People tell me that I am the most organized and efficient person they know. That statement is probably more true than not, since I tend to be almost fetishistic about my time management.

But even an old dog like me can learn new tricks, and I have taken like a fish to water with the Getting Things Done, method of organization and time management.

This Blog entry caught my eye a while back and I decided to investigate the system. The graphic at the top of this post illustrates the basic concepts:

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn't in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn't yours or you don't need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment, both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what's on or off your plate.

Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff). It's actually sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

Pretty simple huh? Yeah it is. The bottom line to ANY time management/productivity application, is to take action... To not allow yourself to be paralyzed by inaction, or to be overwhelmed. Too few of us really learn to look at the big picture and then to break that picture down into manageable parts. This system does it very well...

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