Month 2, Day 19: Still here

Weight: 20 Stone 8.0 lbs
GTD: In 0, todo 70, Someday 45, Done 92

I missed the last few days of blogging. My weight has remained the same, but I managed to sort out a lot of the other issues that are on my plate, including getting quotes for work I need to do on the new house. I still don't have a moving date, but it can't be long now.

I have had several experiences of my appetite being reduced - or at least of feeling full far sooner than I would have done previously. So while I'm plateauing at the moment, my faith in the shangri-la diet is currently remaining.

I've noticed a flaw in GTD though. Some tasks simply are not getting done. I can't get motivated to do them, because they are so large (in particular processing rooms in my house). I'm probably going to change those tasks into projects, and choose particular areas which need to be processed, then set about them instead.

Month2, Day 15: Too much, too soon

Weight: 20 Stone 9 lb.
GTD: In 1, Processing 84, Done 76, Someday 44

Last night I ate too much. Or that is how it felt. In fact I only ate four slices of pizza. 12 hours later, and I'm still feeling satisfied. So for all I suggest that the Shangri-la diet isn't working any more, it clearly has some effect on my appetite, I'm just eating less than I w2as, so I don't notice. For reference, in the past, I could have wolfed down a large pizza and garlic bread and still debated about desert.

I also found a problem in how I am organising Getting Things Done. At Remember The Milk, you can set due dates for tasks. I'm using these as a sort of tickler / priority system, so things I have to do soon get nearer the top of the list. RTM also has a system whereby you can tell it a task repeats every week, month or year. When you complete the task, it then places a new one, due the requisite period of time later, at the appropriate place on the list. While this increases my number of done tasks, it doesn't remove things from my task list. As I add more and more annual tasks to my system, the number of due tasks will get greater and greater... And frankly, it isn't worth me knowing about things I need to do in a years time, it's just worth knowing they are safely recorded somewhere in my system.

So today I added a new list 'tickler' to RTM. Any task that has a next action which needs to be done after a due date more than 1 week in the future will go here, and only put back into rotation during my weekly review. Unlike someday/oneday, these tasks are next actions, and have definite dates attached to them.

This should mean my task lists fall in size quite a bit. But also that they become more useful.

Month 2, Day 14: Lovin' It

Weight: 20 Stone, 9lbs
GTD: In 0, Processing 78, Done 70, Someday 44

Actually I'm going to Pizza Hut tonight, not McDonalds, but it's all junk, and none of it will help my weight, which is making me feel down. My current feeling is the oil increase isn't helping, and might be getting in the way. I'll give 4 tablespoons until the end of February to convince me they are worth it, before reverting to 3, and seeing how that works.

GTD continues to work, and today it reminded me of something I had forgotten, which is good. At the moment, it makes sense to keep it up.

Month 2, Day 13: Getting Purer Things Done

Weight: 20 Stone 7.5 lb
GTD: In 3, Processing 72, Someday 51, Done 61

I didn't feel hungry yesterday, but did eat a large lunch (a steak sandwich and a beer, as a mini work celebration). With a Valentines meal tomorrow (quite why Herself chose Pizza Hut, I'll never understand, but its cheap... if you ignore the cost of me driving to and from Yarmouth to be there), its going to be a bad week for food. My body will be less of a temple, and more of a run down strip mall.

I discovered a 100 point check list of things to achieve if you are integrating GTD into your life. My initial urge was to treat is as a purity test (do people even know what purity tests are these days?) I'm current 33% of my way to being a GTD master. I jotted down some things I think I need to look up in order to improve:

Learn about Master Projects List
Instigate a waiting for list
Instigate a loaned/borrowed list
Check office supplies against list in book
Reread higher altitudes section of book
Reread natural planning model section
Reread 3fold model for evaluating daily work
Reread 4 crietrea model for choosing actions
Listen to 43 folders podacasts

These are all going onto my to do list.

Month 2, day 12

Weight: 20 stone 8 lbs
GTD: In 2, Processing 71, Someday 50, Done 50

This marks the first time I managed to get my number of processing tasks done. Mainly because i worked a lot over the keekend geting a work related project finished.

I've been feeling far more hungry than usual recently. The SLD seems to have stopped working, even with my higher oil intake. I'm now feeling quite hungry a lot of the time, and the appetite suppression that I noticed has gone: On Saturday I ate a whole baguette without problems. It is a bit disheartening. Still, GTD seems to be keeping me organised (despite the best efforts of certain conveyancing lawyers to overload me with stress due to their inability to do anything).

I'm going to keep on with the Shangri-la diet until the end of march, but currently it is falling out favour with me as a long term diet mechanism.

Month2, Day 11

Weight: 20 Stone 6.5 lb

Hungry, and stressed. Sometime I think self help doesn't work that well.

Month 2, Day 10

Weight 20 stone 6.5

I won't be measuring GTD stats over the weekends. Tts too complicated to fit into my routines at this stage.

Month 2, Day 9: Dontcha think?

Weight: 20 Stone 7.5 lbs
GTD: Inbox 3, Processing 81, Done 31, Someday 50

It occurs to me that it is slightly ironic that my postings are becoming later and later while I'm working my way through GTD. No excuses, except at the moment, this is slightly lower on my priority list than certain things at work. My task list seems to be growing at the moment. Hopefully it will drop once I have time to get a few things off my plate here. Moving house should really cut the list down.

Month 2 , Day 8: Oil Surplus

Weight: 20 Stone 7.5 lbs
GTD Inbox:3, Processing 78, Done 25, Someday/Oneday 50

I upped my oil intake to 4 tablespoons a day (starting from last night, I'll now take two tablespoons in the evening). So far I'm still on the hungry side of satisfied, although not crying out for food. We'll have to see how it goes over the next few days. I seem to be back on track losing weight, although my moving average remains below 3.5 lbs per week, and probably will until Sunday, I guess.

Yesterday I had an odd experience. A new coffee machine arrived at work, and i was one of the first to try it out. I currently limit myself to one instant coffee a day, but yesterday the new coffee machine meant I had a weak (half cup) espresso at about 2pm. By half past two, I was buzzing. While trying to draw a straight line, my hand wobbled vigorously. I was awake and active all afternoon and well into the evening. It was only about 9pm that I really came back to normal. All on one cup of coffee. I'm mentioning this more for reference both for the diet, and for getting things done, in case this experience is related to either one.

Month 2, Day 7: Working through things

Weight: 20 stone 8 lbs
GTD: In-box 2, processing 77, someday/oneday 47, Done 20

Despite the fact my weight has dropped to its lowest value since the diet began, and I broke through the barrier of 10% total body weight loss and 20% of target weight loss (since my target weight is pretty much half of my starting weight, it isn't too much of a shock to see them matching up so well), today also marks the day where my week on week moving average loss dropped below 3.5 lbs. As I previously stated, that means I'm going to attempt increasing my oil dosage and seeing how that affects my appetite. I've noticed in recent days that I have more of an appetite than a few weeks ago: not that I'm feeling hungry, but that I'm eating everything I prepare, feeling full less often, and possibly feeling more inclined to snack. So maybe my set point is plateauing, or has slowed in its decline.

In Getting Things Done news, I'm managing quite well, working through items on my lists and completing them. It certainly makes me feel more productive. Below I've added few thoughts I have had about how to improve my use of the system:

Last thing in the evening at work, decide where you are going to start tomorrow on each of your current work projects. make sure each of these next actions are in your work to-do list

Whenever you leave your desk, make sure your next action on your current task in in your work to-do list

Whenever you return to your desk, look at your next actions and start carrying one out.

Whenever you are working on a project and you can think of two different things to do next, add the one you are not going to do to your work to-do list. You can work on the other task now without adding it to your list (but see above if you don't complete it)

Don't be afraid to forget to mark things on your todo list as completed. When you look over your list on returning to your desk, or when deciding what to do next, you will notice these tasks are done and remove them then. Removing them when you are in a state of flow is just an interruption.

My lists are stored in rememberthemilk.com. I'm using the due dates to remind me of what has to be finished before the project is over, but also to prioritise. I often say "due today" for things I plan on working on in the next hour or so, which puts them at the top of the list.

Month 2, Day 6: Productivity Soars

Weight: 20 Stone 8.5 lb
GTD: Inbox 0, processing 71, someday/oneday 47, done 12

I'm still trying to come up with a good format for my GTD stats.

Last night I fully processed my home in-box. All that remains in there now are some things that I have definite actions for written in my task lists. At work, my desk is clear, as are my drawers. I still have a pile of things on the floor that needs processing, but given a few spare minutes, that will go too.

GTD seems to have a few advantages that I'm noticing. The first is that I'm sure I will at least continue to think about things that I need to do in the future, because they are written down, and I'm looking at them. The second is that I can now return to my desk, and know what the next thing I intended to do is straight away, rather than having to get up to speed again.

I'm feeling productive at the moment, even if I don't actually have that many results to show people. I know that I have completed 18 of the things I've set out to do in work, and that makes me feel good.

Processing: Getting Started, problems and solutions

The next phase of Getting Things Done I want to cover is processing. Processing is the art of taking things out of your in-box, examining them, and then deciding what to do about them. For my initial round of processing, I decided I would look only at my notebook. In my notebook, for every other thing I have identified as an in-box, I have added a to-do such as "process work desk in-box". As far as I am concerned, "process work in-box" is a single task, although you are not allowed to remove if from your processing list until it is completely empty.

Step one:

look at the first item in your in-box. Determine if you need to do anything about it. If you do need to do anything about it soon, go to step three otherwise go to step two.

Step two:

If you can just throw it away, chuck it in the bin.
If you need to do it at a particular time future, file it in your tickler system (I'll talk about my tickler system in the future)
If you want to do it sometime, but have no immediate plans as for when, put it into a someday/oneday list
If you might need to reference it, chuck it in a file

And it is dealt with. Remove it from your in-box and return to step one

Step three:

Work out what you must do next, in order to complete this task.
If one action will complete the whole task, go to step five.
If it will take multiple actions to complete the whole task, go to step four.

Step four:

Congratulations, you have a project. Add this project to your project list
Think of the first action, and go to step five. If you can think of other actions that need to be added to the system, follow step five for each of these

Step five:

If the next action can be done in 2 minutes, do it.
If the next action can be delegated, delegate it
Otherwise, add the next action to a to-do list.
You should have a to-do list for each context in which you can carry out tasks (for example, on the telephone, at a computer, at the shops). Add the action to the most appropriate context.
You are finished. Remove the item from your in-box and start again.


Problems and solutions:

Q: In step one, I say "If you do need to do anything about it soon, go to step three". What is soon?

A: For me, the definition of soon is "possibly within the next two weeks". Why? Because I review my system every week, and so have at least a weeks notice of anything I need to do something about. In fact, soon is a bit more complicated than that. Essentially, it is a question of whether you need to begin implementing the task now or not, but anything that needs doing within two weeks must be on a list.

Q: In Step five, I talk about contexts. As an IT professional, I never find myself in a situation where I don't have a phone or a net connected computer (in fact, my mobile phone is a net connected computer). What contexts should I use?

A: Just because I don't ever find myself without a phone or a computer, I keep these as contexts. I currently use contexts to describe the type of activity, not the physical location. In fact I have three physical locations: work, home and at the shops. I have another location 'elsewhere' which I use to fit in anything that doesn't fall within one of those locations. 'At the shops' covers anything I want to buy in the immediate future, and keeps these shopping list items away from everything else I may have to do.

I keep the contexts 'computer' and 'phone' because I may want to do these actions either at work (during lunch hours), or home (or indeed at the shops... as I said, my phone is net connected).

My elsewhere context is for things I need to do at miscellaneous locations. Because I manage my to-do lists using rememberthemilk.com, I can use their location options to assign them to specific places (such as a friends house, or the hotel where I am getting married)

Q: Some of the items on my to-do list happen so frequently, that the moment I process them I think they ought to wind up in my in-box again.

A: I've noticed this too. All these things are part of my daily or weekly routine. Every morning, for instance I brush my teeth, add my weight to a spreadsheet and eat a nutritious, wholesome, breakfast. Every evening, I talk to Herself on the phone. Every Thursday morning, I put the bin out, and every Monday at work, I attend a status meeting.

How do I handle these? I don't put them on my to-do lists at all. Instead I have daily planner cards, one for work, one for home.

These cards (held in portrait mode) have 3 horizontal lines drawn across them, breaking them into 4 sections. The two central sections have 4 vertical lines down them, giving me 5 columns.

In the top and bottom sections I place tasks which need to be done in the morning and evening every day (top for morning, bottom for evening). In the middle two sections I put tasks specific to a particular day, morning and evening (Monday on the left, Friday on the right, top for morning, bottom for afternoon). My daily cards don't have any space for weekends (which I tend not to try to structure), but 6 lines would give you seven (possibly too thin) sections, should you need them.

My explanation of these daily cards has been a bit rushed here, so I'll give them a full treatment in a few days time, providing some blanks and some examples - including a top trick which has made Herself much happier about how tidy our house is, with hardly any work on my part.

Month 2, Day 5: Actually doing something

Weight 20 stone 10.

Grrr.

GTD: I've actually begun doing some of the things on my todo list (actually, that's unfair... while I was processing my todo list I noticed some things I had already done as part of my regular weekly routine... more about routine later). But I've also managed to tackle a few tasks on my list.

Having the in-box around is turning out to be fantastic. I saw a sign today advertising mothers day specials (in a pub which I would never in a million years take my mother to). Straight away I thought "Oh yes, I have a mother. And there is a whole day for her in the future. In fact, on the 18th of March. I must remember that, and perhaps drop it into conversation around that date". Normally, I would then proceed to forget about it until the day before, then rush around getting a card, sending it a day after, and making phone calls saying "Wow, the postal service in Cambridge really is bad". Now it is in my todo list, ready to be processed. Who knows if my mum will actually receive a card and flowers... but she can be sure I thought about it almost a month in advance.

Month 2, Day 4: Processing away

21 Stone 10.

Don't talk about my weight. It will start falling again soon.

I managed to process all my tasks today (which isn't to say I actually started any of them, just that I took them out of my in-box notepad, and into nice lists stored on the internet. I'm currently using "remember the mil" to managed my next-action lists, with one list for each context. I'll talk about this more later, and my experiences with using it. I'm still not convinced its the best solution, and think that just a set of files on Google documents might be a better approach). I'm using Google calender for calendaring and some of my tickler file needs. I think its working

Month 2, Day 3: Ah, the weekend

21 stone, 9lbs.
I was meant to start processing. But I didn't. Not at all productive.

How many inboxes do I have?

Too many.

The process of collection in Getting Things Done is filling your personal in-box with every task you might want to do (be it buying a nail, or selling a house). In an ideal world, we would have one in-box, put everything we wanted to do in one place, and then (when it came to processing) work through things one step at a time.

The world (as you may have noticed) is far from ideal.

The perfect world's in-box would be able to accept physical things: not just the excessive bills that have been stuffed wantonly through my letterbox by greedy utilities companies, but also the ball left untidily on the lawn and the new set of body building weights which I havn't figured out where to store yet. It would also be with me at all times, so I could add a new idea the moment it popped into my little mind.

I don't really fancy dragging my new set of weights around with me.

The solution then, is to have multiple in-boxes. The ones which fit into my life are:

An in-box for papers which sits near the front door, and accepts all those bills.
A notepad which I write things down in, and carry around with me
A section of my desk at work, which I pile all sorts of things into, promising I'll do something with them one day. It currently contains a box of business cards showing my companies old name and a telephone extension that won't reach me since our internal exchange changed. A plastic bottle I use for water (or would do - it hasn't been filled up since before Christmas), and an ethernet card which doesn't work (along with a index card attached to it which says "this ethernet card doesn't work).

But this too is insufficient. The weights wouldn't fit into my paper in-box. They would probably make it crack under their weight. It's almost ready to crack under the weight of the bills (I wonder if red ink is lighter...)

And other people keep giving me new in-boxes. My answering machine is an in-box. So is my email in-box (in fact, there is a clue in its name). As a software engineer, I have to handle fixing bugs and adding feature requests. We manage this with a piece of software. This software is an in-box (and also sends emails to my email in-box). At home, all the bookcases containing books I haven't read are, in their own way in-boxes. When I arrive home in the evening, my doormat is an in-box (for the bills, which get opened and placed in a new in-box), for the free paper, which gets placed in black recycling out-box, and for the pizza delivery menus, which tempt me away from my diet.

In truth, everything that is disorganised in your life is an in-box. Everything that is untidy is an in-box.

GTD recommends making a note of all things too big to fit into your in-box and then processing them one at a time. But in order to decide what gets put into your paper in-box, you are already processing. Maybe making a decision about where to put the weights goes into my notepad in-box, but deciding whether to throw away that empty crisp packet on my lawn is a processing action: do I really need to log it in my in-box, or would it be better just to say "my lawn is untidy, it has become an in-box" and add the task of processing new next in-box to the never-ending list of things to do.

I think the latter is the more reasonable system.

Sure, I should aim to keep things down to 3 in-boxes, but I should use my eyes to notice when other in-boxes exist, and need managing!

Month 2, Day 2: Still Collecting

20 Stone 11 lbs. 114 collected, 0 processed, 0 projects, 0 complete

Yesterday I felt hungrier than I have since starting the diet. While I didn't snack a great deal, I did eat 2 slices of ham and a yogurt in addition to my normal tea.

I'm shocked at how many things I have that I know I have to do. 114 and counting. The list is tending towards shopping I need to do now, but still, I wouldn't be surprised to come up with another 50 or so today. Yesterday I was relaxed, happy and energetic, but not at my most productive (which seemed to me to be more related to the sort of work I was doing than my particular mood). I'm sure GTD has the potential to up my productivity by letting me discover small challenges to face, and by making bigger ones more approachable. Still, thats all going to begin on Monday, I guess.

Over the weekend, I'll try to start emptying my in-box.

Failure and Serendipity

The point of GTD collection is that you should always be able to do it, no stray thought should pass through your mind and if there is anything to do about it, not make it into your in-box. This is the reason I'm using a small notebook for all my collecting. Today on the way to work, a thought arose, so I pulled out my notebook and was about to jot it down when I noticed I had no pen.

Disaster.

A failure and I hadn't even arrived at work. I need a pen fast.

At that very moment, I was passing a bookmakers shop. My eyes were downcast, literally. But on the pavement, lying in a dirty puddle were five or six betting shop pens. It is rubbish collection day today, so I guess they were old pens being thrown out which had somehow missed the bin. These pens are idea, sized smaller than my notebook and easy to carry. the pen I picked up was not nice to write with, but it was sufficiently able to write to note my thoughts down.

The universe wants me to succeed with Getting Things Done.

Now I have a new task collected in my notebook: find out where to buy betting shop pens,a nd get some.... either that or go on the worlds most trivial crime spree in Argos.

Month 2, Day 1 : Getting things done : Collection

20 stone, 11 lbs...
but that's not important right now... because this is February.

My life is currently undergoing something of an upheaval. Work is frenetic, with deadlines coming up each week. Things are being thrown up in the air, and I'm trying to juggle most of them. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes going in to work on Saturdays to glue together the ones which smashed on hitting the floor. I'm getting married in June, and that seems to involve an endless stream of decisions and buying things. The whole process has to be choreographed perfectly, whether its getting Herself's family over from Romania or making a mix CD of the music we want played at various different times. And because work and love aren't stressful enough, I'm also moving house. The lawyers are stressing me, the things we need to do to the new house are stressing me. The fact that days go by when nobody tells me what the hell is taking so long are stressing me. And don't get me started about trying to write a blog article every day. Who had that stupid idea? Me? Oh right...

I need a holiday... But I've seen how much work is going in to planning the Honeymoon, and I can't be bothered with that right now.

Things can only get better. Either I'll discover some sort of wonderful cure for my total lack of organisation which lifts the cloud of stress and bathes me in the sunlight of relaxation, or I'll be committed. To a place which bans metaphors like "clouds of stress and sunlight of relaxation".

Being committed isn't an option. Asylums have warders: that's other people helping you (or at least collecting the pennies from the rich people who come to poke you with sticks). Justhelpmyself isn't about other people helping me. its about me helping me. With the aid of books. (granted, the books have been written by other people... but lets ignore that and assume I'm just such a good solipsist I can create books out of whole matter. Lets assume I'm one of the worlds' top ten solipsists)

So today I mark the next phase of Justhelpmyself. Today I start getting things done. Today I start Getting Things Done. A system of organisation and productivity by David Allen. There are about eleventy-million blogs about Getting Things Done (GTD) out there on the Internet. So what I'm going to do this month is take you through my process of starting up, and seeing what happens.

I've played with Getting Things Done before. Parts of it (the filing systems for instance) have stuck. Other parts I was bad at (The weekly review). Some parts didn't fit well with my life (contexts, projects). And some parts I never really bothered with (the full collection at the beginning, for instance). This time I'm going to try to play it by the rules and see what happens. Only if the rules stop working will I bend them to fit my life.

Collection

The first part of Getting Things Done is the collection phase. In this you write down everything you need to get done. Everything. From washing clothes to bringing about world peace. Mr Allen reckons it takes about 6 hours to do the initial collection. Six hours non-stop. I don't have six hours, but I have a plan.

The idea of collection is to get everything into your in-box. We have many in-boxes in our lives, and in this stage we try to reduce them to as few as possible. While I have a physical in-box that I use at home for papers, many of the things in my mind don't exist anywhere. Since Collection is something you need to do all the time, I resorted to using a pocket sized Black & Red notebook. I'm just jotting down 1 line summaries of things I need to do, with each page dated (GTD recommends dating everything you write, because occasionally its useful).

At work, as well as my mental in-box, I have a physical in-box (my desk) and an electronic in-box (email) I'm going to spend half an hour a day collecting these (and noting things down in my notepad if need be.)

While collection is something you always do, during the initial stage you are not meant to do any processing of your in-box (it distracts from the collection). All I can agree to do (since my employers won't like it if I stop working) is to not use the GTD methodology to process anything, and not to process during my assigned collection half hour.

Since this is day one, my stats:

inbox 0. next actions 0. projects 0. completed yesterday 0.

I also want to keep track of if I feel during the working day I was happy or unhappy, relaxed or stressed, motivated or procrastinating, energetic or tired. I might as well add full or hungry to keep track of the shangri-la diet. Finally I want to keep track of unexpected tasks, missed deadlines and tasks that vanished from under my feet.