My Getting Things Done implementation and a tool transition from OneNote to Wunderlist
In this post I will relate my experiences with tools to support my personal Getting Things Done (GTD) system.
Background
I started using GTD back in early 2012 when I stumbled over a reference to the book, while looking for a better approach to e-mail inbox management. After reading an abstract of the book by David Allan, I was totally hooked on the potential that this approach could have on my daily work pattern.
If you want to know more about GTD I can recommend GTD in 15 minutes — A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done and of course David Allan’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity book.
David Allan writes his book without any preference to tools, and his examples are all centered around paper based folders and notebooks, I obviously wanted a more digital approach for my implementation. So initially I started using Outlook Task capturing actions. There was one advantage — the ability to turn an e-mail into a task with just a right-click — but the lack of good access to the Outlook Tasks on other devices particularly my phone quickly killed this idea. After a few weeks I found a couple of great articles on how to use Microsoft Outlook and OneNote for GTD and then it started to work for me.
My approach was simple. Process in Inbox and turn everything into either reference info (which I archived in Outlook or Copied to OneNote) or into an action in my Backlog list (which was just a bullet list in a Backlog OneNote page). Every week I would organize actions from the backlog list to a Today and This Week list in OneNote, and when processing the daily collaboration flow, when necessary I moved items to a Waiting For list in OneNote. All of these lists were just separate OneNote pages with each action as a bullet point, sometimes including a few comments.
This worked very well. OneNote bullets were an extremely easy format to use for actions, and the blank canvas interface invited a no-nonsense format for actions and comments, so it took little time to add stuff to backlog and move on, and moving items between lists (Backlog, This Week, Today and Waiting For) was just select and copy/paste. And OneNote was accessible and sync’ed across all my devices.
Project: “GTD to level 2”
This summer — in my vacation — I decided it was time to move my GTD implementation to a new level. I had previously not been using the Projects approach of GTD consistently, and while my implementation was good at ensuring that no task or idea was missed, it was not particularly good at helping me ensure that I always worked on the right stuff — a lot of manual processing and reviewing went into achieving this.
So I decided to revisit and refresh my GTD knowledge, and in parallel with this, look into other tools, particularly Wunderlist, where I expected I might be able to do even more with my GTD implementation. Fortunately there were many articles relating experience with using Wunderlist as a GTD tool. I am now on my 3rd week working with the results of my GTD to level 2 Project and using Wunderlist, and so far it is working out very promising.
There are a some really cool features with Wunderlist, such as the Add to Wunderlist Outlook Add-in that allow me to quickly and easily convert an e-mail to an action in Wunderlist directly from Outlook. Also the Add to Wunderlist Chrome Extension which allow me to add a web page to my Read/watch later list in Wunderlist with just a few clicks. While the browser to Wunderlist extensions is available on my iPhone, the mail to Wunderlist is currently not, but forwarding the mail to me@wunderlist.com adds it to my Wunderlist inbox and from here I can process it later.
I have now embraced the GTD Projects approach as well, and am also getting better at using Contexts. I add both Projects and Contexts as # tags to my actions (ex. #GTDtoLvl2 and #phone) which means that it is easy to search across all my lists for actions related to a specific project or dependent on a specific context.
I am still not comfortable with the Next actions being just “as soon as possible” actions, because I find that even “as soon as possible” actions have differing degree of urgency, and I feared that an urgent one would be missed if the Next actions list became too large. But I also did not want to create too many Next actions lists (with different contexts and/or projects) and risk losing overview when doing my daily prioritization. Therefore I have divided these into a Next actions (work), a Next actions (private) and a Soon list. In my weekly processing I try to keep Next actions (work) to actions I plan to complete within the upcoming week, and everything that is still “as soon as possible”, but which I do not expect to do within the upcoming week, goes to the Soon list.
Every morning I quickly go through my Next actions list and Star (a Wunderlist feature) all the actions on it that I need to (or plan to) get done today. The Star feature is nice because it allow me to keep a good overview of “Todays” stuff even though it may consist of starred actions from several lists like Next action (work), Next action (private) and Inbox (yes, I sometimes just star and complete an action in the inbox without processing it first). It even allow me to Star, and thus keep, Waiting for items on my “Today” watch list — a capability I am starting to use more and more frequently.
So my current Wunderlist lists setup now look like this:
The Contexts list is just a list with a dummy item for each context ex. #phone, #homepc, which enables me to click/tap that tag and Wunderlist will bring up a search result with all actions tagged with that context. The Projects list is a list of all my projects including a tag, which not only allow me to have an overview of my current projects, it also means I can also easily click/tap the project tag and see if I have actions on my Next actions list to move that project forward.
A note on transition
A key element (maybe even THE key element) of GTD is to have a system that you trust! This is what reduces stress levels, because your mind knows that it does not have to remember every idea and action, it is safely recorded in your lists. And after 4,5 years I trusted my GTD lists in OneNote completely!
However that also meant that when I started changing to a new system and moving the actions from OneNote to Wunderlist — which did not look exactly the same — I was amazed to find that it filled me with instant dread!
The thought of risk losing the benefits of never dropping an action or missing a great ideas, if the new system did not work as well as the old one, was actually horrifying, even though the only thing I had really done was to move a bunch of short sentences from one tool to another.
Fortunately after a few days I started seeing that I could find every action, I could capture and re-find every idea, and I started trusting the new system as I did the previous one.
Feedback?
I would love to hear from other GTDers out there on how you have implemented your GTD systems and particularly how you adapt improvements on your implementation over time.
Or from other people on how you are working with ensuring your personal productivity.
