Diving into GTD

I’ve been attracted by the Getting Things Done (GTD) system a few months ago while still working at Wagner & Partner in Krems. I tried to implement it at work and for private purposes, however there weren’t that many different things to do or people to communicate with at the office to really benefit, and for private matters … well, they’re private, so the urgency kind of is “flexible”.

Now with Superfund there’s more to do and more Mails/Tasks to keep track of and finish in time. So finally I’m working with a rudimentary implementation, specifically with organized folders for E-Mail. There’s three urgencies, plus some extra categories:

• Yesterday
• Immediately
• Urgent
• Reply only
• Revisit

The first three I use to prioritize tasks. I’m doing everything by mail because that’s how we communicate almost 100% of the tasks. And it’s easy. With entourage lacking the functionality of grouping related messages into a conversation I always mark the definitive “call to action” mail as a task, all other mails for that conversation go to the regular folder. That’s not quite an optimal solution, but it has to do by now.

From an efficiency point of view the system really helps. By separating into three folders the “to-do-list” always is down to about 3-4 items per folder, making it seem managable on one hand and easy to decide which item to act on next on the other.

It’s good. I like it.