Organize IT

Blasthemy! I hope the productivians don’t strike me down ;) Here is my list of issues with GTD that I have picked out. These are a mix of my own and other’s experiences that were shared in a previous post asking the readers what they disliked. This is meant as a one-sided critique and as such is not strictly representative of my true feelings. If you disagree with any points please do share your thoughts. Also, be sure to suggest any points I may have missed.

Getting Things Done is really just a collection of habits, and when they are all adopted into your life they bring about a marked improvement in your productivity and general work performance. However the problem is the GTD book isn’t exactly written in terms of habit building so it can be tricky for a newbie to come along and put it all into practice on a regular basis. In an attempt to address this I will do a mini series covering the different elements of GTD and giving some insight into how to build them up into habits. For an introduction to the methods I will be using checking out my article on habit building.

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When it comes to maximizing how productive you can be there is a lot of talk about adopting frameworks like GTD or Covey’s Seven Habits, cutting down your projects list to the essentials, finding the right tools, avoiding procrastination etc. However in this article I want to discuss another point to increasing your productivity that tends to get overlooked – speeding up your work so that that you will be getting things done faster (for the purposes of this post lets call it GTDF).

Last week I did the first two parts to this series looking at questions you should ask yourself when thinking about designing your GTD system. Over the weekend I had another think and came up with a further three questions. Have any readers found them useful? Can you think of any other questions of your own? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Welcome to the second part of this guide looking at questions you need to ask yourself when thinking through how you are going to create your GTD system so you have something that fits your own personal needs. This was originally going to be a two part series but thanks to feedback I hope to expand it further. If anybody tries applying these questions to their systems to see if they can cut down the amount of times they fall off the bandwagon, let me know about it.