Archive - Sep 2005

This Friday I'll be attending David Allen's GTD | The RoadMap seminar in Boston (if you'll be there, please drop me a line), and I'm trying to prepare so as to get the most out of it. Following are some tips from two sources that I thought were smart; I'd love to hear any additional ideas from you.

First, here are some tips from Jason Womack:

• Do your research - In Learn more, faster, he recommends thorough research before the event.
• Arrive Early - Meet the staff!
• Move around the room at each break - He suggests asking people if it's OK to switch seats. One gets a different experience from each location.

Over at Lifehack.Community user anithri asks "How do I organize a large and growing collection of Electronic documents?":

I have a collection of 200+ PDF's, Word docs, text files...It's easy to find one if I know the name of what I'm looking for already, but opening a large number of them looking for what I'm currently interested in is getting very old very quickly.

One area of my life that David Allen's system has really clarified is how to handle meeting notes. For example, today I had three significant meetings - a programmer/design meeting with two others, an impromptu meeting with my boss (thank goodness I was ready with my Waiting For and Agenda - we completed a bunch of items), and an Extreme Programming (XP) planning meeting with five others that I led. In all three cases I came away with notes that I'd taken during the meetings, marked up with my own little lexicon of "attention icons" (i.e., my way of marking action items, important notes, etc. - for example, an encircled upper case "A" for "action", as earlofmar11 describes).

I read two interesting posts today regarding the large number of GTD-related blogs, and both asked whether there are too many low quality ones written by amateurs (What I'd like to see from GTD sites and Let's Talk About The GTD Hype). First, I'll say that I think it's healthy for a community to question itself - the introspection can lead to growth, and, for me, lead me to think about what I'm doing ("What's the successful outcome?"). For me (a productivity coach-in-training) writing helps me:

• more deeply understand my new field,
• get feedback from other coaches/thinkers, and

I had a little stump-the-coach moment working one of my practice clients on the phone last night, and I'd like to hear others' thoughts in it. She was describing her office to me (no digital camera) and she mentioned her stack of books-in-progress. She was right on when she suggested they should probably go in their own location that doesn't contribute to clutter, but is readily available, but she wanted to know how to "trigger" reading them. Hmmm. That one got me thinking about my own book reading system, and whether it adheres to David Allen's discipline (AKA GTD). The answer: No.

I work in a research lab of about a dozen people, and our mission (from my simple perspective) is to do great research, which boils down to a) doing good work, and b) writing about it and getting it published. We continue to experiment with different ways to do this well, having tried (among others):

• setting up small 'working groups' that meet weekly,
• writing frequent internal 'tech memos',
• encouraging teaming up on authoring papers,

No, I don't consider myself any of those. But here's the story: I've been exploring coaching others in David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (AKA GTD), and I would like to characterize the stages (or phases) of adoption of ideas like this. I strongly suspect there's a standard psychological framework for this, and I hope that someone can point me to it. I'm interested because I'm clearly in something like an evangelist stage, and I'm curious about whether others have gone through similar phases. Here's a first pass at some of the stages I've experienced:

1. exposure (my boss told me about the book, and was excited about it)
2. resistance (got the book, but let it sit for a few months)

This was a remarkable day for me, primarily because I was surprised by a number of "seeds" (which I've been slowly planting) that sprouted up a bit. I wanted to mention a few of them, then tip my hat to David Allen's ideas on project planning, esp. the power of envisioning wild success.

Buzz

Have you ever had the following happen? You're doing something (a chore, writing, whatever) and your mind says "Hey, you really ought to ____." In my case the ____ has been:

• wear safety goggles (while using a crowbar to break break up a wooden pallet)
• check out that wet wood around the shower stall (while showering)
• get my bike's freewheel fixed (while riding it)
• go to bed (when I'm feeling really tired)