out of my binder, fill it in with various reference information that I would actually not use, and then put it back in the binder. So for my next iteration I cut out much of this fiddling.

Contexts have never worked for me. I rarely have hundreds of tasks and/or large scale projects to manage. I did experiment with listing tasks under context headers but because the lists are so small I can scan all my tasks in a few moments and pick out those that need doing there and then. So obviously that was one of the first things to go and for similar reasons, I took out the need to write down the start and completion date, except for date sensitive tasks. Now I was simply left with a tick box and the task details, though in hindsight I could even have done without the tick box as I was still moving tasks to the ‘archive’ section upon completion.

I also briefly experimented with using index cards. The idea was appealing (and still is in some ways) because of the size and flexibility. However, I could never find a way of keeping all the cards together as neatly as using sheets and a ring binder. In the next part of this series I will be discussing how opening and shutting ring binders for each task sheet gets very tedious, and how everything has come together into the system I use today.