Tag: “Perspective”

The first step in mastering the control of your activity is managing your actions, your projects and your calendar. When you want to frame your actions in areas of responsibility to have a clear view of your activity, you do it through your projects. Reading your list of projects and grouping them into focus categories you can draw conclusions. Looking from the bottom up you get an idea on how you are doing at the moment.

The most important difference between GTD and other personal productivity systems is, for me, that GTD does not trivialize task prioritization by assigning a single number or letter to each task. This method is not suitable for anyone with an average workload—understanding workload as the amount of tasks we have to do both in our professional work and in any other aspect of our life—.

One reason for the success of GTD as a personal productivity tool, is that it is the first one that urges people to make a complete inventory of everything that makes up their current reality, before starting to implement the method.

GTD is a personal productivity system that allows us not only to get things done efficiently, but also eliminates the stress coming from the excessive commitments we all acquire too often. David Allen, creator of GTD, does know that this over-commitment, although overwhelming, is not the real culprit of our distress.

Horizontal focus is the key to a relaxed control over your daily activities. It is about clearly defining the outcomes you want—your projects—and the next actions required to achieve them, and creating reminders on a trusted system that you review regularly.