This year I’m re-doubling my efforts to really use GTD effectively. I’ve got tools I’m happy with and a workflow that seems like it will work, especially with practice. Now all I have to do is get my head around the actual doing.
(If you’re not down with the GTD, most of what follows will seems like glossolalia.)
Up until recently I thought that I had to next action everything, each and every little step in a project. This doesn’t really work for a lot of what I do, and especially doesn’t work for things like long sustained writing. Or even short unsustained writing. Or, indeed, anything where the quantum of activity is orders of magnitude larger than the canonical two minutes
The aha! moment came when I was listening to a talk that Merlin gave at IDEO. In the talk, about 10 or 15 minutes from the end, Merlin says that he realised after a while that GTD wasn’t very good for creative work. There is no sensible next action for “write new journal paper” other than “spend X period of time writing for new journal paper”. On the other hand, GTD is very good at “clearing the decks” and getting the minutiae of life and stuff out of the way so that you have time to sit still for an hour and write.
(In hindsight, this is what Merlin was getting at with his 3-part series that precipitated the renewed, and awesome, direction of 43folders.)
Now I’ve decided that for activity that can be thought of as a series of sustained actions, so writing or anything where getting in the flow state is nigh—mandatory, that the next action is the kick-start from where you left off.
Here’s how it looks in practice: Start the project with the next action, work for however long you have and then, when you need to stop, switch contexts or reach an impasse, get that next next action down where it’ll be ready for you to use as a jumping-off point later.
On the other hand, for stuff that is super-atomic, but spread out over days I can still go crazy with the next action-ing especially if I know the workflow. But, until recently, for a project like “Submit paper on Foo to Journal Bar, the next action list tended to look like “write paragraph on how Baz related to Quux”. Urgh. Too much time planning, not enough time doing.
Now, my next action looks like “write for 1hr for Baz Journal project”. And then I start, I write (oft times with a (10+2)*5 if I’m stuck) and then I stop. When I stop, the next action goes down and that tells me what my next step is. Most of the time it’s just “write for 1hr on Baz Journal project. Sometimes it’s “check with boss on whether we want to use the term Quuux” followed by “write for 1hr on Baz Journal project. You get the idea.
Cory Doctorow says he follows a similar pattern “Leave Yourself an Edge”:
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you’re in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day’s knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the “hint.” Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it’s hard to build on a smooth edge.
And there you go. A renewed appreciation for GTD. Let’s see how I go putting it into practice.
[Thanks to some javascript voodoo, comments are enabled on this post.]
