Jabinc · HackerTrans

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I struggle with the "never enough" side effect a lot. I am hopeful that continuing to hone the system will allow me to reach David Allen's stress free notion of "I can only do one thing at a time, and this is what I am choosing to do." Applying the 10K foot goals helps me with the larger life balance, but I still feel overwhelmed much more than is healthy.

Jabinc

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I have been honing in on my own personal adaptation of GTD with Evernote for about four years. It has absolutely made a positive difference in my life, productivity, and stress levels. I tried two or three times before this and it never stuck.

I think the system works well for people who are already inclined to the general mindset and other systems likely work better for different types of people. For me, it is a slow process to reach a perfection of the system.

I am currently going through my fourth major overhaul of my system and I think when I come out the other side I will be about 80% of the way to where I want to be. I think I am about 60% now, but even when I was only 20% in the beginning it was an improvement over zero.

The last large overhaul I did shifted me from David Allen's notion of contextual based lists to lists based on criticality. Contextual was largely irrelevant to me since nearly everything I do can be done on my phone and otherwise computer, which is where I spend most of my working day.

I have 4 next action lists for the tasks in my personal life. Critical - Nothing sits in here for more than a day or two. The struggle for me is being honest about only putting items in here that I truly cannot let go past a day or two, not items that I wish I would do in a day or two.

Priority - This holds items that absolutely need to be completed at some point in the near future (within a week or two), but not necessarily today. It is reviewed every few days and actions are taken care of, shuffled up to critical, or shuffled down to Important, or elsewhere.

Important - This exists so that I don't fill up Priority with junk, but still feel like I have place I will review regularly so that these items don't fall through the cracks and end up as last minute fires to be put out.

Remember - Along the same lines, this exists so that Important isn't full of junk that I am just temporarily attached to. Most of 'remember' ends up being filed to a project, deleted, or placed into incubate. This folder was a key addition to remove the stress of what to do with ideas I felt were important in the moment, but knew they couldn't possibly take precedence over anything that had a real timeline.

I am returning to running my own business at the first of the year and so the new overhaul is all about managing separate clients and the related projects/tasks. From previous experience, I know how hard it is for me to comfortably step in and out of work, especially at home. I am developing a series of forms, note tags, and procedures to dump my mental operating RAM into Evernote at the end of a work session and then reload that project/task specific data into my mind whenever I return.

Like GTD in general, so much of the value for me is in having the confidence to say, "you can forget completely about that for now, it has been documented and filed in such a way that you need have no fear of not remembering and accessing it later in the moment when it is needed."

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