Now I’m not usually the self-help type, however this book has been getting a lot of press during the past year, so I figure, what the hell, let me give it a try. I was just disorganized enough to make good use of the thing.

In a nutshell, Mr. David Allen does a few things differently from the classic organizational tips that we’re all used to. He hates the traditional todo lists. He figures that listing everything you need to do on one list makes you "go numb" that the list rather quickly.

An Empty Head is a Happy Head

I think this is my favorite of all his philosophies. Generally, we’re not supposed to try to keep any bits of information in our head. That’s why he advocates things like planners, notebooks, PDAs, etc to keep track of everything. You collect everything into your inboxes . This is basically for dumping place for any loose bits of data that have had to be processed or organized. It takes the stress out of a lot of things. Even though I’m far from perfecting his process, just having an inbox has already done wonders for me. You remember something that needs doing, you scribble it down on a piece of paper or a notepad and you throw that in the inbox and you’re done.

Processing The Inbox

This is what I need to work on. After you’ve collect all your stray data, then comes the processing and organizing stage. You go through the inbox and put things in their appropriate places. These places include Calendar, Action Lists, Project Folders, and Reference Material. Now that sort of simplifies matters for most of us.

The calendar is easy for most of us. We’ve been using it for some time now. But the difference with David’s use of the calendar is he only stores things that you absolutely must get done on at date (at that time) or the sky will come crashing down. He’s against putting a list of things that it "would be nice" if you could get them done. By doing this, one April 1st, 2009 hits, the first thing you do is look at your calendar and see that you need to "Execute killer April Fools joke on boss, 3 years in the making". When you look at that, you can then evaluate it and decide whether that’s the best use of your time. Else, you go to your action lists.

Action lists are a variation of the classic todo list, but they are divided into specific context categories such as Home, Phone, Email, Computer, Work, Agenda (people you need to see), Waiting for (stuff you can’t do because someone has to get back to you), etc. The idea behind these contexts is that you shouldn’t be worrying about doing something if you’re not in a position to do it. If you’re at work, then you should only be looking at your Work list. If you’re mile from a Computer, then you can’t possibly "Upgrade Wordpress to 2.5". This doesn’t work out so well for me and here’s why: All my contexts seem to always overlap, so I’m always looking at my entire list, pretty much. I got a cell phone, so I always have to keep looking at Calls list. When I’m at Home there’s the possibility to make calls, emails, use the computer and even login remotely to my computer at work. So, I’m still trying to refine this process a lil’ bit.

A Project, by his definition, is anything that takes more than one action to complete. There are a lot of tips in there about planning projects, but the one thing I did pick up and try to make use of is the organization of projects into folders. So currently, I have an Auto Registration project folder that I just keep dumping stuff into. Got that expiration letter in the mail, dump it in the folder; set up my online account to register so I dump the username and login in the folder; got the sticker in the mail, dumped it in that folder. After all that, I set a calendar reminder of when I needed to change the car sticker. When that day came, there was no question as to where everything about Auto Registration was located. He also advises we use the projects list for higher level projects like career goals and such.

Everything else that you don’t need to do something about and you don’t want to trash gets classified as reference material. And he has some good tips about filing, etc.

He also has some good tips about processing email. He has this idea of "getting down to zero", which basically means that your email inbox should be kept at 0 (read and unread) as much as possible. That doesn’t mean deleting things, just when you read email you should process it like you do everything else: evaluated the next actions it and put in the appropriate context (folders work fine), stick it in a projects folder if it’s so related, or file it away as general reference material if you want to keep it. That way, when you go through your email and wonder "what do I need to DO?", you can head straight to your context folders.

Weekly Review - Now There’s My Problem

The thing with all this organization and not keeping everything is in your head, is for you to be aware of what you need to do, you need to have a weekly review of all your lists and you need regularly process your inbox.
This is the last lil’ bit of the process that I need to work on and get squared away in my brain.

After that, I’ll be unstoppable! :D

Popularity: 24%

Similar Posts

  • None Found