Getting Things Done (GTD), is a productivity methodology designed by David Allen. GTD increases your productivity by getting things out of your mind, and into a reliable system that you can trust. This frees your mind to work on the task at hand, instead of trying to remember a myriad of things at once. You will find yourself more relaxed, and more productive at the same time.<\/p>\n
In particular, one easy-to-use part of GTD (which I describe later), only takes 2
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minutes to learn, but can increase
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your efficiency by phonemenal levels.<\/p>\n
There are many parts to GTD. One important component is next-action lists, which
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replace to-do lists in other methodologies.<\/p>\n
David Allen realised that in today’s dynamic society, todo lists, daily plans, etc, often
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do not work. If everything and everyone around you is going 100% to plan they can
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work, but how often does everything go according to plan? A meeting runs longer
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than expected, the report you need isn’t ready yet, or the computer network goes
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down for an hour, and your whole day can go out of whack.<\/p>\n
David Allen’s solution to this was next action lists. Rather than plan out the day
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based on projects, you list the next-action items for tasks you have to do. You
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record these next-actions into separate lists based on context.<\/p>\n
This is best shown with an example…<\/p>\n
Suppose you had the following todo list:
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The first step in GTD is to change the list to be based on the next physical action for
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each project:
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By listing the next specific physical action, it becomes much easier to proceed on
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the projects. You might procrastinate on “Prepare for the department meeting”, but
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“Print out the financial report for the department meeting”, seems like a much easier
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thing for you to tackle, and therefore, you are MUCH more likely to get it done. Just
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this one idea alone will increase your productivity dramatically! It seems simple, but
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it is actually quite profound, because it focuses your mind on ACTION.<\/p>\n
The next step in Getting Things Done, is to move these next-action’s into separate
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lists based on context:<\/p>\n
@Phone (Things I can do when I am at a phone):
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@Computer:
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@Home:
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Why have separate lists? The main benefit is that it lets you look at the tasks that are
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only suitable to where you are at the moment. If you are at work, you aren’t
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distracted by the tasks that are on the @Home list, and if you are at home, you
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aren’t distracted by the work tasks. The actual GTD contexts that you use are up to
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you. The standard ones that David Allen recommends are generally based on
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location (like the ones above), but you can use whatever works best for you.<\/p>\n
Another benefit of separating out the lists into contexts is that it becomes easy to
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change what you are working on quickly if something goes wrong. Suppose your in
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the middle of some research online, and the computer network goes down. Whilst
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other people might decide it’s time for a coffee break, you can just look at you
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phone list, and start tackling some of the @Phone tasks instead.<\/p>\n
Breaking your todo lists into next-action lists based on context may seem like a lot
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more work than a standard todo list, but it isn’t really. It only takes a little bit longer
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to plan, but the increase in productivity more than compensates for this.<\/p>\n
Next-Actions lists are a small part of the Getting Things Done methodology. They
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are useful on their own, but their power is multiplied when used with the rest of
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David Allen’s system. GTD is incredibly effective, and I highly encourage you to try it
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out for yourself, by reading David Allen’s book (“Getting Things Done: The Art Of
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Stress Free Productivity”), or by trying out some GTD software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Getting Things Done (GTD), is a productivity methodology designed by David Allen. GTD increases your productivity by getting things out of your mind, and into a reliable system that you can trust. This frees your mind to work on the task at hand, instead of trying to remember a myriad of things at once. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[269,3573,3572],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techfeatured.com\/automotive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}