Finish the GTD book.

I bought it months ago and have only managed to read a couple of chapters.

I keep wanting to wait until I really, really have time to read and dedicate myself to it. But I picked it up again this morning and I’m going to finally finish it, soon. Hopefully.

Very good book. I also bought the tape series that I found to be very useful during downtimes.

Ok, finally finished it (it’s been months and months in coming). I am most of the way towards implementing it – have a filing cabinet, folders and labeler, and a Hipster PDA for idea capture and listmaking.

As I imagine is the case with many people, I need to focus on the weekly and daily reviews, and then of course there’s the discipline of just doing the damn things on your action list.
Anyways, excellent book.

The first time through I just concentrated on getting the big picture of the system. The second time I read for the how-to. I’m currently working on implementing the system and am referring to specific sections fairly frequently. Postit flags and the book’s index are my friends!

I want to re-read this book in a few months and see how much of it I’ve remembered and applied. There were some really good ideas, some common-sense and some which gave me a new way to look at time management.

There were two main things I walked away with. The first is to build your to-do lists from achievable 1 step actions rather than the result you want to achieve.

The second is to have several to-do lists based on where they can be done, meaning you’re not always running over your list thinking “nope, I can’t do that just now”.

You still have to think about what you want to achieve, but this goes on a project list. Projects are anything which will take more than one action to complete. It’s important to make your projects achievable, so that you can actually mark them done rather than let the list build up.

I tried lots of software to implement GTD, liked Ecco Pro, but eventually settled on Life Balance. It’s really made me appreciate my old Palm m505, and now I am budgeting for a Treo. It’s made me realise that the value of a PDA isn’t the technology itself, but the software it runs. I would have got a MS thing but now I’m liking Palm software.

And a good system.

Now if only I can be more disciplined about the “Weekly Review”.

I started implementing Getting Things Done part way though with a Tickler File and separating collection from collation in a Hipster PDA. It took me quite some time to read to the end of the book, however.

I read through the book without properly starting to implement the system just so i could see whether it would be a good fit for the way I work, and I have to say that I’m very impressed so far.

Going to begin re-reading the book again tommorrow to start implementing the suggestions.

I started doing the GTD thing and it was working so well that I stopped reading the book. I bet there’s some hidden thing at the end that makes it even better.

I do have all my tools, I just need to finish the book to make sure I’m using them correctly.