It´s been over a year now that I applied Getting Things Done (GTD) to my life. That step was largely inspired by all this very positive blog coverage within the Macintosh user communitity. All I did to start it, was getting the book and follow it.

What is Getting Things Done about?

GTD is a personal time management system, which aims to give you a mind like water (aka floating mind), which means to react on everything only with as much energy as it deserves. It does this by telling you about the tools you need to move everything (currently) unnessesary out of your mind into a place you absolutely trust. Trust must be absolut here, because if you are unsafe about the creditibilty of that place, things will start to wander back into your mind and disrupt you from getting things done.

OK. I admin it sounds a bit scary or esoteric at first, but what it means in practice is that you get a toolchain and workflows to keep you from getting confused about what to do next and prevents your desk/inbox from overflowing. It does by helping you to break down all those overwhelming projects and tasks into little, achievable pieces of work, the next actions.

One important thing about GTD is, that you are encouraged to implement it in either your professional and personal life, so it shouldn´t matter if you have to clean up the cellar or code software for your boss. Especially the latter might become subject to conflicts in many other time management systems, if they are too strict to let your boss to decide about your work time. BTW – GTD does not give you more time a day than the 24h you´ve got. It also might not make you to achieve more than you already do. But it will make you more relaxed while you do it.

The toolchain aspect talks to the geek in me. I love to optimize things using computers and software and there is a whole bunch of GTD supporting software available for the Mac. I´ve got OmniFocus for this purpose, which is a bit pricey but absolutely worth it when it comes to features and convenience. Beneath to the management related features it has a very good synchronization support i totally rely on. And, best of it, it also works on the iPhone. OmniFocus has become my place to trust in.

GTD at my professional work

My professional work management was changed fundamentelly. I used to write TODO lists before. I did this by copying the remaining tasks from previous day to a fresh piece of paper every morning, repriorize them and see all these planning gone by the first contact with my boss. Today I just put every task (or project which simply is a group of tasks that lead to a greater outcome) in OmniFocus as it occurs. Tasks that got a deadline are done within that deadline (almost), everything else if there is time. I also learned to delegate work, something I barely did before, if I am not the most perfect available person for the job.

Further I stopped to multitask. In my opinion multitasking is doing multiple things at once in a bad fashion. Multitasking from my brain´s view is nothing more than extreme expensive context switching all the time. When I work on a next action, I do that exclusively.

My colleagues don´t know that I am doing GTD or what it is. That shows GTD is not that invasive.

GTD at my home work

At home GTD got me to keep everything proper. All those papers flying around are long gone into a set of folder now holding all my legal stuff or to recycle bin.

But as it comes to next actions, I don´t do that much at home. My time at home is very short and filled up with fix blocks of work (mostly my distance learning stuff). So I gather new next actions all the time but never do them until it is absolutely necessary.

Anyways, nothing gets lost and something even gets done when I have a bit time. So its not that bad at all.

Conclusion

GTD cleaned up my head a lot. I no longer wander around asking myself what to do next. And in the end I do everything at least.

Every morning at work I can prepare for the stand up meeting in less than 5 minutes. I just need no time to synchronize TODO lists with the reality.

I almost stopped to procrastinate (Only very unpleasant things are pushed) and became more honest about doing things.

All in all I became more productive, more relaxed and happier than before. I would say, starting GTD was one of the best decisions I made in the last year.