David Allen: GTD is More Than Just Lists

Weblog Web Worker Daily sits down with Getting Things Done author and productivity evangelist David Allen to discuss his upcoming book and how GTD is more than just lists. To Allen, it's about control:

If you walk into anywhere and want to get more control, all you really need to do is a version of collect. That is I need to sit down and just get everything that has my attention or the attention of everybody in the group I'm trying to get [in] control.

The new book, which Allen describes as "GTD on steroids," provides a higher-level look at implementing GTD in your everyday life, which is what Allen focuses on in this interview. If you've given GTD a once-over but have had trouble seeing the forest for the trees (or the project for the lists, as it were), this interview may give you a better idea of how and why you might want to integrate GTD philosophies into more aspects of your life.

David Allen: GTD is More Than Just Lists

Inbox Zero

Seit einiger Zeit beschäftige ich mich nun damit, Ideen und Ansätze zu recherchieren, welche den Arbeitsalltag produktiver und effizienter gestalten. Neben dem GTD-Ansatz kann auch das "Inbox Zero"-Konzept zu diesen Zielen Beitragen.

wartet mit einer Sonderseite zu diesem Thema auf. Hier die wichtigsten Themen dazu in der Übersicht.

Weiterführende Beiträge und Ergänzungen bei 43folders.com

• 43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”


• Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a definition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”


• Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”



• Inbox Zero: Where filters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”


• Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”


• Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and find a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”


• Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”


• Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”



• Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the first time, a clean record and a fresh start.”


• Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Getting Things Done (kurz GTD) ist eine Selbstmanagement-Methode von David Allen.

GTD basiert auf dem Prinzip, dass eine Person ihre anstehenden Tätigkeiten notiert und somit den Kopf frei hat für Wichtigeres. Diese Elemente werden in ein System eingepflegt. Das System liefert kontextbezogene Aufgabenlisten für den Alltag. Die Person soll sich somit auf die Erledigung ihrer Aufgaben konzentrieren können, ohne befürchten zu müssen, etwas zu vergessen. Diese Selbstmanagement-Methode soll effizientes und belastungsfreies Arbeiten ermöglichen.

Mehr Infos dazu, gefunden 43 Folders.com:

NPR: Tech Junkies Crazy About ‘Getting Things Done’

As an insufferably huge public broadcasting nerd, I was happy to hear (via our pal, Ryan) that 43 Folders was mentioned in tonight’s All Things Considered story about Getting Things Done.

Since this may be the first time some folks have visited the site, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite GTD posts from the past four years. We talk about lots more than GTD here, but it’s definitely a lot of my readers’ favorite topic.

Thanks for stopping by. Ton of links after the jump…

• Getting started with ‘Getting Things Done’ - “So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your ‘stuff’ has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?”



• How does a geek hack GTD? - “So I wanted to start a conversation about how geeks handle their lists, their projects, and their agendas–not so much in terms of the tool they use to store the information, although that’s fair game–as with how they segment the information and decide when to break it into pieces.”


• Next actions: Both physical and visible - “But, for me, turning anxieties into projects and projects into discrete physical behaviors has a lot of appeal. It takes all the pressure off your brain and puts it back where it belongs: on your eyes, on your hands, and on that fat ass you need to get into gear.”


• Does this ‘next action’ belong someplace else? - “I’ve noticed that there are often items on my ‘next actions’ list that hang around a lot longer than they should. I scan and rescan and sort and add and delete, but there’s always a few stragglers who hang out there for a week or more. Eventually this starts to vex me, and I try to debug why things aren’t getting done.”


• Mental dialogues, yak-shaving & the triumph of the ‘mini-review’ - “My mini-review falls somewhere between the glances I give my lists throughout the day and the comprehensive weekly review I do each weekend. It’s basically a 10-minute metamoment where I stop working and just try to re-focus on my goals, and the tactical adjustments needed to get them moved forward today.”



• What are you ‘waiting on?’ - “The thread that runs through all of these is that the onus is on me to a) make sure these items represent part of a commitment I’ve made, and b) make sure they actually get done (even if it’s not my direct responsibility); otherwise, they should get moved onto my ‘Maybe/Later’ list, right?”


• A Year of Getting Things Done - (3-part series: 1, 2, 3) - “I recently realized that this month marks one year since I started using Getting Things Done in earnest. With the calendar year closing, it seems like an apt time to look back at what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where I’d like to see GTD heading in the future.


• Choosing a daily GTD action plan - “I employ an informal Getting Things Done action strategy that’s similar to the one Chris lays out in his post. I often have a theme for a given day, where I choose an approach that’s suited to my mood, my energy level, and the kind and amount of work on my TODO list. (I’m especially a fan of days where I knock down ‘mosquito tasks’ as Chris calls them.)”



• Fractal Implementation, or, On the Dangers of David Allen’s Finger - “This is my stake in the ground about GTD: if you can stay focused on drawing from its best practices to get more of the important things in your life accomplished, then you’ll be a happy kid. For real. But if, like a seeming majority of people I encounter these days, you allow yourself to obsess endlessly over the minutest details of implementation and maintenance—well, you’re screwed. You’re wasting your time.”


• Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “The more email you have been neglecting in your inbox, the more drastic and ruthless your processing must be.”


• Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “By and large, you’ll discover, your head is flooded with this stuff that you aren’t or haven’t been doing anything about. Not coincidentally, this is almost always stuff that represents some kind of incompletion, functional fuzziness, or procrastination on your part.”


• Simplify your contexts - “If you feel a gnaw about the loss of your old contexts, try to shunt some of the mental load into sub-projects and better verb choices in your tasks.”


• Folders for organization and action - “But, as ever, if you’re fussing and thinking and fiddling and wondering about this stuff, you aren’t doing it, and dammit, that’s what this is all about.”



• Priorities don’t exist in a vacuum - “Unless you can always satisfy the big red letter commitments you’ve created for yourself — as well as the ones that are constantly being generated for you by others — an obsession with priority alone is pointlessly stress-inducing, unhealthy, and unrealistic.”


• 6 powerful “look into” verbs (+ 1 to avoid) - “Decisions can only be delivered after you’ve nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information.”


• Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD’s David Allen - “Hope you all enjoy hearing the whole series, in order, all in one place. There’s some nuggets of GTD gold in there, if I do say so myself.”

GTD bei 43folders.com

Wie man aufhört ständig seine Email-Inbox zu checken...

Die negativen Aspekte vielseitiger Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten werden sich in der heutigen Arbeitswelt immer häufiger erkannt und Problemlösungsmöglichkeiten dafür gesucht.

Ein großes Problem: Die Flut von eingehenden Nachrichten (Email, Instant Messages) beeinträchtigen die Konzentration und sorgen permanent für Ablenkung. Eine gute Strategie kann es sein, diese Ablenkungen zu minimieren. Man kann zum Beispiel sein Outlook so konfigurieren, dass es nur zweimal am Tag die Nachrichten vom Server holt. Und man kann den Instant Messenger nur zu bestimmten Zeiten anstellen. (Stichwort: Sprechstunde ;-) ).

Zuviel Kommunikation macht sogar krank und manche werden gar süchtig danach, permanent die eingehenden Nachrichten zu überprüfen. Dabei sollte man das gerade abends und am Wochenende nicht tun... .