2006-02-10
10:48
GTD’s Dirty Secrets
There’s two little secrets and one Big Dirty Secret to GTD. Don’t get me wrong here – I like GTD – it’s a useful system, and it works well. There’s a couple of secrets that you’re never told, though, and one big secret. It’s time to let the secrets out.
(Drumroll…)
(Feeling the tension yet?)
(Maybe I’m giving this too much build-up.)
(Here goes…)
- The best way to get things done is to do them.
There. It doesn’t matter how much you push things around your lists, and how carefully you pick the contexts for them, if you don’t do them, you won’t get them done. Sounds obvious when it’s all spelled out, doesn’t it? Does to me now I’ve worked it out, but until I did, I could spend weeks moving things around my lists without actually ever doing anything.
Actually, I still can, but at least I know what’s going on now. I’m just no good at doing anything about it.
If you’re not careful, your GTD system itself can become a whole world of procrastination that you rarely escape from to actually do things. Anyway, this leads us to the second secret…
- The best way to do them is to start doing them.
Again, it sounds obvious, but how many things are on your lists that you haven’t started doing even though you’ve had time (if you’re honest). I can spend all day flat out doing absolutely nothing, and at the end of the day, I haven’t started on anything useful at all. I haven’t had time.
If you’re going to get any of those things done, you need to actually start doing them. The start doesn’t have to be much. Mark Forster has a simple trick that he refers to as just getting the file out. You make a start by giving yourself permission to do the smallest possible amount of work on something, even if it wouldn’t help at all, but you make yourself do that bit. It might just be getting the file out, or it might just be creating and opening a blank document that you could start typing in if you were going to do more. But you don’t have to do more. If you’ve been putting off doing the dishes, you could just put them in the sink and add some hot water.
The point is that the very small step isn’t offputting enough that you don’t start, but once you’ve started, you probably won’t stop and put the file away again. You probably won’t just close the document without doing anything else, and you probably won’t leave the dishes to sit in the water or drain the sink again – you might at least write a paragraph or two, or jot down a few ideas that occur to you whilst you’re there, or at least wash a few items. The key is to get yourself started.
OK. That’s the two little secrets. Ready for the big one? Oh, come on, don’t kid me – it’s just underneath this text, and I know you’ve already skipped ahead and read it…
- GTD is of no help at all with making you want to do things.
It’s a nice little method of keeping track of all the things you need to do, but if you don’t actually want to do them in the first place, it won’t make you want to do them when they’re on the lists. I even find myself resisting looking at the context lists, because I know they’ll be full of things I don’t actually want to do. The problem lies in making yourself want to do the things on your lists, otherwise you won’t start doing them. And as we’ve already covered – if you don’t start doing them, you won’t get them done.
So how do you make yourself want to do things? That’s a tricky one, and I don’t really have any answers. (No, come back. I’ve got a few ideas. They might help.) If your lists are too full of things you really don’t want to do, it might be time to have a good think about your life – is it what you want? Is your job something you actually don’t want to do? How can you go about changing it? Maybe you actually don’t want to do all that DIY work to get your house into the state you want it in, and you’d have been better moving somewhere that wasn’t described as “ideal for a DIY enthusiast” in the brochure.
Assuming things are basically how you want them, it might be that you just need to spend a bit more time thinking at the higher levels – working out why you’re actually doing some of these things – what’s the longer term gain from them? Visualise where you want to be, and how some of the tasks that are on your lists will help with getting you there – that might give you that extra bit of motivation to get going on them, or at least to stop being scared of looking at the lists.
Alternatively, just give yourself permission to go through your lists, and move a few things you really don’t want to do (and won’t cause any really huge problems if you don’t do them), and just move them to your Someday/Maybe list. You can always move them back once you get a few other things out of the way, but if you’ve not been doing them anyway, you’re not losing anything by getting rid of them – and it might just make the lists feel a bit more enticing.
Once you actually want to do the things on your lists, GTD is a great way to organise them – it will give you nice simple lists of the things you can do at any point, with a fairly minimal overhead. Until you want to do them, though, it can be just another way to put them off.
This is why I suspect like most people, reading Neil Fiore’s classic book and using it along side GTD by David Allen is important to actually getting things done.
The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play
Thanks for the suggestion, Craig.
I’ve found I get a lot of good ideas from reading Mark Forster’s blog, and his latest book “Do It Tomorrow” sounds excellent. I’ve found more success recently from a simple ‘ToDo’ list, coupled with making ‘WillDo’ lists on days when I think I need them.
This is probabily the best, most down-to-Earth, short article ever writen about the subject of DOING THINGS in oppose to organizing them. Thanks.
This is so true. I am trying to mash-up GTD and another book I just recently read called “Aligned Thinking” Basically the book helps you see that what you are doing is aligned with your goals and there is a reason why you are doing something. The book is an easy read and quite helful but I am still trying to use techniques of Aligned Thinking and GTD to come up with a good system. That way I will want to do all of the things listed since they are in alignment with my goals set up using Aligned Thinking.
That certainly looks like an interesting book, and very well received in the reviews at Amazon – unfortunately, it’s not listed at all over here in the UK.
I think a lot of people have tried mashing up GTD with 7 Habits, and had limited success, but I’ve not heard about Aligned Thinking before – thanks, Don.
Found this post through a Technorati link to your mention of my Getting Nothing Done post at Moleskinner, and I really like your take on this. Lately I’m absolutely fed up with the whole boatload of planning systems. Last week, my wife and I were walking through Office Depot and we started talking about all the elaborate organization schemes we’ve floundered through over the years. And there’s no question: We’ve spent more time planning and organizing and prioritizing all the things we’ve had to do than we’ve spent actually doing them. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
…and I’m a tweakaholic.
I just love playing with notebooks, and pens, and pencils, and PDAs, and PIMs, and…
Maybe I have a little problem
Excellent article
Just finished setting up a GTD system today (only 3/4 through the book), felt something was missing. I naively thought my 3×5-card GTD system would become animated and start dancing around like that Disney cartoon, sprinkling productivity into my procrastinating life. Until I read your blog and realized I now have more work to do, it’s just more organized.
This was actually the reason I stopped using a Palm many years ago, I spent so much time tweaking and organizing my ToDo’s/Memos, I actually got less work done, and found that a pad & calendar with tasks and invented-icons was simply faster and easier. I guess it’s like the saying `Don’t kill a fly with a cannon’.
Just my $0.02. Once again, great article, it’s a reminder that GTD really is about Getting Things Done, not Putting Things In Folders and Organizing Them Every Week
Thanks, Netstormer. I’m afraid I’m better at Putting Things In Folders and Orgainzing Them Every Week than at actually Getting Things Done – it’s more fun.
And killing a fly with a cannon sounds kind of fun too, come to think of it. Probably depends whose house the fly is in, though.
I’m experimenting with a personal wiki at the moment, but even there I’ve got carried away. I started with a TiddlyWiki variant, but then decided it wouldn’t scale enough, and I’ve ended up installing Apache, MySQL and PHP, then setting up MediaWiki. Heh. Sometimes I spend all day shaving Yaks.
But – there’s some really smooth yaks around here
I think this is where an outliner like LifeBalance might start to become more useful. Not only does it filter to the top things that you may or may not want to do (although that’s usually not enough incentive for me), it’s ubiquitous pie charts do give you incentive to do the things you’ve been putting off by encouraging you to balance you pie chart. The only reason I like my Palm Organizer is that I can carry my lists around with me (without having to write out yet another list), but it does take longer than scribbling things down on paper or cards. My original system had cards laid out by goals/projects on a big peg board. It depressed the hell out of me because I ran out of room to put up to do cards and the sheer volume was overwhelming. Thanks for the article!
I did try LifeBalance, back when I was using Palms, and it’s a bit of an odd thing. Once you get all the sliders tweaked to the right places, it’s kind of magical – it really does seem to just know what you should be doing, and its handling of GTD-style contexts is excellent.
I’ve not tried it, but MyLifeOrganized looks to be a similar sort of thing for Windows and Windows Mobile. There’s a freeware edition, but I think one of the limitations is that you can’t set up contexts.
It might not make me want to do things, but it helps me do them anyway. That’ll do.
It’s that Yoda philosophy.
Sorry, I mean: “Ah, that Yoda philosophy it is, hmmm?”
Things Done Getting!
I know I’m late to reply on this one, but I have to disagree with “GTD is of no help at all with making you want to do things.” In my own experience, I tend to end up with a lot of things that I want to have done even though I don’t want to do them — the most recent example was getting rid of two marginal motorcycles from the garage. Even though I gave myself a reward for doing it (once both are gone, I can get a new bike), “get rid of them” was way too big a thing for me to ever start rather than procrastinate.
But turning it into next actions (“find out if I can make more by fixing them and then selling them, or just selling them as-is”, “post ads for as-is bikes”, etc.) has got it started, and the particular distinction between project and action is what got my ass moving on that.
So GTD isn’t about making you want to do things, but it can reduce the things you don’t want to do (but that you’d love to have off your plate) into little palatable steps. It’s like cheese sauce to steamed broccoli.
I agree with pigpogm–it’s a good distinction to make between the two kinds of things that aren’t getting done:
1) things you want to get done, but find overwhelming because there are too many steps to them you haven’t thought out (e.g. get rid of motorcycle so you can have room/buy a new one),
-versus-
2) things you THINK you should be doing, but could really care less and should just ditch.
In both cases, GTD can help. In number 1, you make it manageable with the next actions list and break down the project so it’s not a huge mass of “have to get rid of motorcycle!” In number 2, you move it to the “someday/maybe” category, which I think the original post mentioned. Or kill it altogether if you REALLY don’t want to ever do it.
Of course, I’m just talking out of my a**
because I haven’t really applied this yet. Next task: move 90% of my projects into “someday/maybe”!
Twinkie
I see what you mean, but it’s probably down to a matter of interpreting the words. In your case, I’d say you really wanted to get rid of the bikes – GTD didn’t make you want to do it, but it made it manageable. That’s one of the things GTD does best – it helps and facilitates you in doing the things you actually do want to do, but find too big or difficult.
Hi all,
I am reading through GTD related pages (mostly blogs, interesting) and I have found this article. And I, obviously, have things to say and I must say them. Even though it is an old entry, I may not not find my way back here (I gave my e-mail just in case…)…
I have not read the book, only few articles, so if I am telling something obvious (or obviously wrong), please forgive me.
The story of the tree: I have installed some new stuff on my new PC, which led to installing the Firefox browser, which led to looking at the available extensions, found GTDGMail… and I have now 12 tabs open. All started by the innocent installation of software for my DVD-RAM drive.
So the tree grew, and with todays enormous amount of available information on the Web it can grow for ever. Yeah, I could start writing Next Things To Do, but it may end up being several A4 pages. Just as frightening as the situation GTD is against…
So sometimes, when enthusiasm takes you on a wild ride into growing a tree of things to do: you need to let the leaves fall. I find it that an “idea box” or “things to know about” – quite the opposite of Next Step – is taking the teeth out. Just jot down the keyword(s), and when you feel like it, do a search with your favorite search engine. Instead of detailing it, wrap it up into an innocent looking few words.
I used to keep notes around, papers with thoughts etc., bookmarking the pages to read, saving stuff to read later… But all I end up with is a large, unmanageable bookmark folder, and papers everywhere. So nowadays I just write down (for example) GTD and perhaps an ISBN/author, and let all the current possibilities (leafs) to leave my mind. Google will get me back there – and more – it will get me to the current possibilities of that particular time.
Learning is a thing hard to plan. In my job, I have to learn all the time, and I have started to do it also for non-technical issues. When you study/research a topic, it oftentimes leads to just too many branches to manage. There are 2 solutions: find a good introductory book to guide you in the jungle step by step, or abort your research (IOWs do not get carried away) and just continue later, starting with a few key words again, looking at the available information. Sometimes, giving time – for all things read – to sink is all that is needed to be able to continue with a higher understanding.
I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes you need to let “opportunities” go away. And one can do that on most subjects with confidence: the Net and the info will be there. So I load off my mind by few simple words.
I think this is (perhaps) a special case of Defer. Defer with keywords, perhaps.
I hope I did not bore anyone too much.
WW
I’ve been using GTD for several months now, and I totally know what you’re talking about. “Hey, look! I’ve got everything I need to do written down in these organized files! I guess I should go watch TV.” I kinduv expected GTD to do my work for me. Or at least force me to get it done. But it turns out, I have to actually DO things once in a while.
Well put.
-Adam