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.