One of the key elements of GTD is capturing what’s on your radar – offloading what’s on your head so you’re no longer thinking of stuff, but about the stuff. It’s a great bit of advice and it’s something I encourage people to do regardless of what system, workflow or methodology takes your fancy. If there is something that wants my attention I’ll jot it down somewhere so I don’t have to carry the weight of the memory around. It sounds like a sensible, even smart way of keeping track of everything, making sure you don’t forget things, etc. But recently something occurred to me that puts mind sweeping into doubt.

The brain is often compared to a muscle and if you’re not giving all the parts of it a good, regular workout it’s going to become lazy and weak. A top chess player needs to keep his mind focused on strategies and gameplay in the same way a jogger needs regular training to keep themselves at a physical peak. With that in mind, if you’re not having to remember stuff at particular times and occasions because you’ve got a diary or a to-do list instead, then surely the recollection and retrieving side of your brain is going to suffer?

On a related point, I think this presents an arguably negative side of the internet age, particularly when it comes to learning. With knowledge at your fingertips why do you need to remember it? Rather than having to make sure something you’ve learned at school stays lodged in your brain, you can relax and let is slip knowing it’s only a Google search away.

This is by no means a post on why we shouldn’t be doing mind sweeps, because the benefits are too great for that. However, it does make me think that maybe some form of brain exercise could be necessary to fill the gap that gets left when your brain is no longer forced to carry around as much mental weight as it used to. Of course, it could all be unrelated and just be a natural part of aging and no longer being in regular education. What are your thoughts on this topic?

The main focus of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology is… well, to get things done. It aims to give you a tool to enable you to identify everything you need to do and then go and get those things done. This is fine. No, this is superb. But it does create one particular problem – it consciously blurs the boundaries between all aspects of your life. It seeks to provide you with a solution to all strands of what you do in one fair swoop, on the assumption that for a lot of people the boundaries are already a little fuzzy.

This flies in the face of the traditional personal development mantra of work/life balance. The ethos that we should all seek to find the fulcrum whereby we are at least content with our split of cubicle nightmare and golf course heaven.

So how do we tie these together? Marry the power of Getting Things Done with the ability to switch off and drink cold, fizzy beer in front of a big TV? Well, I am not going to offer you ten words that solve it all, or even a good old top ten tips for doing so – I think there is no one-size-fits-all route to un-blurring this boundary while still clinging to Mr Allen’s teachings.

My personal solution is to pull my horizons of focus into my tasks and projects – knock 20,000ft onto the runway. I split my life into my areas of focus – simplistically this might be “work” and “home”. The idea is not to identify all my areas of focus, but to come up with the broader buckets in which they sit. Rather than have one set of @next actions, @phonecalls and @email folders, I have a set for each of these buckets. Whilst this is duplication, it doesn’t significantly hamper the process. And when I sit down on a Saturday morning, my @next actions list doesn’t remind me I need to write a report on new markets, phone my boss, and complete my time sheet.

I admit this is far from elegant. But it draws that line for me which is needed to prevent the perpetual creep of work into my weekends. Maybe you could only use GTD for work? Or maybe your personal tasks all fit into one @home context? How do you try and keep your work-life balance within a GTD framework?

• GTD is flexible
  Just why do people think GTD is a strict  framework? In fact why do we assume that productivity as a whole is some limiting discipline that requires following tight rules, tight systems, tight deadlines and tight time management? Don’t confuse the whole idea of GTD with one of many potential implementations of it.
• GTD removes distractions
  Constantly worrying about that electricity bill that needs paying is a creativity killer. Letting thoughts and items that need your attention build up in your head is a creativity killer. GTD encourages you to collect such mental clutter and free your mind up from such distractions. So how come GTD is viewed as the creativity killer?
• GTD makes you more organized
  Wow, I’ve just come up with a great new design idea, but I’ve nothing to write it down on. Ah well, I’m sure I’ll remember it. Damn, my creative juices are flowing and I’ve suddenly realized I’ve got a meeting to get to. I have fifteen errands to do and I don’t know which order to do them. Argh! And so on and so forth…
• GTD frees up  time and energy
  It’s nice to think that us creative types live in some creativity nirvana where we’re surrounded by inspiration 24/7 and great thoughts and ideas drip off us like sweat. Unfortunately that’s not the case and more often than not we’re cranking mundane widgets just like everybody else. But if GTD means we’re not wasting so  much time and energy on our day-to-day matters, that’s surely a good thing.
• GTD allows me to focus
  Ahh, the next action, oh how I love thee. As I pointed out on Monday, creativity isn’t about thinking big about fuzzy ideas and concepts, it’s actually about focusing right down, a bit like a next action of creativity. Innovate the car wheel, not the car itself.

Of course GTD isn’t for everybody but I’d love to read your thoughts on this regardless of what side of the fence you fall. Any creative people out there who love their GTD? Any who find it stifling and restrictive? Leave a comment or two!

Explanations abound
I’ve noticed lots of people point the puzzled productivity-aspirant to the GTD entry on Wikipedia. That certainly helps explain the methodology and all the various stages and elements that make up GTD, but it doesn’t exactly sum it up in one neat package. And don’t even bother with the official David Allen Company description. Groundbreaking? Sophisticated without being confining? Subtle effectiveness? Its ability to enliven, enlighten, and empower is its magic? Sounds more like a fine wine, a sport car or a dubious drug to me. But I can’t judge. He has the GTD brand to sell and a business to run.

Management this, management that
That just left me with time management, project management… you know, those buzz words. However, a time management tool can technically be a calendar and a project management tool can just be a to-do list. I’d like to think GTD is a bit more than just an advancement of the same-old thinking and the same-old tools, right? Those buzzwords have been around for so long and been used to describe such a wide range of things that their entire meaning has been watered down.

It’s Twitter time
Yesterday I had my weekly Twitter session. Yes folks, Tuesday is my Twitter day (control social media, don’t let it control you)! Anyways, I came across one little tweet that inspired this entire post. It roughly said that GTD isn’t a time management tool, it’s an attention management tool (apparently originally from Lifehack.org, if anybody has a link please share). Ding! Of course, what a great way to sum it up, I thought. Every element of GTD, from the vertical map to the someday/maybe list is designed to capture those things that have your attention and manage them in such a way that they don’t become distractions or drains on your time and energy.

But wait!
Next time somebody asks me what GTD is all about, I might say it’s an attention management system and go from there. Or maybe not. It occured to me as I wrote this post that anything that has your attention is ultimately just another throught in your head. So… how about GTD being a thought management system? Would really like to read your comments on that. How do you go about describing GTD?

On Tuesday, I asked why David Allen considered falling off the wagon to be a normal practise. Surely it’s a flaw, a hole, a big gap in the system? Since then however, I’ve figured that it’s really just a roundabout way of saying it’s fine and good to screw up, lose your focus and break your momentum occasionally. Well, in that case, fair enough. Right?

Also on Tuesday, I used the analogy of a car being driven flat out until you run out of fuel, as a way of describing GTD. That’s certainly what it felt like when I was really into it. I’d start the month off brilliantly, flying through my lists and doing regular reviews. But by the end of the month I was spluttering and coughing and finally came to a stop in the middle of nowhere (metaphorically speaking of course). I’d then scrap my system, design something different, have a mind sweep and start all over again from the top.

Then I read The Four Hour Work Week and one line stood out for me, “What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.” With that I went from basically doing as much as I could for as long as I could, till I fell off the wagon, to taking a  more steady pace. I’d do more if I was energized and focused, but still at the very least be able to do the handful of important goals I’d identified if I was wobbling.

My point is that there are measures you can take to limit and even avoid the circumstances where you fall off the wagon. Why then, is it accepted and even embraced as part of GTD?

So, why not do it daily? If the benefits of reviewing your work on a weekly basis are so great, it surely makes sense that doing it daily will result in… seven times as much greatness? Well no, because we aren’t machines who work 24 hours a day at 110%. We simply don’t do enough work in an average day to need to review our results at the end of it. All you’d be doing is checking a couple of next actions here, jotting down a few forgotten about projects there… micro-managing sucks.

Reviewing monthly then, is a big no-no. If reviewing daily makes you focus on little things, then doing it monthly spreads you too thin. That’s four whole weeks without clearing your head, chasing up loose ends and closing those open loops. Ouch.

Not enough happens in a day that you need to review any of it, but plenty happens in a month, though by then you’ll probably be lost in a foggy haze of unfocused-ness to do anything about it. Doing it weekly is thus the ideal compromise… or is it? I’ve long thought that reviewing as and when you need to is the best approach. What are your thoughts?

• You can’t catch too much/too little
  There is no limit to how much you might have floating around in your head. Just because you may only have a small list of stuff captured, it doesn’t mean you’re thick. Likewise, you may have pages upon pages of thoughts and tasks to do, but that doesn’t make you a creative genius either.
• You’re not committing yourself to it
  Don’t be put off by the amount of stuff you might capture. Sure, a huge list of potential to-do’s can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t represent stuff you have to do. As long as it’s out of your head and down on paper, you can make rational judgments on whether you really need to pursue it or not. Your brain will let go of it much more easily that way.
• Don’t aim for completeness
  You can’t drag everything you might conceivably want to do out of your head. When you think you’ve got everything down, something else will always pop up. You can be thorough, and there are tools out there to help you capture as many loose thoughts as possible (like my trigger list), but you will never have the perfect mind sweep so don’t get hung up on it.
• Don’t be judgmental
  You might have a wacky idea for a project at work but you think your boss will hate it. However, you won’t stop thinking about it till you capture it. Don’t worry about jotting down a silly thought or a crazy to-do item. Regardless of your feelings about a particular idea or task, if you’re thinking about it, it needs your attention.

MIAW really fills in many of the holes and criticisms GTD had. Much of the faults I’ve felt about GTD in the past have been answered well here. Where the original book was open to a lot of mis-interpretation due to its lack of detail at times, MIAW goes into much more depth to clarify things, including a nice, detailed example about a fictitious Gracie’s Gardens, to demonstrate the key points. In particular, Allen attempts to resolve one of the bigger criticisms aimed at GTD by expanding it out of the business world and into other areas of your life. However, this is with mixed success. Despite the value of getting things done in both your work and personal life, it acutely avoids the fact work is often a big, hard chore. Allen still has some way to go to convince me that my work and personal life should be viewed as one and the same.

What rather irritated me about this book initially was the GTD lovefest that covered the first few chapters. Now I appreciate that GTD is very popular, arguably even a phenomenon as far as these sort of things go. But is it really as world changing as Allen suggests? This is not to say that he goes on some ego boost because he does admit to failings in GTD. However, to me this part of of the book felt out of place and was probably primarily there to pull in newbies to Allen’s system.

The book however, is a very good read and primarily revolves around achieving control and perspective, with the latter being about the horizons of focus, something that was barely discussed in the original book. It’s been dramatically expanded in MIAW, so much so that it could cover a book all to itself. It fits comfortably into the bigger picture now, effortlessly resolving a further criticism of GTD. There is little excuse to not gain a higher perspective after reading it.

The control element revolves around the traditional GTD workflow, with slight word changes: capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. Much of this is common GTD knowledge written in a fresh and detailed way but what’s particularly good here is that Allen focuses a lot on getting you out of the capture stage and onto the doing stage. If you listen to the average GTD-er they will talk at great length about what fancy tools they use to capture stuff but never about how they take all that and do something with it. MIAW goes a long way to resolving that.

Does this book stand up well on it’s own? It’s not as to-the-point and simple as the original which will almost certainly make it less appealing to any new audience. I’d probably recommend you read and experiment a little with GTD first if you haven’t already, otherwise many of the points made in MIAW may go over your head. What is certainly true though, is that it’s a great accompaniment and will give any GTD-er a fresh shot of motivation and food for thought. And even if David Allen’s system isn’t your thing, there is so much non-GTD specific smart discussion here that you could apply it to whatever methodology you use.

But isn’t that the point of the vertical map? Sort of. It should allow you to look at a current project, for example, and determine whether it moves you forward to your long term vision. If not, why bother with it? However, do these connections have to be explicit? I think not. This may be why many people get stuck with the vertical map. It’s worth noting that you don’t necessarily have to use all six levels of the map for it to still be effective, either.

As I discussed on Monday, I’m currently reading through Ready For Anything, David Allen’s second book after Getting Things Done. Now I don’t know if his description of the vertical map pre-dated what he wrote in GTD, but I found it made a lot more sense, so in this post I want to take some of that and hopefully explain the six levels better. Let me know if this makes it any clearer!

• What are your current tasks?
  This covers all your next actions and physical steps that you need to do to move all your commitments and responsibilities forward. These include phone calls, emails, conversations, etc. I personally have a next actions list to keep track of these. It should be something you refer to daily.
• What are your current projects?
  These are the outcomes you’ve committed to do that require more than one action to do and which you are actively working on now. Some examples include arranging a birthday party for your wife, getting your kids into school or finalizing business plans for the new year.
• What are your current areas of responsibility?
  In the GTD description of the vertical map this section seems out of place considering the goals/projects based focus in the other sections. However, I’ve always found clearly defining my roles and responsibilities to be invaluable. Responsibilities for your work might include staff development, customer service and asset management. Responsibilities in your life would be finances, health, career, recreation, family, etc.
• How will your work/personal affairs change?
  This section covers largescale objectives or goals you intend to fulfill over the next twelve months or so. It could be something like moving house, arranging a wedding or achieving a 10% increase in sales during the current financial year. Note how these represent big, multi-faceted projects that would have to be broken into smaller projects to achieve them.
• How will your career/personal life change?
  This is where you start to move from the actual to the aspirational. Here you want to start thinking about where you’d like to be ideally in your career and personal life over the next several years. Planning for a family is an obvious goal here, as is starting your own business.
• Why are you on the planet?
  Now we are at the deep end. Without being too philosophical, this covers the big picture, your purpose for being, or what your “job” as a human being is. What do you want from life? If you’ve ever experienced mission statements in business you’ll have an idea of what this section involves.
  

Two minute rule
It’s very easy to forget about the two minute rule because it seems so inconsequential. Tasks that take a mere two minutes (or so) shouldn’t be such a problem, right? Well I’ve always found that it’s actually these small, quick tasks that fill up my to-do list and, quite frankly, when you have a bunch of them to do they are a royal pain in the ass. So why did I forget about doing it? With this in mind, the two minute rule is my top principle to focus on this year.

Vertical map
It’s very easy to forget about the vertical map (or horizons of focus) and neglect the bigger picture. I have two reasons for this. Firstly, it all seems rather obvious so why overthink it?  I want to be happy and healthy, have a successful career and a loving family… you know the drill. Secondly, there is the hard to disagree with argument that though it’s fine to dream about the future, it’s what you do in the here-and-now that influences everything. But of course, just saying you want to be healthy and have a loving family isn’t enough to actually achieve it. You need an actionable plan (hence the vertical map).

Mind dump
It’s very easy to forget about the mind dump (seeing a pattern yet?). Perhaps I feared I would end up unearthing a load of extra work but that’s not how it works. Collecting and processing are two different processes. Just because I’d collated several pages of potential work to do it didn’t mean I automatically had to do it. It’s all about getting it all out of your head and freeing your mind from the mundane matters of remembering what it is you have to do.

Those are the three GTD basics I’ve most neglected over the last year and am aiming to focus on again but there are more that you can focus on. I asked people on Twitter what basics they neglect. Sam Spurlin said he fails to keep his next actions list up to date, while Howard Yermish brought up the common problem of neglecting the weekly review. Why not share some GTD basics you would like to re-focus on this year in the comments?