It's a big job,
Getting Things Done. David Allen's clever system takes effort but it actually works and despite all the work you have to put into it, you do tend find yourself feeling lighter than you used to. Fewer things are pressing on your mind because you're handling them all. If the hardest part of GTD is keeping at it then we'd say the second hardest part is understanding Allen's corporate language. Hopefully we've dealt with translating that all week – including
yesterday's coverage of the single most vital part of GTD – but now we want you to go do things. We want you to do them with our recommendations of specific Apple technologies and software.
We've nothing we rush to tell you for the very first step of GTD, the part where you blast down every single task you can possibly think of. You could write that in Evernote, you could write it in Word. We'd look at a mind map app like MindNode but at this point the job is to get things down and any way you do that is fine. Even paper. We wouldn't recommend doing this into a To Do app because it's just too much of a slog entering a few hundred To Do tasks in one go.
Once you've got this massive list, work it: drop some things you know you'll never do, examine other projects and think about whether you've actually written down all the tasks you need for that. This takes time but you end up with the real picture: all the tasks in your life and in your head that you will actually do. Then it's off to the software for certain.
Capturing tasks
Capture is David Allen's term for writing down every task as it occurs to you. Alongside all those tasks you just came up with, there's that one when you put down your mug and went to the kitchen. There's the eighteen you find on your desk in the office tomorrow morning. All day long, you get given tasks and you think up your own: capturing is about recording all of those. It is not, emphatically underlined, not about doing them.
If you get a task and you can do it, you want to do it, it takes two minutes, just go do it. Don't bother capturing the task, just get it done and move on. For anything more than that, anything from a stray, unfinished thought of a task to a giant project, capture it and get on with your day. Know that you will come to it later and that you'll make decisions about it then.
You've already got all the tools you need to capture. We do very much recommend Apple's free Reminders app that came on your iPhone and iPad. As basic as it is, it has great features and there are people who use it daily despite also being deeply addicted to bigger, more complex systems.
You also already have Siri: "Hey, Siri, remind me to phone Burt about the spanner when I leave here" is immensely useful. It's so useful that other systems piggyback on Siri and Reminders for this: you can set up Things and OmniFocus to scoop up those reminders and include them with the rest of your To Do tasks. We do this every day.
When Reminders isn't enough, do look at
Todoist,
Things and
OmniFocus because they all give you other ways to rapidly add tasks. With our favourite OmniFocus, for instance, whatever we're doing on our Macs we can press a couple of keys and be entering a new task into it. Jot that down, hit Return and we're back to our work knowing that OmniFocus has that new task.
Since we began this series of Pointers articles there have been two developments that help productivity and GTD on Apple gear. One is the release of an updated version of
Dispatch, an email application that replaces your Apple Mail. The updated version now works on iPad as well as iPhone and what it gives you is the ability to send an email straight from your inbox into a To Do app. Some apps have already got their own systems for doing this but you're probably like us in how you get most of your tasks via email so something that speeds this up is good.
The second is that
Workflow has just been updated to version 1.3 and adds the ability to make more use of iOS 8's Notification Center: you can set it up so that with one swipe down from the top of your iPhone or iPad and then one tap of a button, you can be entering a new task into popular To Do apps. Two minutes into using this we had OmniFocus set up with a button.
Processing
You dumped all those tasks into your To Do app, now you have to sort them out. The most important thing, which you can do in any To Do app, is delete things. Think about the task you've entered and you'll sometimes find you've done it since you added it, sometimes you'll know it's no longer needed. Delete them immediately. Your To Do app is not a record of what you've been doing, it's an active tool for what you can do next. So delete anything and everything that you can.
Thereafter, look at the remaining tasks and write them out properly: write them as if someone else is going to do them. Also, if it's something big and vague like 'decorate house' then think about what that really entails. What is the very first thing that needs to be done before you can start? It could be that you need pick a paint color, it could be that you need to work out your budget. Whatever it is, write that down and drag it around your To Do app until it's above the 'decorate house' line. That's what David Allen calls your Next Action and we swear by this one.
If you're using Reminders, also look at dividing your tasks into different lists. This isn't ideal because often you need to see everything or at least to see, say, every phone call you need to make, regardless of how this one is for work and that one is for groceries.
With OmniFocus, Things and most middle to serious level To Do apps you get projects. Avoid having too many of them –– though we can talk, we've got 73 on the go right now –– but pop the task into one of those. That way you've thought about it enough that you can get it out of your head plus you've put it in the right bucket. Later when you have time to deal with decorating the house, you know where to go to get all your tasks for that.
This may be tilting away from pure Getting Things Done methods but over the years of our using this we've found it handy to arrange our To Do lists in the morning. The less time we can spend fiddling with our lists the better but you get this list for today and it's helpful to think yes, those can be done this morning and no, those will have to wait until the afternoon. Without getting minute-by-minute with it, plan out a shape of your day.
With Reminders, you can go into each task and set a time as well as a date. Don't try to estimate how your day will run hour to hour, but look at setting all the morning ones to 9am and all the afternoon ones to 1pm. It just parts your list constructively.
As well as OmniFocus and Things, we've had good experiences with
Pocket Informant for dates plus we've previously recommended
The Hit List for OS X and iOS.
Review
It sounds as if you spend a lot of time on your lists in GTD: you write down everything, later you consider every task and in the review process you look at it all again. That's true but in reality the capturing of new tasks becomes so natural and quick that you often end up wondering whether you remembered to add that last idea. Add it again, why not? You'll also find that processing your tasks is quicker the more you do it and the more you automatically write clear tasks as if they're going to be done by other people.
What does inescapably take time is the review and we have exactly one recommendation for you here: OmniFocus is our favorite To Do app and one reason is how it handles the review. We fall off the wagon just like everyone else but what gets us back on is popping open OmniFocus's Review button and working through the tasks. Tap the things you've done, add new tasks, delete others and then mark a project as reviewed. That's all it does, but it's what you need.
It also sounds as if we're somewhat task-obsessed and we are but –– hang on, as we wrote that, our Apple Watch pinged with a message from Reminders; what do you mean we're addicted to this stuff? As well as the hundreds of tasks that we lob into our To Do apps, we also have to carry around a lot of reference documents. A lot. You could put a task like 'Read this urgently' and attach the Word document –– if you're using an app like Things or OmniFocus that accept big attachments –– but then you're clogging up your list with these things.
All To Do apps worth their salt sync for you so that every task you enter on your iPhone is there on your iPad too and when the task is to read some gigantic document, you don't want that document being synced around. It'll take ages, for a start. So instead look to keep everything you've got to read in some other system that is always with you.
We use
Evernote for this and more than just dumping files in there, we get a link to the right note. Paste that link into OmniFocus on your Mac and when you get to the task 'read this urgently' on your iPhone then just tapping on the link opens up Evernote and shows you the document.
Getting Things Done
You won't remember to keep every reference document in Evernote –– you will remember to save all your tasks into one trusted system until you forget. Presumably David Allen doesn't fall off his own productivity wagon but the rest of us do and actually the one bad thing about GTD is that you'll feel worse stopping than before you began.
It's because you've been on top of things and now they've slid. It's because you've come to really understand how much you're doing and so looking at it again from the beginning makes it seem like a mountain you can see distressingly clearly. However, the way to restart GTD is the way you started in the first place and just exactly as that helped you, it helps you again. Invariably, if you abandon GTD then you feel worse and the best solution is to adopt it again.
Hopefully using the Apple gear you've already got with you every day will make it harder to stop and then easier to start up again. One more thing: if you do fall off the wagon, a great way to get started again is to tell someone about Getting Things Done, perhaps in a series of articles on
MacNN.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
Top