Been busy lately jotting down ideas and tasks you need to carry out! But you always end up doing none of them, wondering what’s stops you from getting on with the first step!
Mr. David Allen, in his book “Getting Things Done”, identified the brake that keeps us behind from acting out and getting on with the tasks we like to do and carry out. It is easy, the GTD technique states that most of our preferred activities and interests are kept inside our heads. That’s why we regularly fail to act upon one of them, they seem to be hard, and we give up eventually.
Mr. Allen called this problem a stress breaker, we have to let go of thinking and overthinking about the tasks or activities we didn’t complete. Then, after we outline a list of uncompleted works, we try to bring them from inside our heads to the outside world. How are we going to do that? You may ask!
In the beginning, you take a board with different sections, colors, and small note sticks, just materials you have available at home. Take a few minutes to think about daily interests or tasks you need to complete, or finished, but you are not satisfied with your performance. Every task must be split into small sub-tasks, which are easy to carry out and require short periods. While you break every activity into chunks on your board, you thereby move from worrying too much about what you did or need to be done, to the process of actually doing them.
Through this gradual process, moving from inside your head allows you to reduce stress and uplift your productivity. That is, the more you break down the activities into small chunks on a whiteboard or wall panel, the more you get relief and motivate yourself to complete them. Far away from many other techniques, the GTD method is highly designed to manage your daily life’s ventures and projects.
So far so good, you now have to discover the process that will help you Getting Things Done after you become familiar with how it works.
- Capture: means the ability to observe all the projects and activities that run inside your mind. Because humans have a short-term memory span, it is easy to get distracted thinking about them. Getting rid of these tasks, momentarily, frees up space and allows you to concentrate and complete each one. By having them written on a paper or colored board, you get a chance to execute every single one, in a gradual process.
- Clarify: stands for your capacity to select activities that are either achievable or unachievable. Some tasks, with instinct feelings, are probably going to be handled successfully, some others are not. Remember to choose tasks you can completely start and finish, just be reasonable and trust your gut feelings.
- Organize: is a key factor in making the GTD process runs smoothly. When you finally decide upon the achievable task that suits you, it is time to divide it into smaller categories. These can be carried out and completed within a specific time frame, so you need a calendar and a note stick. Each small category takes a period, it is up to you to organize it according to your preferred schedule.
- Reflect: This is a self-evaluation meant to test and ensure that you are following your task management system, thoroughly. As you keep track of the successful completion of each category, within a certain activity, you evaluate its efficacy. Therefore, you learn more about what steps to follow next, or what things to exclude and redo again.
- Engage: refers to the last stage in the GTD process. You got your mind clear, jotted down tasks you need, selected the achievable ones, organized your calendar, and tracked the tasks’ timing. What remains, in the last stage, is your willingness to work on the activity or project you like to undertake and complete.
“I’ve always had confidence. It came because I have lots of initiative. I wanted to make something of myself”. Eddie Murphy
Never assume that climbing a mountain is an easy endeavor, but always remember that gradual climbing from the mountain’s bottom to the top is only a well-planned activity that someone else wrote, designed, and executed. Thanks to Mr. Allen and his brilliant GTD management technique. What has been roaming around in our heads has magically become an actionable venture or project in our real daily lives!
