read and implement Getting Things Done

two or so years after buying it!

I found Allen’s writing style a little obtuse but the ideas quite worthwhile. Psychological research shows that change occurs when we break ideas down into their components and attack those, rather than than trying to change at the higher level. Even just thinking about writing as “I’m doing 5 minutes of brain dump” rather than “I’m writing a novel” makes the writing much easier to tackle.

I’m spending the week in the collecting and processing phase-I’m a paper piler and there have been tremendous piles of papers to sort through (3 garbage bags full of what I’ve thrown out so far). I’ve also been looking for optimal “buckets” to keep my ideas in. I think I’ll be using the combination of (a)my PlannerPad calendar, (b)a small carry-with notebook to capture info on the go, which I then toss into my inbox for weekly processing, along with© a computerized outline (which I’ve set up very similar to the way that this person has set his file up-http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/wiki/index.php/HogBayNotebook/JesseGrosjeansNotebook. Except I’m using Action Outline instead, since I’m on a Windows machine.

It was, in fact, reading around on the web and getting ideas of how other people are implementing the program that helped the ideas become more concrete and got me all the way through reading the book.