Stuck between a GTD Rock and Hard Place

[Leonadial]

I find myself in a place where I can't imagine going back to life before GTD but I'm so ineffective at implementing it that it's actually counter productive. I've been working at it for over 5 years now and I need some help! Let me provide some context.

I'm a 40 year old guy, just relocated to Singapore with my family to take a new role where I lead a sales team for a software company I've been with 16 years. I'm responsible for APAC region while our HQ is back in Europe. Mornings should be when I can get some work done, while afternoons, when Europe and then US comes online, are when the back-to-back calls start. Given the global nature of our business, I'm getting 200-300 emails a day to process, coming in all day long.

So my day starts with trying to process the new emails from overnight. Sometimes 50-100, of which 10%-30% will have next actions for me, and of course hundreds more come in during the day. I have a number of Outlook plugins and mouse shortcuts that help me delete, file and convert to next actions anything I can't delegate or do in 2 mins. But this process can still take me 1-2 hrs, especially if I didn't get my inbox to zero the previous evening. So it's mid-morning at best before I even look at my next action list, get a few overdue things done and then grab a quick lunch before the back-to-back calls start.

Any notes and action items I take from meetings or calls I usually capture on paper, and I make sure to clearly mark the AIs with the intent that I copy them into my OutlookClearContext based lists later, but sometimes this happens days only later. Heaven forbid I'm away on business travel for a few days, my inbox gets out of control and I feel even more overwhelmed.

And of course I don't do my Weekly Review regularly or completely. I have 2 hours allocated to it on a Friday morning but rarely respect it. If my inbox has gotten on top of me I can easily spend 2-3 hrs clearing a 300-600 email backlog, generating 50-10 next actions on a list I sometimes haven't looked at in days. I go through this stale list and take little pleasure in checking off tasks I'd completed during the week because they started to burn, rather than due to me being in control.

Bottom line: I seem to spend too much time trying to process my inbox and not enough time working through my next actions list. I'm supposed to be a strategic leader, but I'm ruled by my inbox. I sometimes go days without even getting to my list, so it becomes a "blackhole" where I send stuff to get it out of my inbox but I don't trust myself to look at it and therefore don't trust my system anymore. But there is no going back to pre-GTD days. I really am feeling stuck. Any suggestions!?

 

[Oogiem]

My first thoughts are to first try to limit the number of incoming e-mails. Can you categorize them? Are there bunches more that you could delegate and get the people sending them off to the new person instead of you? Can you suggest a once a day e-mail with action items so you can process them all at once from the people who do send you stuff you do need to process? Can you re-set expectations on how quickly you will respond to e-mails? Instead of dealing with them once a day, perhaps, I know it seems like sacrilege, but would it be more efficient to block a single day that you do nothing but handle the e-mails? How many inboxes do you really have? Paper, e-mail? Are there others? Do you consider things like social media, or bookmarks from browsing and inbox? Can you consolidate those into a smaller number of inboxes? Can you use rules and automatic sorting on the e-mails to clear out the messages you don't have todeal with right away? Have you trained the people whoi e-mail you to leave you off of blind CC's on messages?

Do keep in mind that for nearly eveyone you do need to spend about 1-2 hours a day doing nothing but processing your incoming stuff.

You have a new role, now is the time to re-set expectations about what you can and can't do. Are you still doing stuff that belongs to your old role? Can you talk to your boss and get old items moved on to your successor? Are old subordinates still contacting you? Do new ones not understand your new role?

Then I'd take a serious look at your lists. Are the contexts sufficiently well defined so that you can clearly do the items in them without much additional thinking? Are the actual action items on those lists very well defined? Is your project list clean with no projects that should be in someday/maybe still sitting in active and hanging over you? Never underestimate the mental cost of switching contexts. Are you thrashing from action to action rather than just saying, I'm staying in this context for a while and working on items in it? Especially if you find yourself moving in and out of the the same few contexs as you handle each action that's a clear signal to stop and stick to one context for at least a couple of actions before moving on.

Are your lists inviting to use? Is it fun to put things onto them and fun to check them off? Do you like to use the tools you have chosen? If you don't like the tools you'll never really enjoy using them and that resistance will make the system seem cumbersome. Find a set of tools you love, whether it's a special pen and expensive paper and a custom notebook for paper systems, or a really nice phone or mobile tool, or a cool mousepad or whatever, make sure the tools you use inspire you and make you feel good and successful whenever you use them.

Then the critical weekly review. So you can't carve out a chunk to do the review at one go. What about a staged review? There are 3 main stages to the review, get clear, get current and get creative. What if you set it up so that Monday is the get the inboxes clear stage. Then maybe Wednesday you review all your projects, actions and the calendar and Friday you get creative. Or go to a different location to do the review, if your system is portable then perhaps a long lunch at a coffee shop, or an hour or 2 in the local library would be better. You could also do a mini review in the morning.

I have a routine where depending on the season before or after checking the sheep I have breakfast, and sit at my computer and look at the day. I look at the calendar, then the weather, then my lists and finally I read the news and do things like come here and post on threads that interest me. Some seasons I do that before going outside, some I do it mid morning after major morning sheep work is done but I try to do the same set of things nearly every day.

There are ways to deal with your overload but you'll have to figure out which ones work for you. Good luck.

 

[Supergirl]

Do keep in mind.you are striving in the right direction,just be patient,take a good look at what you have and create ways of making g the best of it.giving up is not an option.keep going!!!!

 

[Cpu_Modern]

At least from what you are writing, it is obvious that your company has a counter-productive email culture. It is further obvious that your problem is not whether you use GTD or any other method to organize and execute your workload. The problem is the amount of work you have to do.

From where I stand, a team leader should invest much of his time into developing his team. It looks like you are doing a big chunk of the grunt work yourself, which is IMO a meltdown in the making.

Why 200-300 emails? Are they sale requests? That should be handled by your staff. Are they internal? Then use GTD to eliminate the problems within your organization that create these emails in the first place. Threehundred email per day is insanity, there is no job on earth where that is a path to success, not even in customer service. How can you do good customer service with a load like that?

You have to tackle the real problem, which is the amount of emails. As a leader you should focus on building the processes around and in your team, develop your team, school your team to increase success and all that sort of stuff.

The same goes for the back-calls. Do these calls lead to sales? If ye, your staff has to handle these. If not, why are they even part of your process?

GTD cannot compress time for you, nor can anything else. IMO, you have to re-structure your job ASAP.

Alternatively, this is just your job. You do the emails, you do the back-calls. Everything else slides. BTW, what did your predecessor do??

(I used to work as a coder and I am in marketing/sales now. Feel free to PM me regarding a specific detail in your sales process, if you think that would help us.)

 

[Rosendo]

Hi Leonadial. It looks to me that you are very clear on the use of GTD and the benefits your can get from it. As we learned, the most difficult aspect of a job is the find out what is the job about. Take some time to define your job, to define what is really important in your job that you have to do by yourself. For example, create a list of your activities in one column; the second column is just to visualize (yes/or no) if you can delegate that activity. Do not focus on the person you can delegate it or if that person even exists. Then, review those activities that cannot be delegated and decide how much time should they use of your available time. Do this like and exercise. Your are not making any commitment - it is just a way to see and starting to realize the importance of each activity, if it really has to be done by you, and if it does - how much of your time should you invest in it. That is just the first step but you will see that there may be activities you shouldn't be doing by yourself and that are taking huge chunks of your time. Your will gain some clarity about your job and it will help you getting further in your job definition. Feel free to contact me anytime to change ideas about your job.

 

[CamJPete]

Oogiem is one wise shepherdess. Great advice. I can't really add to much more to what she and other have said other than second it. My thoughts:

The first part of the workflow diagram is "stuff" coming at you. If the pipeline of stuff is flowing at you is faster than you have time to drink it up and it is becoming counterproductive, it is imperative to develop a solution to reduce the flow rate. This may require constricting the flow at the source (unsubscribe, asked to be removed from cc), or redirecting the flow along the path (delegate to an assistant, current team member), or increase the number of people who can drink it up at the end point (expand your team through hiring). It may require buy in from supervisors and some discussion on why you need to implement a solution based on your current workload. If they tell you suck it up and quit being a baby, well...perhaps you have a new project on your list of "stick it to the man". The next best solution is to go rogue and implement your solution without their buy in Oogiem gave some great ideas to implement. Perhaps brainstorm a few of them and post them and see if we can help out. Everybody's work situation is different, and maybe you have very few options. As you go along keep repeating the mantra: "what small thing can I simplify today to reduce the flow tomorrow?". As Rosendo mentioned too, ensure that you are not drinking from other pipes of stuff that you don't need to. Try to define exactly what stuff should be coming through your pipe which depends on your defined job responsibilities. Perhaps that needs some further definition and mutual agreement from superiors also so that have the authorization to say no with confidence and without fear.

From an system organizational standpoint, I believe that very clear hard edges between lists and regular updating through review are of the utmost importance if you are going to trust your actions list. It is good practice to double check that every item has a very specific context and that it can truly be done in that context. I find sometimes after some of my actions have sat in a context for a month or so that I resist doing them because I really need to do them with a different tool (i.e. I need to be at a computer when I make this call, and can't make it while driving home --hands free of course.) Ensure each action item has a clear verb along with. If I'm honest with myself, I start ignoring my actions list if they aren't really reflective of my true next actions, or it isn't current. Probably nothing more than what others have said.

It sounds like you may need two new projects: 1. "slow the flow to 1.5 hours a day" However, if it still takes two hours, you will still have six work hours to do work from your lists minus surprises. Which leads to the next project: 2. review projects and next actions list and delete, rewrite, or move to someday maybe until you can honestly say that you trust working from them and do so often

Good luck and keep at it. I first read GTD in 2007. It's taken me until the start of 2016 to really understand the finer points of the system to make it gel.

 

[jenkins]

I'm supposed to be a strategic leader, but I'm ruled by my inbox.

Sounds to me like you need to delegate so you can focus on higher level tasks. If you are in a leadership role, you probably shouldn't be processing 200-300 emails a day if that could be delegated to someone else.