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GTD, McGee, & Me
Jibbah | Apr 26 2006
When I decided to get serious about organization and productivity, I purchased two books: GTD and Take Back Your Life. I first read GTD and tried the GTD Outlook plugin. It was buggy and cluttered up Outlook, and during a crunch period I fell way behind on my inboxes, so I wanted to take the opportunity to reorganize with McGhee's system which seemed basically the same at Allen's, but more Outlook friendly. I managed to uninstall the plugin and have been following along with McGhee contentendly and now need to process my Catagories (none), which has 71 items. I'm having a couple problems: 1. It seems that most of these items don't have a meaningful objective set up for them, so it's taking forever to get through them. For a small task like "Learn Outlook Shortcuts" I need to figure out what meaningful objective is involved and then try to come up with outcomes, subprojects, and metrics (I'll get to those in a sec). Then each subproject needs outcomes, tasks, and metrics. It's very slow and the list is growing as I process it, not shrinking. The books suggests this process take an hour, but it will easily take me 4-8. 2. I'm not sure how to distinguish between meaningful objectives and mission/goals. Frankly, McGhee mentiones missions/goals but doesn't how to use or integrate them, so I'm not sure how they fit it. For example, I wanted to schedule monthly one on one meetings with my team, this seems to relate to the aim to have a smoothly running department. But this sounds more like a goal than an objective because it doesn't really have clearly defined outcomes. 3. Some stuff in my Categories (none) seem like tasks or subtasks (that belong to a supporting project). In McGhee system these don't really get their own tasks, they go in the notes section of their support project. Is this correct? it seems odd that ONLY task level items don't get tasks, but objectives, supporting projects, and SNAs all do receive outlook tasks. 4. I have no idea what metrics are or when/how to use them. McGhee regularly refers to Excel sheets in relation to this, and I gather that it's some way to track results, but is it always relevant? Examples would be very helpful. I'm loving the overall concepts of GTD and TBYL, but I'm having sometrouble iimplementing. Many thanks, 3 Comments
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 I'm not sure what your...Submitted by emuelle1 on April 26, 2006 - 7:13pm.
I'm not sure what your profession is or what your professional and personal needs are for a time management system. I often find myself losing sight of the fact that most of these systems are designed for very high level executives with a broad scope of responsibility and many underlings to work with. I can't say I'm familiar with McGhee's system at all. I've been working with Franklin Covey for probably a decade, and I picked up GTD last year. I think I'm finally getting to the point where I have put together concepts from both into a workable system for my situation. I often find myself caught up in trying to properly define a project such as learn Outlook shortcuts. It may be good to mind-map or old fashioned brainstorm what exactly you hope to get out of this. It's easy to get caught up in a high level abstract and forget what the practical should be. Let's say a reasonable goal for learning Outlook shortcuts would be to open an email, fire off a reply, save a copy in another folder, create a task to track the task, create an appointment for a follow up, and update the sender's Contact information without taking your hands off the keyboard. That makes it a lot more practical, and I think it cleared up a similar abstract that I've been stuck on for a while. Sometimes creating objectives is as easy as trying to figure out what you want to do. I've had "learn programming" in the back of my mind for years, but I never really defined what I'd hoped to do with programming. I finally have an objective to create a note management application that actually does what I want. One Note is a great concept, but basically non-functional. Evernote is a great concept, but it's still on version 1.1 with no update in site. Keynote is dead, and GoBinder is like One Note with a calendar. If I could just get one program to manage my notes the way I want, that would be cool and it is an objective of what I hope to get out of learning to program. » POSTED IN:
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