Getting Things Done - GTD
How to Implement Your GTD System: Initial Setup
AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez
In the last series of posts we’ve seen how to get control through the five stages of the GTD workflow and how to gain perspective through its six perspective horizons.
These models allow, in a systematic way, to elevate the two fundamental components of personal productivity, organization and focus, to their maximum expression.
The GTD methodology provides a framework that allows you to intuitively and flexibly manage the real world. You will hardly mismanage your personal and professional life if you capture, clarify and organize everything that catches your attention, regularly review your commitments from different levels of perspective, and accordingly, choose the best actions to take at each moment.
Systems vs. Reality
However, no matter how good the structure on which you pretend to base your personal management strategy, reality is often much richer, more complicated, ambiguous and uncertain. It’s difficult to maintain balance, focus and peace of mind in a world where things change so quickly and where we’re forced to manage large volumes of information.
Regardless of how organized you are, the stability of your personal management can be quickly lost after an unexpected phone call, a serious problem in an important project, a change of situation in your partner’s life, an injury, a lottery win, and so on. All these things, good or bad, are part of your life and you have to accept and integrate them.
That’s why GTD is not about having everything perfectly organized and in order, but about having the necessary tools and knowing how to use them in order to recover coherence and peace of mind when your life gets messed up.
Smart people know that not every day is the same, so they build systems that allow them to do things right when they’re not at their best. There’ll be days when you are active and motivated, and everything will flow. Other days you’ll find it hard to concentrate, you’ll be slow, and you won’t be able to make much progress.
Having a personal management system allows you to manage these inconsistencies.
How to build your GTD system
It’s not enough to have a good system to be productive. You need to create an enabling environment to develop the habits, behaviors and good practices needed to make that system work.
A good system must be combined with a friendly work environment and the right tools. Only then you can eliminate distractions and effortlessly execute the processes that will help you truly become effective, i.e., do the right things properly.
Capture Tools
One of the most difficult habits to acquire is to learn how to capture everything that may require some kind of action or processing in one or more places, allowing it to be managed later.
In theory, any way in which you capture things will allow their subsequent management, but here “allow” means that, in addition to making it possible, it encourages doing so.
It’s important that you feel comfortable and confident with your capture tools because this habit is crucial to efficiently implement the GTD methodology as a whole.
Since good ideas are not always going to come to your head when you are quietly sitting at your desk, you will need different capture tools.
Although the cell phone has become a universal multifunctional tool, it’s also a major source of distractions and having too many apps may not help to ensure that you will process sooner rather than later what you have captured.
It’s great to be able to use an app to capture voice memos when you can’t write or type, but only if you have the habit of reviewing those voice files daily to trigger the necessary actions.
In any case it’s always a good idea to carry a notebook and pen with you, and have others in your usual places of work, both in the office and at home. Writing on paper has certain cognitive advantages.
You should also have a physical inbox at each of your workplaces, so that you can capture the things that come into your world in a physical way: letters, flyers, business cards, packages, etc.
For working with others remotely there are many interesting brainstorming and collaborative capture apps. If you share a physical place to work and meet with other people, whiteboards are a great help for these joint captures.
A nice setup of capture tools will help you to empty your mind, eliminate stress and, therefore, think in an optimal way.
Action lists and calendar
Nowadays everyone uses some kind of calendar. Make sure yours is reliable and integrates well into your day-to-day life.
Decide where to keep your action reminder lists (phone calls, home stuff, office work, errands, etc.). You can use a notebook, physical folders with sheets inside, or task management software.
Your action lists and calendar should always be accessible and make your work comfortable.
Lists with specific functions
In addition to action lists, you will need other lists for more specific content, such as the Someday/Maybe list or lists where you store information related to different perspective horizons (purpose, vision, goals, areas of responsibility and projects).
Also, find a way to have this information organized and accessible so that you can refer to it whenever necessary: paper, note-taking software, Excel-type databases, etc.
Reference Material
If you are a knowledge worker, the volume of reference information you accumulate, both physical and digital, can be enormous. That is why it’s essential to have a system in which you can easily store and retrieve information.
For the physical part, a well-ordered bookcase and a well-organized folder system should be enough. Reference material in digital format is more difficult to organize. I use a software called Obsidian as a knowledge center, but there are many similar tools on the market (although they tend to be more cloud-dependent).
Office, home and other workplaces
A well-designed work environment, where you can think clearly and calmly, is one of the best investments you can make, both at home and at work. In addition to having a comfortable environment, it should ideally be your own environment, i.e. a place where no one can interrupt what you are doing.
Depending on your activity, you will probably need a portable system that you can take with you when you travel or simply when you are not in your usual places. In my case, a small briefcase with a laptop, charger, notebook, pen and some additional accessories, plus my cell phone, of course, allows me to access my entire management system from anywhere.
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Do you already have your system set up? That’s perfect. In the next articles we will talk about how to start populating the information and how to work with the system once you have started.
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