!Today? - Permission granted

[Anonymous]

I always smile when I see posts from people who have a "!Today" or "!On Deck" or similar context and who go on to say that they don't think it fits in with GTD.

I think you are very wrong for the following 2 reasons:-

1.In Getting Things Done David states that you should start each day by imagining what a great day would be.

2.The 4th stage of workflow is "Review"

Surely the most pure GTD approach to these 2 activities is to write down your results?

Personally I have a "!Do" context list which contains the Next Actions that I have reviewed and decided as the next priority. I try to keep this list bounded by things I can today. I try and review daily and before each review move any incompletes from the "!Do" list back to the appropriate contexts. This way I am not creating a daily "must do" list and I am not setting permanent priorities.

I also try and include some fun things on each "Do" list ( I have a separate checklist to inspire ideas).

This may not be in the book but to me it is the most "GTD" type thing that I do!

 

[mdmason2003]

I view my "!Today" list of Next Actions as my goal for the day -- it will be a great day at work if I can get all of these things accomplished and go home on time.

 

[taxgeek]

Hear hear!

 

[MarkTAW]

I'm fairly convinced that I'm a freak of nature when it comes to how I implement GTD, but I tend to have 1 to do list and everything on it is very narrowly focused on the next 24-48 hours. Everything else is a project.

 

[Bellaisa]

I just posted about this last week on the discussion "Figuring out Next Actions and Prioirities" - http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1890 saying the thing that Jac just said - a daily to do list is OK.

And then a strange coincidence, that same day, I was listening to the GTD Fast CD and - horrors - David was talking about "the daily to do list" and its pitfalls - where is where people probably get the idea that a daily to-do list is anti-GTD.

I think this is just a question of semantics or the TYPE of daily to do list. There is a big difference between:
1) Coming to work in the morning and writing down a daily to do list from your psycic RAM without FIRST looking at your calendar and lists.
2) Doing your "daily review" (looking at calandar and @ context lists) and writing down the results of that thinking: what you 1) must do today and 2) what you'd like to do today.

With scenario one, you'll get yourself in trouble because you are not trusting your lists and not thinking through the step process (context, time, energy, priority). With scenario one, you are saving yourself having to rethink your daily review everytime you finish a task.

To me, the heart and soul of GTD is not having to think the same thought twice unless you don't want to. For me the @1today, keeps me from having to "rethink" the daily review. So, to me, this is very much in keeping with GTD. The trick is to start fresh daily and not bypass looking at your @context lists as much as you need to.

Again - semantics. Maybe if a person called @dailyreviewresults instead of @1today, they could get around the issue.

As far as the things that won't blow up if I don't do it that day go, I'm able to view my 1today list as flexible and negotiable. If 3:00 hits, I've finished all I HAVE to do, I'm totally exhausted and everything left on my list is high-energy, I just go look at my regular NA lists and find something I can do more effectively. I don't stress over it. Some days are like that - but the 1today list gives me something to shoot for.

On a related note, on the CD, David said something that I think is important when planning out your time (scheduling appointments, doing your daily review) is not not plan your day to more than 60% capacity because about 40% of a typical person's day is dealing with stuff that gets thrown at them that they weren't anticipating. So if you only want to work 8 hours today and meetings, must-do tasks and processing your inbox (assuming you do it daily) are going to take more than 5 hours, you are probably in trouble. That ratio I'm sure varies from person to person, but is a good thing to keep in mind.