Ok, I’m a die-hard GTD fan. The system is really fantastic for me (an information worker) where it’s less schedule-focused and easy to adopt into technology with almost any tool. Plus, I feel like the system encourages you to feel better about your organization system being personal than forcing you into a mold. I have taken personal organization classes before. GTD is my favorite.

I write this blog entry with an offering of a little tweak that I use that helps me avoid procrastination and focus on daily priorities:

That’s my Outlook Task view grouped by Categories. That is all my categories. I found it much more straight-forward to adopt only the core contexts instead of lots of super-specific ones. Other than the little number of contexts, what else is different?

 

The “TODAY” context. Outlook allows you to assign a task to two categories. I use it in my morning review. I set some goals for myself in the morning that I want to accomplish this day (i.e. things i need to do to keep a project on schedule). So, when I do the review - I just right-click on tasks, enter the category picker, and ALSO check off the “TODAY” Category. This way a task remains in “Office” or “Internet” but also gets added to my “TODAY” context. I leave the “TODAY” category open and make sure that I’m working to accomplish them through the day. Of course, sometimes you don’t get to complete one of them - so it can sit there until tomorrow - or, if the priority changed, take it off the “TODAY” context.

For me, this has made a great difference in feeling bad about forgetting the important thing for the day, and it definitely beats the post-it notes that I used for this before!

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Date: Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 9:58 am | Category: Blog | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.
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