Tutorial - 'Gettings Things Done' process

Introduction

The book 'Gettings Things Done' by David Allen contains a method for organizing your business & personal life. You can get a look at the book at Amazon.

The method in short

'Getting Things Done' isn't really magic; it just takes a hierarchical view of what you're doing (both personal & at the office) and lets you record it so you can clear your head and rely on a number of checklists to avoid forgetting what you're supposed to do.

In contrast to what Stephen Covey's methods though, which were rigid in that you had to plan things tightly in advance, these modern times ask for more flexibility, and David Allen's does just that. It focuses less on agenda planning and lets you move time around flexibly.

Organiser fits this paradigm quite perfectly. Try to follow the reasoning below:

• All things you need to do should be stored in Organiser. Small things that you can do in under 2 minutes should be done immediately, so you don't fill too much into a checklist.
• Try to avoid having multiple lists, for example, lists on paper, other files (Word for example). Keeping a centralized location to store the things you need to do allows you to trust that list. The target is to keep your mind clear so you don't wander of still thinking of all the several checklists you might have. Use one.
• On incoming tasks, decide whether to trash the task immediately (don't enter/store) or to archive it. For mail, just archive in your email client. For tasks, archiving often doesn't really make much sense, so you can also decide to delete processed tasks.
• Create projects, then subprojects, subdiving your taskload into actions. You can see 'Projects' as administrative splitters, while you can name Subprojects to represent goals. For example: for a project where you want to build a bike, you might create a group (project) 'Bike', then under that, create a group (goal) 'Find wheels' that contains the actions 'Check friends for any spare wheels'.
• For planned actions, use the 'Task' item in Organiser. For chores where you don't really want to set a date, adding 'Todo' items are good enough. Organiser will highlight the tasks that are current.
• Delegate tasks if needed; Organiser contains 'Contact' items, so you can assign 'Tasks' to persons other than yourself.
• When a task is done, click the checkbox in front of the task/todo to mark it as completed.
• Tasks that you may want to do, but that are currently not really important, can be stored in a 'Someday' folder. Store the active projects in a folder called 'Active'.
• Every week, check all the items in the list. Delete or check all items that are done or obsolete, to keep your database of things-to-do clean. This is important to avoid clutter and possible ignoring items due to the sheer size.
• Every week, or perhaps somewhat less, check outside the 'Active' folder. For example, the 'Someday' folder may contain inspirational ideas that become more urgent or just become a possibility.

'Gettings Things Done' for Organiser

To setup this method in Organiser, follow these steps:

• Create a new document
• Add an 'Active' group
• Select the top ('All') group and add a 'Someday' group
• Add a 'List of Projects' group to the top. Enter a small list of projects here that are currently running, so you have a short overview of all the projects that are currently running. Use 'Todo' items for example, or 'Fact' items to store the descriptions of the projects.
• Optionally also add a 'Contacts' group to the top

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