So today is the day, that I finally start working on being productive, and actually stopping procrastination in its tracks. Today is the day, that I start working with “GTD” (Getting Things Done). So far, I have a few ideas as to how I’m going to get things going, and I’ve found a few resources to help me get started, so hopefully everything goes as expected.

So what is GTD? - GTD is basically a movement by a bunch of people, who have fallen short, in meeting their productivity standards, and who have found a way to beat the game of procrastination. That’s how I see it anyway. Some other sources, such as Wired, would call it a cult. As would many other sources. Regardless of what it is, it’s a good way to keep track of everything you’re doing, and an amazing way to keep organized.

At the moment, I don’t know exactly how I’m going to use gtd, I’m either going to post stuff on my blog, or I’ll be working with it on my wiki, once I get it going.

The way I’m going to approach everything that I do, and any new task that just happens to pop up, will be done in a specific order. Collect, process, organize review, and then do. This seems like a pretty damn good system, for taking in new things, to me. I stumbled across that procedure, while reading Getting Things Done with Your Macintosh, Part 1. Here’s the authors explanation on how things should go:

The GTD method has five steps: collect, process, organize, review, and do.

• Collect simply means that you note these items in specific places; i.e., a dry-erase marker on the kitchen fridge, or a voice recorder by your bed, for the examples I mentioned above.
• Process takes all of the items you’ve collected and determines what needs to be done next, such as “buy more milk.”
• Organize puts all of these actions into “contexts,” so you’ll complete them more easily; when you buy your milk you can also buy bread, but you can’t usually send an email message.
• Review places these organized lists back into your brain, at least enough so that you have the lists you need, when you need them.
• And finally, you actually do the things on these lists, when you’re ready to do them with the least effort and the most effectiveness.

The plan, for me, so far for the collection phase, is to have two places to ‘collect’ things. First place, will either be a moleskine, or a regular school notebook. The second area to keep stuff will either be on postit notes, around my desk, or a .txt file on my computer.

For the ‘process phase’ I’ll just be adding to selected things that were selected from the collection phase.

For the ‘organization phase’ I’ll probably make out some sort of template, and set things up in a .txt file. If not I’ll just figure out a filing system of some-sort,this folder for that, that for this, etc. If this doesn’t work, I think I’ll try setting up gtd via email, and just using mail filters, to organize everything. The ‘review phase’ doesn’t get its own paragraph, because it’s self explanatory, I’ll just review the lists, and store some in my mind!

Then finally, there is the actual ‘do phase’ which I think is the most important part of the whole thing. This is the part, that I think I may have trouble with, for the simple reason of procrastination. But then again, if I have everything pre-thought out, actually doing a simple thought out task, should be easy. So maybe procrastination wont be an issue. That’s the hope anyway!

So that’s my personal plan. If you’re interested in joining up to get organized, here’s a bunch of links, and resources, that will help you out a whole lot!

Resources

• Getting Things Done with Your Macintosh, Part 1
• Getting Things Done with Your Macintosh, Part 2
• GTDTiddlyWiki
• 43 Folders: GTD Wiki
• Art of Stress-free Productivity
• GTD Wikipedia page