Getting Things Done (Part 1)
Time management is a critical element of success. Everybody says so. Thing is – you can’t manage time. What a stupid concept! Time is a mutually agreed hallucination, anyway. It doesn’t really exist. And we certainly can’t manage it, in any real way. Time just…is. Or isn’t.
What we can do is decide how to use the time that we have. We manage our actions, not the time it takes to do them.
One of the things just about everybody I talk to says is that they don’t have enough time, they are very stressed and they are on the edge of losing control. Or have already lost control and are just doing the best they can to get as much as they can done…little of it as well as they’d like.
There are all kinds of methods, tools and techniques that have been developed to enable us to manage our lives with success. That lives have to be managed at all is something that gives me pause, but that will be the subject of another post. Or, more likely, a number of other posts.
So, one of those methods, including tools and techniques, for successfully getting things done is called…well…Getting Things Done. Developed by a management consultant named Dave Allen in the late nineties, Getting Things done (known to aficionados, of course, as GTD) has a cult following in the millions. And hate groups in the thousands. Google Getting Things Done and you’ll get 108,000,000 hits. 108,000,001, now!
There are books on GTD. Allen wrote the first but many others have followed – including follow-ups by Allen himself. There is GTD software – the best of which (to my mind) is the Open Source (and therefore free) Thinking Rock. There are on-line and real-world consultancies…the best one I’ve found being Priacta’s Total Relaxed Oerganization. Why the best? They give away the entire Phase I (set up) of their training program on line. Priacta figures that many folks won’t be able to move on to Phase II (actually using the system) without their help…and by the time they ask for help, they’ll have invested so much time in the setup that they’ll be ok with paying to learn how to actually use the system. Especially since the quality of their training is evident from how well Phase I is put together. Unfortunately for them, at least in my case, I figured it out without their help. If you need to get control of your inbox (which is really all GTD is about, in the end) you can do it successfully, too. And probably without Priacta’s help, once they help you get the system set up – for free!
This Post’s Tactic
Getting Things Done aims to limit the number of ways new stuff to do enters your life and systematize the way in which you process it and decide what to do, and when. As a starting point, think about how many different ways you receive “direction” in your life. Email. Voice mail. Memos. Brief chats with your daughter. Long chats with your spouse. Make a list. It’s kind of scary. No wonder we’re stressed!
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