NA Discipline

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Busydave

Registered
We stop working on projects willingly, or through interruptions. A powerful discipline would be to identify next actions at the moment we cease working on a project, and leave a stake in the ground for the next time. This would immediately seal off the open loop effect. It would probably also be the best time to identify the next action anyway. It would reduce the size of the snowball of open loops to be addressed at the next weekly review.

How successful have you been in developing this discipline?

Dave
 
F

Frank Buck

Guest
Busydave,
You are exactly right. Someone on the bulletin compared defining the next action to a bookmark. In the best of all worlds, when you are working on a project, you go straight fom one step to the next without writing anything down. It's when you stop working on that project that you need a bookmark to tell you where to pick up again.
Frank
 
R

RLJefferies

Guest
NA Discipline

I'm good at "closing" my work on a project & noting the NA on the appropriate list. :)
The most difficult for me is whenever work is interrupted by someone else's crisis and I am forced to change tracks of thought. (This wouldn't happen to them if they used GTD themselves :wink:.)
Occasionally I have been able to stall the interupter with, "Just a moment, let me clear this out of the way." Then I jot myself a quick blurb to be processed later before I address the person/issue before me. This is not always possible, especially when the Crisis is also Urgent.
Anyone been able to come up with strategies for coping with the interruption without losing your place?
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Re: NA Discipline

If I get interrupted when I'm really in the 'flow' then there is usually too much in my mind to be able to write fast enough or to be able to summarize it easily in a simple 'bookmark' type of phrase. So I try to keep a digital voice recorder handy to be able to get out as much as possible as quickly as possible. My handwriting speed is maybe 30wpm (grafiti is only 20wpm), wheras talking at 200wpm is pretty easy.

Doug
 
A

Ambar

Registered
Doing this is my habit. It's uncommon that I'm surprised by finding an incomplete project with no next action on my lists. (It's more often than I find things that should have been next actions left in the "Project" context, but that's an artifact of my software. The weekly review catches them, and I do check the projects list more often than that.)

Cheers,

Ambar
http://ambarconsulting.com
 
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