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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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 Metrics are difficult to get...Submitted by mcnicks on April 26, 2006 - 10:46pm.
Metrics are difficult to get a hold of. David Allen says in the GTD book that, when you are defining a project, you should ask yourself a question: how will I know when I have succeeded? I think that this sentence may well be the most important thing I have taken away from the GTD book. Every time I ask it in a meeting or even mention it offhand, everybody comments on how good a question it is. Metrics ask the same question. However, metrics are about defining a quantitive measure of success. So, rather than say "improve sales", a metric might be "increase sales by 10% over the next reporting period"; rather than "run the helpdesk better", a metric might be "reduce average turnaround on tickets to less than 48 hours". The point is that you can go away, make a measurement and judge objectively whether you have met an outcome. The trouble is that writing good, realistic and easily measurable metrics is difficult, although it does get easier the more you do it. In the meanwhile, just ask yourself, "how will I know when I have succeeded?" » POSTED IN:
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