Getting Things Done for Clubs and Association Leaders

Published in

MemberMan

7 min readNov 30, 2015

Getting Things Done: Picture of man relaxing at a hand-drawn desk

Not too long ago my wife asked me to help her organize her to-do list. She said she felt overwhelmed by her task list, and was tired of the nagging guilty feeling in the back of her mind that, no matter how important was the task she was working on, there was something else that needed her attention. Having recently read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and successfully implemented the methodology to move past my own guilt-inducing task list, I was happy to try it out on someone else.

The Getting Things Done® methodology can be used by anyone to reduce stress, increase productivity, and generally improve your overall feeling of well-being. It’s particularly useful for club and association leaders, who have so many different areas of influence, and whose jobs tend to be more relational than task-oriented.

Quick explanation of Getting Things Done methodology.

tl;dr: First of all, read the book! There’s no substitute for David Allen’s easy-to-read style of explanation and getting the word from the horse’s mouth. Stop chasing your tail and take control of your to-do list. Collect everything (that means everything) into your inbox (maybe multiple inboxes). Regularly process the inbox. Organize your tasks into projects. Do or delegate the tasks. Periodically review your system.

1. Capture

The first step in Getting Things Done is to capture everything and anything into an inbox. Anything that comes across your desk, pops into your mind, or otherwise presents itself as a task that needs to be accomplished gets captured into your inbox.

I recommend setting up several inboxes, each suited to the kind of information that it handles. Email naturally has its own inbox — that’s already a great place to start. There are also many other kinds of inbox, and you might have more than one of them. In addition to your email inbox, you might have a paper inbox on your desk, a folder on your computer’s desktop, a notepad that you keep in your pocket, and an app on your phone to capture thoughts and tasks. In each case, the inbox is where things go when they first come to your attention.

What goes into your inbox?

Tasks you need to complete at a later date
Articles you don’t have time to read at the moment
Something you’d like to look up on the web at a later time
A note to send to someone when you get back to the office
Items you need to add to your shopping list

Capturing things into your inboxes serves two purposes: first, it catches that item and puts it in a place where it won’t be forgotten. Second, and more importantly, it allows you to take your mind off of that item. The human mind, as wonderful as it may be, is actually a terrible place to keep track of tasks. Our short-term working memory can only keep track of a limited number of active items. Trying to keep your tasks in your head (instead of capturing them into your inbox), causes stress — it’s the source of the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that there’s something else that you should be working on right now. As David Allen says on the homepage of his website, “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” Without the confidence that you’ve captured all your tasks and gotten them out of your head, you’ll walk around all day with a feeling of unease and distraction. It’s hard to be productive when you have unfinished tasks hanging out on the fringes of your consciousness. On the other hand, capturing those tasks into your system gives you the confidence to forget about them for the moment, because you know that they’re not forgotten, and you’ll get to them in turn.

Here’s my list of tools that I use for capturing:

Gmail (I use Gmail’s new Inbox for getting to inbox zero)
Evernote for capturing random thoughts, notes, and web pages using their browser plugin. I use Evernote as both my personal and business journal.
iOS Reminders for capturing random tasks that I think of when I’m away from my computer. I use Siri to say things like “Remind me to buy more printer paper at Costco”.
OmniFocus for organizing my task lists. I create a project for any logical group of tasks (MemberMan Marketing, Vacation Plans, Shopping List, and School Fundraiser are each projects), and a context for where those tasks happen (Office, Phone, Errands, etc).

Process

Each day you should sit down with your inbox and figure out what to do with each item. It’s important to only handle each item once — you should never put anything back in your inbox. After you finish processing your inbox, it should be empty. If you’ve ever heard about “inbox zero” this may seem intimidating at first. But trust me, it’s worth it. Your task list is a great place to put tasks — your inbox isn’t. If you’re using your inbox as a task list (“I’ll just flag that email for later and leave it in the inbox”) you’re setting yourself up for overwhelm.

When you process your inbox, pick up each item and give it your full attention. What needs to be done to this item? Is it something that can be knocked out in two minutes? Then just do it right then. A paper that needs to be filed? File it right then. Waiting on someone else for that task? Delegate that task to them. Something that requires time and attention, such as a project that you’re working on? Put it in the place that you’ve set aside for that project (we’ll talk about that under “organize”, next). Does it have a deadline? Put that on your calendar right now.

When processing my email inbox, I will generally try to reply to most emails at that time. If the email contains an event or deadline, I’ll put that on my calendar, including a link back to the message in the event description, then archive the message to remove it from my inbox. Gmail makes it easy to create an event from a message. If the email is something I can delegate to someone else, I’ll forward it to that person at that time, and then archive it. If it requires more action from me, I’ll create a reminder in my task list (along with a link to the original message), and then archive it. This gets my emails out of my inbox and into the task list where they belong.

Organize

Organizing is simply the process of putting things where they belong. Separate your tasks into categories or projects, and create a separate task list for each project. Often times you’ll find that you need to break down tasks that you’ve collected into smaller parts. For example you might have collected a task called “Organize Annual Meeting”. There are probably several distinct tasks involved in this, so you should turn Organize Annual Meeting into a project. Now create a new task list with this heading, and place all tasks related to it under this heading: “print last meeting minutes”, “confirm meeting date and time”, “send meeting notice”, “proofread agenda”; all the discrete tasks involved in organizing your annual meeting should go on this list. Similarly, you should create a separate list for each project or discrete area of work.

Many people will find physical paper lists to be the easiest way to organize multiple task list. Paper is nice because it’s tactile and easy to move around. You can have a separate sheet of paper for each task list. If you organize your projects into working folders, you can keep the task list for that project in its folder.

Personally, I find it easier to keep my task lists on my computer. I use OmniFocus to organize my many lists into projects. Organizing my task lists on the computer makes it easy to collect tasks from my many different inboxes. It’s then easy to move tasks between projects, and it eliminates having to write things down more than once or scratch things off a paper list.

Do

Organizing is an ongoing process. After you’ve processed and organized your tasks, it’s time to do them! When you do your tasks, pick up each one and complete it with the confidence that this is the most important thing that you can work on at this moment.

Review

Every week or so you should review your system. When you review you should take a quick look at each project or area of work, and see how you’ve done. Make sure that every task is in its proper project. Review deadlines, and adjust due dates. Remove tasks that have been completed, and delete anything that’s no longer relevant. Make note of any tasks that weren’t completed, and make a plan for completing them. Look at what you did do, and congratulate yourself!

Tools

The simplest tool for Getting Things Done is pen and paper. But there are so many great software products now that it’s a tempting choice.

If you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person who pushes yourself to accomplish more and be more productive. You can make your life easier and even exceed your own expectations by adopting a methodology like Getting Things Done.

GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company.