The challenge of personal productivity
One of the challenges I have been trying to overcome over the last few years has been “getting things done”. The people that know me personally can testify to the fact that I tend to be scatter-brained, and can get distracted by inputs. The desire to overcome this is one of the reasons I started working on TRAMBU. Since then, I have learned a lot about (personal) productivity and organizational methods and systems to get work done timely and efficiently.
Technology oriented practices such as the Mikado method, Lean, Agile, Scrum, and XP offer a nice framework to organize your workload. On top of these project-oriented approaches, there are a plethora of self-help books on personal productivity. Lately I have been reading “Getting things done” by David Allen.
The method
In his book “Getting things done”{:target="_blank"}, David Allen proposes a simple yet effective process of dealing with thoughts that got through your mind. The hypothesis being that the human mind is made for having ideas, not for storing them. In his book, Allen shares his 5-step personal flow with the reader. He defines the “Collect”, “Process”, “Organize”, “Review” and “Act” phases. From my experience with Agile methodologies, I have added an extra phase. This phase comes at the end of the process, and is called “Analyze”. I believe that systematic reflection on the actions taken is a valuable learning and adjustment tool. You can see a visualization of the expanded model below.
I will attempt to describe the process in some more detail. A fair warning here though: the book does a much better job of explaining this process.
There are five distinct phases in the GTD personal productivity flow: (1) Collect, (2) Process, (3) Organize, (4) Review, and finally (5) Act. Here is a brief summary of the goals of each phase:
(1) Collect: You write down everything that comes to mind. Whatever is in your head should be captured. You do not have to worry about this stuff being actionable, or specific. No need for SMART goals here.
(2) Process: After you have captured as much as you can, you go over each item and try to figure out what it is you want (or need) to do with it. A good trick here is to envision what state you want to achieve, and how you would go about getting from here to there.
(3) Organize: Now that you know where you want to go, and how you think of getting there, you need to organize your items into piles (called ‘buckets’ in the book). Time-critical items go on your calendar. Things that you don need to act on go into the trash bin or into a reference pile.
(4) Review: Everything you need to do is now sorted and organized into neat piles. This is great! Now you need to learn the habit of looking at these piles at regular intervals. You go over the items on your backlog, and choose which one to act on next.
(5) Act: and now: Just do it!
As mentioned before, I added a sixth phase to the system: “Analyze”. If you look at infographics of most agile development methodologies (like the one below), you will notice a lot of loops in the picture. In these systems, the development team comes together at the end of each iteration and look over the work they have done. This is the moment in the process where there is time for critical reflection on the quality of actions taken, the inefficiencies encountered, and the overall satisfaction with the current system.
If you map the GTD process on agile software methods, most of the phases described fall into the “Backlog refinement” or “Planning” categories. Once you finish your actions, they disappear from the system. In my experience, a practise of systematic reflection is a great tool to evaluate and adjust how you are doing things. Maybe after the umpteenth time vacuuming the living room, you are tired of it and would like to look into a way to make this easier and more time efficient. “Alternative to vacuuming” ends up on your brain dump. After processing, you end up deciding to buy one of those round vacuum-robot thingies that were all the rage a few years ago. This leads to the action “Buy a roomba”. The circle has been made.
Conclusion
The main goal of putting a formalized system in place is to literally take things “off your mind”. The only way this works is if you have enough trust in your system. You have to believe that you will get back to the things you are writing down and organizing. My previous personal process of “lists of lists of stuff I might have to do” did not quite fit this description. Especially as usually I never looked back at the list after I had finished writing it. So mr. Allen’s system is something that I would at least like to try. My major criticism however is that when you divide your actionable items between a calendar and a few lists, the practise of having a specific “Review” phase in your personal system does not take long to deteriorate.
To make a system such as the one described above successful, you have to trust it and use it rigorously. Keeping a paper notebook and personal calendar on your person at all times seems like an easy, low tech way of going about this. Combine this with collecting these “brain dumps” into a digital system at the end of the day, and the collection phase ends up being minimally leaky.