Fascinating article, via, err, someone in the last 5 days of LJ I just caught up on.

So why not apply GTD methods of organization to your feelings and everything icky? It may sound stupid to some of you, but I know people who would immediately benefit from this kind of thought process.

If we can manage our emotional relationships like we do business relationships, maybe we’d have less trouble. If we could organize all personal stuff like you do your work stuff, could we become emotionally productive?

I like some of the general ideas: When something bothers you, bring it up (do) or get over it (trash), but don't just leave it hanging around as an open loop!

I encountered GTD and the world of time management and productivity fairly recently, just in the last couple years, and while it has had some positive impact on my life, I don't yet have a system I'm really happy with. This article on "The Art of the Finish" really struck me as something that might help:

I’ve spent the past five years researching and interviewing unusually accomplished young people, and I would estimate that the majority of them are terribly disorganized. The minority that did have good productivity habits were certainly less stressed. But it played little role in predicting their ultimate success.

From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. If they’re organized, this might happen in scheduled chunks. If they’re not — like many — this might happen in all-nighters. But they get it done. Fast and consistently.

It’s this constant stream of finishing that begins, over time, to unlock more and more interesting opportunities and eventually leads to their big scores.

If you are productive without harboring this intense desire for completion, you will end up just being busy. We all know the feeling. You work all day off of your to-do list. Everything is organized. Everything is scheduled. Yet, still, months pass with no important projects getting accomplished.

He then puts together a basic system around finishing projects, rather than checking off tasks. I know I find that tasks seem to multiply ad infinitum. The real feeling of progress I get is when I *finish* something and can forget about it - know that it will no longer spawn more tasks for me to fight. Not that any project is every truly finished - one could always find more things to do on it. But by saying "This is good enough for now", we get to close the file and stick it in the closet and focus on something else.

My one concern is various "one-off" tasks that aren't part of a bigger project, but will bite me if I put them off forever.

I definitely like the focus on projects instead of next actions. Part of the benefit of GTD is supposed to be the focus on concrete next actions. But I never have any trouble finding a way to advance a project. I pretty much always know what I need to do next.

I'm going to stop reading the book for awhile as I focus on other habits, but here are some quotes to give you the flavor:

From the intro: "The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life."

Rule: Resist the temptation to clear up small things first.

Remember, whatever you choose to do over and over eventually becomes a habit that is hard to break. If you choose to start your day working on low-value tasks, you will soon develop the habit of always starting and working on low-value tasks. This is not the kind of habit you want to develop or keep.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

I think this must be a hack of some deficiency of how our minds work. There must be part of our cognitive architecture that in order to start a task, our mind has to contemplate the fullness and importance of that task. Because I've found it very true that it is much harder to get started on something not fun than to continue doing it once I've started. And this doesn't seem rational - why should all the mental effort be the context switch or activation energy, rather than the work itself? But, rational or not, this is how our brains seem to work, so developing habits to force yourself to get started on key tasks is likely a major element of personal productivity.

I'm going to try Things as my GTD program. I'm also going to try to follow the raise/fold philosophy by only having a few (~5) active projects at a time. Rather than having a system full of todo items, most of which are postponed, I'm going to try to have a much smaller number of projects, most of which are postponed. By making the decision to activate at the project level, rather than the item level, my system will be less cluttered, my reviews simpler, and I will be more focused.

Wow, making key tasks for the day and doing them first (before email, before LJ, before anything) is damn effective!

My previous GTD system was failing, so I am reworking it. I got really stressed yesterday because I was in a bad transition where I had lots of things to do, didn't have a new system to track them, and didn't want to track them with the old system. It occurred to me that a busy and stressful period (like cleaning up all the loose ends to leave your job, while also running a nonprofit, selling a property, ...) is probably not the best time to change task systems :).

So I made a "crisis period" list of only the projects & items which have to get done over the next week and a half, reviewed my old system and unprocessed new system "stuff" to pick out only those items, and am working only with that set of things for now. It looks much less scary when it's all down in one place.

Lots more on my GTD rework in a week or two when I have time to finish it :).

I think I'm going to switch OS X GTD apps soon, as well as revising my GTD process based on what has and hasn't been working for me. I've been using iGTD, and it's just too cluttered and powerful for me. I want less features and more ease of use. There are some great things about it - it's free, and the developer is very productive, so it has advanced rapidly. But it doesn't give me a "Mind Like Water"

I first checked to see if LifeBalance, my old favorite, had gotten a facelift or an iPhone version. I used it for years, and what I love about LB is that it actually prioritizes for you. Basically, at every level of the project hierarchy (from goals down to projects) you can set importance, and then LB sorts tasks based on those, and on what you've done lately, in order to try to keep your total accomplishments balanced by area. I love having it tell me what to do, and being able to yank up & down priorities on projects based on changing importance. I've never found this in another task manager, yet it's really simple & intuitive.

Anyway, LB improves very slowly, and still doesn't have an iphone version, so forget it.

The two apps that sounded really good from reviews are Things and OmniFocus. Both have available, robust iPhone versions. Any comments from those who have tried them?

Steps to improving oneself based on a book:

1. Read the book
2. Analyze/Summarize/Understand the book
3. Extract exercises - practices to use in your daily life
4. Do exercises

I usually just do 1 & 2, and it greatly limits what I can get out of self-improvement books. 3 & 4 are crucial. So what I've started doing is copying all the exercises from books I've finished into a file. That takes care of 3, which at least gives me a shot at 4.

I'm thinking about starting a group where we have an exercise a week, and post about our experiences with it, as a way of helping myself do #4. Start out as just an LJ community, until someone joins who feels like making a website & "real" blog. Hopefully it will inspire more interest than the last community I created, poker_students, which didn't seem to generate much discussion. (speaking of which, if someone wants to post about HSP S1E2, go for it).

Ok, I should just do it...I've created practicing_life. Joining/posting is open for now, I'll change that if we get spammers. I'll post the first exercise on Monday. I have a ton of exercises, so if at some point y'all get tired of mine and want to post one of your own, tell me so, as I don't think I'll run out for at least a year :).

I noticed a link between GTD's "Next Action" and "Outcomes" and NVC's "Concrete Requests / Observations". In both cases, our brain's ability to work with concepts / abstractions / generalizations gets in our way, and the solution is to be more concrete.

For those who aren't familiar, one of the tenets of GTD is to specify outcomes rather than goals. That is "If I accomplished this goal, what would it look like?". The example in the book was "Become a better chef" vs. "Cook a 5-course Christmas dinner by myself." You can see in that example how murky and undefined the former is, how unclear it is how to proceed or when you are finished, whereas the latter is much more specific and actionable.

Similarly, while you can have lots of desired outcomes or project reminders, some of which may be somewhat murky, in GTD you are always supposed to have a small, specific next action associated with each. This means that you always have a clear step to take. And often the process of thinking of an action will clarify the goal.

The NVC equivalent is that right speech is not to say "You are a slob", but "It makes me sad to see your clothes strewn about the living room, as they were when I got home today." And to say "I would like you not to leave your things lying around in the common areas of the house", rather than "I'd like you to be neater".

While there is more here going on than just concretization, the concrete observations and requests are very important in keeping the conversation focused, specific, and not about attacking or judgment.

So, when in doubt, be more concrete!

Long, interesting piece about the author of GTD.