GTD Evangelism

A few months ago I was in bad shape. I had recently taken on a lot more responsibility at work, and found that the main thing I enjoy about work, Java architecture & coding, I didn't have any time left to do. More than that, I couldn't seem to find time to do the other stuff either. And on the rare occasions I found myself with a chunk of spare time to get some work done, I floundered, not knowing which of the hundreds of things I should tackle. This got me really, really stressed out.

Curiously, around the same time I was doing a lot of posting on the Java Posse newsgroup. Evidently I had no time to do any work, but I managed to make time for answering questions on a Java forum! Dick Wall, the guy who runs the Java Posse podcast, is also a fairly senior dude in his company. This made me wonder, how the hell does he find time to put so much work into the podcast, as well as do his job, and have a home life?!

I put this question to him, and his response included a reference to David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) system. I had a look at the website and although I was very sceptical I was also desperate, so I bought the book from Amazon, which arrived a couple of days later.

I started reading, and, as expected, it's very American-rah-rah which I suppose is to be expected. But, as I said I was desperate, so I kept going and pretty soon got very excited. It was clear from the first couple of chapters that this was going to be the answer to my problems - or at least, it had the best chance to be.

I read the whole thing in about a day and a half, then headed off to OfficeWorks. The book recommends a lot of specific stuff you should get, like an electronic label maker. I didn't see how that could be important (I do now), but I didn't want there to be any reason the system wouldn't work for me, so I just took everything literally.

My out-of-work life was a mess, to be sure, but it was my work situation that was causing me 95% of the stress, so that's where I went to work implementing the system.

The results were incredible. Within a week, I was feeling a LOT better. After 2 weeks, I had completely organised absolutely everything at work into the system, plus everything I could think of that I wanted to do with my team in the future. It was an awesome feeling - racking my brain, I could not for the life of me think of anything I hadn't covered. What I had in front of me was a beautifully organised filing system, lists of current and future projects, lists of things I needed other people to do, and best of all, a complete list of immediately doable things that would all contribute to the progress of my work. Now I would know exactly what to do when I had a chunk of time at my desk.

The effect on my stress was like magic. Since starting GTD I've been sleeping better, I feel generally positive and more energetic. Even more amazing is the effect it had on my team. The improvement is palpable.

I've been using GTD for 3 months now, and I've made many improvements to my system in that time. No doubt I will make more as I get better at it. I might use this blog to document those improvements as I go, to help people to whom I've been evangelising GTD. (I bought 4 copies of the book to hand out as Xmas presents!) I've also been watching and asking questions on the GTD forums on David Allen's website, mostly for clarification of various concepts presented in the book.

There are various software tools and add-ons out there for implementing GTD, and I looked into them, but the beauty of the system is that it is incredibly simple, and built of things that all of us already do (albeit incorrectly) to organise ourselves. So I've found the built-in features of my email applications (Outlook and Gmail) to be sufficient, although I have invested a lot of energy in getting those settings just right. I also have gone extremely low-tech for the non-digital parts of the system - for example, I now take a simple memo pad and pen to meetings.

I really think this has changed my life, and saved my career. It was clear to me already that I wasn't even coping with my current level of responsibilities, so there was no way I could take on more. And there are lots of non-work things in my life that haven't been progressing, which I feel now I can finally get moving on.

Gushing enough?