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Trying to setup GTD - Internet Business - Always Online

Hello new friends!

I am nearly done with the GTD book, and I am trying to get a few conceptual questions answered.

1 - Are ongoing everyday tasks such as:
Checking for new orders, sending those orders to vendor via purchase order, check for new tracking numbers, send tracking numbers to customers.

These are divided by vendor in some ways, but the orders come into one website. So I am not sure if these actions are really contexts, or projects? If they are projects that are just permanently daily tasks, and not something that are ever going to be "completed"...

2 - Since I am always with my laptop, and phone, I am not sure the best way to setup my contexts? Should I divide things up by time during the day? ... like "morning work", "afternoon work"? The thing is I can pretty much do any task at anytime. Its nice, but frustrating as well.

I am planning to use outlook as my trusted system, with the GTD add-on. 90% of my items are digitally stored, or at least have the key reference digitally.

Your advice is welcome!

dermeck's picture

Hello new friends! I am nearly...

MoeBerry;7593 wrote:
Hello new friends!

I am nearly done with the GTD book, and I am trying to get a few conceptual questions answered.

1 - Are ongoing everyday tasks such as:
(...) If they are projects that are just permanently daily tasks, and not something that are ever going to be "completed"...

2 - Since I am always with my laptop, and phone, I am not sure the best way to setup my contexts? Should I divide things up by (...)Your advice is welcome!


Arno answers:
1: I also feel that all these regular things( which I believe are not projects ) don't really fit into the GTD vocabulary. Usually I work far away and return home for the weekend only. Consequently starting from friday at home I have to go through very regular acitivities with goal 'get ready for monday morning' and during the week target 'get ready to drive home and have a proper weekend'. Friday evenings, usually in a car I do a 'debriefing' session where I speak all my positive and negative experiences into a dictaphone. Many of these issues result in 'rules' to streamline my regular half-weekly tasks like "don't do any shopping after 1100 on saturdays because it's too busy" or "it's good enough to wash this and that twice in a month". My project during this 'debriefing' session is to reduce frequency of regular activities(David Allen doubts it is healthy to check for email permanently) or to drop certain actions completely. From the control perspective the 'check-lists' live in my head alone.
2: It looks to me you have a project called "I need clean context definitions to trust my system' on your mind. Some sort of GTD of GTD level project. Here I would also recommend debriefing sessions. Try to remember in which circumstances things went well or wrong. As a 2nd consequence you narrow the contexts down to reinforce the outcome. Here's an example. Last summer I never found time to read a book I bought. Then I recalled the last time I wanted to read that book. I was on the beach late evening. This is how it got into a 'on-beach' context. You don't need a beach to read the book of course, but for me it helped. The on-the-computer context is usually too general to be of help. I usually have contexts 'mac-online', 'mac-very-long', 'mac-uinterrupted'. If this does not come naturally to you try to remember the situation in which you successfully completed a certain type task. If the result is 'computer-with-cappucino' then that's your new context next time.

 
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