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Getting Started with GTD
Babel | Apr 30 2007
The problem when I began reading GTD was that the sheer volume of all of my open items came piling down on me and I froze. The book seemed to get heavier and heavier until I finally put it down. I knew I had a problem (open loops out the ying-yang), but the book wasn't going fast enough for me. I needed to start addressing my open loops now. What was I to do? Google! Ah, Google --- the cause of and solution to all the world's problems (Simpsons reference). So off to the webernet I went, searching for GTD tips and GTD examples. What did I find: blogger after blogger telling me just read the book. One blogger even wrote that I should read the book twice. Damn you bloggers! I went back to GTD, but this time I went with a new attitude (Just Finish It) and a stack of 5x8 note cards. In my googling, I did, however, purchase the $10 Outlook PDF, because I knew this was where I would be headed or maybe because I was just too hyper. I'm not going to lie to you, it's slow and painstaking, but after a few hours of reading and absorbing GTD and taking over 50 cards of notes, I've reached page 44. At work today, I jumped the gun and organized two folders @Next_Actions and Projects. I even started dropping some action items into each (open loops in the Project folder). My problem, if you've made it this far, is this: I have a project called ABC Department. ABC Department has come to me with several (okay, many) reports that no longer function. The reports are the Red Report, Green Report, Blue Report, etc. Each report has several actions items and a few action items even have their own sub-action items. It would look like this: Projects Should the Reports stay as a subset of their department or should the move up a level? What have you found that works? All said and done, I can imagine that their may be a time that I might have up 200 Projects at different levels. Are there limits? Thanks in advance. 4 Comments
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 I would recommend thinking of...Submitted by mdl on April 30, 2007 - 8:02pm.
I would recommend thinking of ABC Department as an "area of responsibility," with each report as a project within that area of responsibility. The book uses an airplane metaphor: Life purpose = 50,000 feet I've found this a really helpful way to organize my work. That way you don't have big catch-all pseudo-projects -- e.g., health, finances. Instead you have "desired outcomes" (projects), such as "lose 10 pounds" and "rethink investments." Projects = "any desired outcome that takes two or more steps to complete." I've found this one of the most helpful definitions in the book. I would recommend rephrasing your projects as "desired outcomes" (e.g., solve problem X on purple report). You might have several such desired outcomes for the purple report. Visualizing a desired outcome helps to clarify/organize the work that needs to be done. » POSTED IN:
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