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Starting out with GTD
Pat Armstrong | Oct 26 2007
Hi everyone. I bought a paperback copy of GTD some time ago, flicked through it idly, and have only just got around to sitting down and reading it properly. I'm about halfway through, and have a question about fitting it to my situation. Some background: I'm a graphic design student, currently finishing my second-last year. I live with friends in a sharehouse, and will for the forseeable future. This means my bedroom is my main workspace for my coursework and odd freelance gig, and that I'm liable to move house once every year or two. I use the machines at uni quite a bit, but they're shared (so neither the space nor software setup is really customisable), and all my books/notes/reference stuff is at home. With my final year of uni starting in a few months, after the summer break (southern hemisphere!), I'm in dire need of a good, functioning organisational system: I'm easily distracted by all the other projects I have going at any one time, and deadlines often creep up on me. GTD seems like a good fit with a great community built around it. The thing that seems to be stopping me from getting through GTD, though, is the very corporate/business-y angle DA seems to be coming from. No-one I know my age has a filing cabinet, and the idea of a physical "inbox" on my desk makes me imagine fluorescent lights and beige cubicles. What do I need an automatic labelmaker for? I'd take less time writing out labels by hand, and prefer the look of my own handwriting to low-res thermal printer type. Anyway, you get the idea. Reading through the posts here, it seems you're all from quite varied backgrounds. So, my question is: How can I adapt the GTD system to my situation? Or do I just need to adapt to it? Thanks for reading! Love to hear your thoughts (or pointers to similar questions or issues that have been raised in the past). 6 Comments
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 No-one I know my age hasSubmitted by mwr on October 26, 2007 - 6:09am.
Do you keep old coursework around somewhere? If so, where? I still have a cheap 2-drawer filing cabinet from my undergraduate work, though my coursework files have moved to my office filing cabinets. If a regular filing cabinet is too large, not mobile enough, etc., then would a file crate like this one be more suitable? And if you do freelance work, don't you have to keep records of old work, receipts, tax records, and similar? Some file-folder storage might be the best way to keep track of that. As for the inbox, I don't use mine that much. But I guess the driving questions would be * Do you have a ton of loose papers in your workspace? * Are they loose because you're not sure what to do with them yet? * Do they get in the way? If so, then the inbox is like a trash can, but on the other end of the process. If I throw things in the trash (or recycler) when I'm done, they're out of my way and collected together for final disposal. If I throw things in the inbox, they're out of my way and collected together for later decision-making or work.
My handwriting's not that great (curse of the engineer who didn't have to sit through 6 months of traditional board drafting classes), so the label maker is more readable than my labels. But as long as you can get them labeled quickly, I'd think handwriting would be fine. If you want to plan for reusing folders, you may want to either use a pencil or something other than just layering more labels on the file tabs, but that may also be not that important. » POSTED IN:
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