MeyerBros

See, I’ve always put “personal productivity” schemes in the same box as “motivational speakers” and cheesy shallow self-help books. In other words, I scoffed in their general direction. But I’ve been humbled - humbled by Getting Things Done.

I’m not going to thoroughly describe the system here, so follow that link if you want to read about it (or just read this excellent shorthand summary of GTD). I’m just going to tell you why I love it.

I love GTD because it doesn’t try to totally change the way I work. Instead, it takes the tricks I’ve already discovered on my own and helps me make them more effective.

For instance, usually somewhere between once a week and once a month I’ll realize I’m totally stressed out and I don’t even know why. I’ve learned on my own that I can deal with that - I sit down with a pen and paper and try to dump out everything that’s on my mind that might be contributing to my anxiety. Usually I discover that I don’t really have as much to be anxious about as I thought.

Also usually somewhere between once a week and once a month I gather up all the little papers that I’ve scribbled notes on, the Amnesty International action alert I want to act on, the phone and electricity bill, the card from Aunt Jane that I want to respond to, and all the rest. I go through the pile one by one, either dealing with each item or consolidating it onto my main todo list. It feels great.

(Alright Mr. LiteralPants, I don’t really have an Aunt Jane. But I didn’t want to single out any of my real aunts, and if I did have an Aunt Jane I’d try to reply to her cards. For reals.)

But there have been some problems with these tricks. For one, I don’t do them nearly often enough or regularly enough. I let myself be stressed out and completely procrastinatingly unproductive for weeks or even months sometimes without doing either of those things.

For another, my resulting “todo list” has always been a massive gargantuan creature, with a few small actionable items that I will actually do mixed in among a menagerie of amorphous vague scary phrases like “think about Project X” and “organize my life” that I will NEVER actually get around to doing, and some of which have actually sat on my todo list unchanged for over three years. I see all those giant unapproachable todo list items that never go anywhere and I feel small and ineffective. So instead I go play a few games of StreetSoccer on LittleGolem.

GTD solves these problems. The “empty my mind onto paper” trick? It’s the first step in the GTD workflow - the “mind-sweep” to collect all my “open loops” (unfinished items causing my brain anxiety) into one place, ready for processing. The “collect all my bits of paper” trick? Part of the same first step, “Collect”. But then GTD gives me an effective and all-encompassing system in which to place all these collected items - a “project list” on which I only include multi-step projects that I am actually committed to completing (the Circle of One Book website), a “someday list” of projects I might someday want to commit to but have officially decided that I am not committed to now (tagging all our digital photos from the past five years).

And then, the most beautiful thing of all. The actual todo lists? They’re firmly restricted to one “next action” per project. Each “next action” has to be a single action that can be completed in 20 minutes or less, worded in physical verb terms (no “think about” or “decide” - only “call John to set up meeting time”, “write down three ideas for proposal X”, “move shelf to other side of bed”). And every week I review all my lists to figure out what the next action is for each project, decide if there are projects I’m no longer really committed to (so I move them to the someday list or trash them), see if I have “next actions” on my todo lists that are hanging around for too long because they either skip a necessary dependent step or because they’re worded too vaguely.

OK, so now I am describing the system. More things I love about it:

• I love my HipsterPDA
• I love using my TiddlyWiki for keeping all my todo and project lists.
• I love having a visual list of projects (not mixed in with little one-off items) that shows me in a glance what I’m committed to doing in my life right now, and gives me a hint if I might need to cut some out. The project list helps me actually make decisions about whether a project is something I really want to or can commit to - at the top of my project list it says “Committed to completion. Desired outcome (one sentence).” and if I’m not really willing to commit myself to achieving that desired outcome, it doesn’t go on the list.
• I love only having physical 20-minute-or-less items on my todo list, and only one per project. Totally reduces the intimidation factor of big projects.
• I love the horizontal balance among projects and variety of activities that comes of tackling one “next action” at a time instead of thinking that I have to tackle a whole project in a single sitting.
• I love the idea of the “procrastination dash”. If I’m having a hard time starting a task, I set a timer for two, four, five, eight minutes and tell myself I’ll work only on that task until the timer goes off. Then I can go back to playing Blue Max or whatever else I was doing to procrastinate. Thing is, after the four-minute dash, I’ve usually gotten over the procrastination “getting started” hump and I’m actually energized to keep working on the project.

It’s embarrassing, but it’s the truth. My name is Carl Meyer, and I use a productivity system.