Ask The Readers: How Have You Gone About Modifying Productivity Systems To Suit Your Own Requirements?
Whatever methodology you are a fan of – whether it be Getting Things Done, Do It Tomorrow, The Four Hour Work Week or even The Power Of Less – the one bit of advice that always gets repeated by bloggers and productivity fans alike is to tailor these systems to suit your needs. Perhaps, one of the big reasons GTD is so popular and has so much written about it is because you can tweak and modify it so much.
For me personally, it’s difficult to say where GTD principles begin and end in my own setup nowadays. Next actions are definitely one of the big things I’ve taken away, but contexts? Gone. Horizons of focus? No thanks. I simply use my weekly planner as my hard landscape and print out a new one each week as part of my regular review. On top of that I take principles from The Four Hour Work Week (80/20 rule, Parkinson’s law, etc.) to keep how much I do to a minimum.
But what about you, the Organize IT reader? Whether you started out with GTD, Do It Tomorrow or something else entirely, how have you tweaked the principles to suit your needs? What features have you kept or scrapped? I’d love to read your experiences. Please retweet this so we can get more responses!
4 Comments
For me, the most important thing to achieve productivity was simplicity of use as per my post on the subject.
I use the GTD methodology and eProductivity for Lotus Notes to achieve what I need. In the past, I’ve found that too much tweaking adds to complexity and as soon as I make something complex, it becomes an untrusted system!
You make a good point Paul. Not really considered how tweaking can make things more complicated but you’re right. For the longest time I tweaked items like my weekly planner, adding features and other tid-bits to cover all bases… but of course none of it was of any practical use.
I totally agree that tweaking a system over time usually leads to it being less productive, but since I’m an efficiency consultant for a living, tweaking was part of my professional research. I use the GTD concepts of next actions and contexts (just a few, namely @calls and @errands), but I have a daily action card that automatically covers recurring tasks (exercise, vitamins, feed the cats) with room to list next actions that must or should be done on a specific day. GTD’s lack of support for deadlines always confused me – how do you complete, say, a big research paper on time by just intuitively looking at your list?
I used to constantly tweak my system until I realized all I was doing was tweaking it. I was continually modifying contexts, actions, and moving around tasks. I thought I was getting more things done but I was really just fooling myself. All I was doing was looking at how many items I could check off each day, not if they had any real impact or were the most important for me to complete.
I think the biggest change I have made is to look at the big picture more. Yeah, I have important tasks for each day but like you, I try to look at my week as a whole. Now, my GTD list is simply a reminder and not what I live by each day by.
The next step is to look at the entire month in a similar fashion… guess that is my next tweak.