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.
Showing posts with label collection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collection. Show all posts
Monday, February 5, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
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!
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.
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.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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