The ‘How I do It’ Guide to Getting Things Done: Part One

5,000 unread emails. 5 email accounts to review across work & personal devices. A 6-inch high paper in-tray at home

These log-jams inflict a nagging tug on your mind that there’s stuff to do and you ain’t doing it. This nag uses up thinking energy, interrupts your clarity, reduces your effectiveness.

New AI based tools can help you manage the email/task beast and identify what’s important and needs action. They don’t help with the offline world though. They don’t help you manage the goals and objectives you have.

So here’s my approach. It’s not the only way. Certainly won’t suit everyone. But it works (for me). I of course welcome feedback & suggestions to improve.

So, I have three requirements:

1. It’s Simple
2. One Universal Inbox to capture everything that i can access everywhere
3. Secure, private and backed up!

I don’t want or need complicated tagging, proprietary software tools, unfriendly online-only web tools or the host of other ‘solutions’ out there.

It’s loosely based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), but before you move on to avoid yet another GTD article (you don’t have time right?), i want to reassure you that this is a practical how-to — it may take 40 minutes to setup and some discipline to manage but it works. I can vouch for that.

How does it work?

Every email, project, task, thought that needs some level of action finds it way into my Universal Inbox (let’s call that the !INBOX for now).

Anything that can be one-and-done in under 2 minutes is done during one of my planned sessions each day (more on that later) and therefore avoids being added to !INBOX.

Anything that will take longer needs to be added to !INBOX and scheduled according to it’s priority & the time it will take. Oh, and by ‘action’ i am also referring to thinking time not just executing stuff.

So establish a !INBOX.

You can do it in your email client (But I struggled to quickly manage adhoc tasks, documents I needed to work on, web pages I wanted to read etc)

You can use tools like Evernote (I don’t as I have increasing concerns over security, readability and confidence that I had access in-perpetuity)

You can use a notebook (which i tend to lose)

My choice is Finder; the file management tool that’s part of OSX. You can equally use Explorer or some other file management solution.

I created a folder structure as follows:

!INBOX: this is the folder i collect all of those tasks that need scheduling

I have three folders which manage my take on “tickler files”

‘When (d)’: manages days

‘When (m): manages months

‘When (y): manages years

Finally, i have ZZ Archive where things i have completed or finished with are moved to.

Within each folder, i have a naming convention which use alphanumeric sorting to represent each day, month and year.

Here’s my workflow:

1. If it’s not obvious that a task needs to be done on a certain day, month or year; It is added to my !INBOX folder (I’ll get to how i do that shortly). 95% of incoming tasks go here.
2. At the end of each day i review the !INBOX folder and move the task to the relevant day when i plan to either complete it or start work on it. I have a daily recurring 30 minute meeting in my calendar at 1730 on workdays for this. I also have a 60 minute slot on Sunday to plan the upcoming week.
3. The logic for the folders are:

• 0-This Week: I need to do it this week but it doesn’t matter when or i can’t decide which day yet. I review this folder in each daily review
• 8-Next Week: Something that needs to be done next week. I review this on the Sunday planning session.
• m0x-xxx: The month in which it needs to be done (in the future). Can contain tasks for the current month that are not this or next week.
• Yr-xxxx: The year in which it needs to be done (in the future)

I added links to Finder’s sidebar so i can access the most-used folders quickly (see left hand side of image)

I also have !INBOX in my OSX menu bar.

The final part of the setup, is that all these folders exist within Dropbox. The folders are also backed up to my local TimeMachine.

This means i have access to my files at home, work and mobile — both online and offline.

I think that’s enough for Part One.

In Part Two, i’ll cover how i quickly add things to !INBOX from email, web and when i’m on the go.

I’ll also cover off the obvious elephant in the room; security.

Part Three will cover how I schedule & execute tasks and projects. To-do lists are not enough.

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