Using time as a primary filter

bishblaize

Registered
I've been using time as my primary filter for about 6 weeks now, thought I’d feed back on how it's gone.

Why try?

Contexts are a way to filter down your full list of NAs by the “hardest” filter available. Historically it might be a tool (@computer @email) or a location (@office @home). If you didn’t have that tool with you, well, ignore that whole list. It was a nice, clean-edged way of filtering down your options. As long as you reached that tool or location some point during the working week, you could ignore it until then. This meant that instead of choosing from ~80-100 possible NAs and being overwhelmed, you might only have 30 to choose from. Much better.

My job has changed in the last 5 years. I’m CEO of an SME of about 40 staff spread over a few cities. I don't have a traditional office, I work from home or a co-working space. My laptop is with me ubiquitously and all our company tools and documents are cloud-based. 95% of stuff on my NA lists are done from a laptop. My @computer list ended up with 90% of my NAs on it. That made it hard to pick a task, because I was scanning through 70 to 80 Next Actions looking for something to do each time. I found myself not even wanting to go trawling through my @computer list. I then tried to break up my @computer list by using more discrete tools (@Word, @Excel) or activities (@mindmap, @Review). But this didn’t really work.

In GTD the classic decision-making process is context > time > energy > biggest pay off. You filter first by context, ignoring what you can’t do right now. Then you look at your remaining list(s) and pick one, factoring in time, energy and importance.

What I was doing was very different. With contexts being nothing more than categories rather than hard limiters, I was essentially filtering by mood – I was asking myself what do I feel like doing next? I was able to do any Next Action, I was just picking one over another based on little more than preference for that kind of task at that moment. This is a very poor way of choosing, for two reasons.

Firstly, if I was relaxed about doing any kind of task, which I often am, then this doesn’t filter things down at all. I’m able to do any of my contexts, and therefore I’m back to picking from my full list. Secondly, this won’t necessarily surface the most important thing I could be doing. If I decide that doing some online R&D is what I feel like doing now, but in my @emails list there’s a Next Action that would be beneficial if I did it now, then I won’t see it, even though its a valid option.

The reality is that this is a completely arbitrary way to separate my tasks. I could achieve the same outcome by simply putting them in alphabetical order and choosing one based on their first letter.

Filtering by time

Almost on a whim I saw another post by someone on the GTD Forum and decided to start trying to filter by time. I split my tasks down into 4 types – 5 mins or under, 15 mins, 30 mins and 60 mins+. Instead of trying to accurately predict the task, I just estimate it to the nearest round segment. I could just as easily have chosen "short, medium, long or very long", but that felt too woolly.

I’ve since done 6 weekly reviews in a row on this basis. I set up Omnifocus so it would filter first by time, and then give me the usual view of Contexts and Next Actions. This has worked outstandingly well. I was shocked because I had always been suspicious about how practical it was to try and predict your work based on time. However, as the weeks went by, it became apparent that this was really working well for me. Going into my NAs felt far less intimidating because I was back to having my working environment filter my tasks down for me.

What I realised is that, in my job, windows of time are a more meaningful limitation than tool or activity. I have all my tools and can do any activity from any location, more or less. However, if I have 25 minutes til my next meeting, that’s a real limit on what I can do. If I can’t do 30 minute tasks or above, don’t even show them to me. This works both ways too. If I have a free afternoon (which is rare) then I can go straight to my 1hr+ tasks, since I know it might be a week or more before I get another chance. Again, the filter is helping me pick.

I have so many meetings in a working week that I'm constantly in these weird windows of time, as DA calls them. 20 minutes here, 40 there, then 10, then 90, and so on. They’re part of the hard landscape in a way that contexts used to be for me but aren’t any more.

How accurate can you be judging time?

My biggest worry going in was about judging how long things took. This turned out to be a total non-issue. Firstly, you already judge time anyway. I overlooked this fact, but when you choose what you’re going to do next, you factor in how long it will take, so I was already fairly adept at judging how long it would take. All I’m doing is asking myself the question up front and recording the results of that thinking in my trusted system – classic GTD behaviour. And of course the more I did it, the better I got.

Secondly, if you’re wrong, it probably only matters if you hugely underestimate. If I thought an NA would take 30 minutes and it takes 15 minutes – great! Lucky me.
The main risk is that you thought it would be quick and it took a long time. This just didn’t happen much. Since I know that my tasks do not, in fact, take precisely 15 minutes, its just an approximation, I avoid trying to do things like fit a 15 minute task in a 17 minute window. I do occasionally get it wrong, but the impact is not all that severe if you think about it, and its hugely outweighed by the benefits.

Final thoughts

I actually learnt a huge amount about myself and GTD doing this, but this post is long enough without my ruminations on the various aspects of GTD that this shone a light on.

The main thing is that this isn’t an argument in favour of using time as a primary filter per se. Rather its an argument that you should use your "hardest" filter first. My previous job had very hard context filters – I had a desktop Mac that was based in one office, our company finance office was somewhere else that I had to go regularly, and we had 3 other buildings where I needed to do bits of work. So my @computer, @building1, @building2 type contexts worked great. And if these work for you, you probably don't need to worry about it.

But I know from the comments online that many people have the same issue as I do in my current job. People are inventing contexts that are essentially arbitrary and recognising that they’re not getting the same payoff they used to. If it isn't working for you, maybe trial out using time.
 

ivanjay205

Registered
I've been using time as my primary filter for about 6 weeks now, thought I’d feed back on how it's gone.

Why try?

Contexts are a way to filter down your full list of NAs by the “hardest” filter available. Historically it might be a tool (@computer @email) or a location (@office @home). If you didn’t have that tool with you, well, ignore that whole list. It was a nice, clean-edged way of filtering down your options. As long as you reached that tool or location some point during the working week, you could ignore it until then. This meant that instead of choosing from ~80-100 possible NAs and being overwhelmed, you might only have 30 to choose from. Much better.

My job has changed in the last 5 years. I’m CEO of an SME of about 40 staff spread over a few cities. I don't have a traditional office, I work from home or a co-working space. My laptop is with me ubiquitously and all our company tools and documents are cloud-based. 95% of stuff on my NA lists are done from a laptop. My @computer list ended up with 90% of my NAs on it. That made it hard to pick a task, because I was scanning through 70 to 80 Next Actions looking for something to do each time. I found myself not even wanting to go trawling through my @computer list. I then tried to break up my @computer list by using more discrete tools (@Word, @Excel) or activities (@mindmap, @Review). But this didn’t really work.

In GTD the classic decision-making process is context > time > energy > biggest pay off. You filter first by context, ignoring what you can’t do right now. Then you look at your remaining list(s) and pick one, factoring in time, energy and importance.

What I was doing was very different. With contexts being nothing more than categories rather than hard limiters, I was essentially filtering by mood – I was asking myself what do I feel like doing next? I was able to do any Next Action, I was just picking one over another based on little more than preference for that kind of task at that moment. This is a very poor way of choosing, for two reasons.

Firstly, if I was relaxed about doing any kind of task, which I often am, then this doesn’t filter things down at all. I’m able to do any of my contexts, and therefore I’m back to picking from my full list. Secondly, this won’t necessarily surface the most important thing I could be doing. If I decide that doing some online R&D is what I feel like doing now, but in my @emails list there’s a Next Action that would be beneficial if I did it now, then I won’t see it, even though its a valid option.

The reality is that this is a completely arbitrary way to separate my tasks. I could achieve the same outcome by simply putting them in alphabetical order and choosing one based on their first letter.

Filtering by time

Almost on a whim I saw another post by someone on the GTD Forum and decided to start trying to filter by time. I split my tasks down into 4 types – 5 mins or under, 15 mins, 30 mins and 60 mins+. Instead of trying to accurately predict the task, I just estimate it to the nearest round segment. I could just as easily have chosen "short, medium, long or very long", but that felt too woolly.

I’ve since done 6 weekly reviews in a row on this basis. I set up Omnifocus so it would filter first by time, and then give me the usual view of Contexts and Next Actions. This has worked outstandingly well. I was shocked because I had always been suspicious about how practical it was to try and predict your work based on time. However, as the weeks went by, it became apparent that this was really working well for me. Going into my NAs felt far less intimidating because I was back to having my working environment filter my tasks down for me.

What I realised is that, in my job, windows of time are a more meaningful limitation than tool or activity. I have all my tools and can do any activity from any location, more or less. However, if I have 25 minutes til my next meeting, that’s a real limit on what I can do. If I can’t do 30 minute tasks or above, don’t even show them to me. This works both ways too. If I have a free afternoon (which is rare) then I can go straight to my 1hr+ tasks, since I know it might be a week or more before I get another chance. Again, the filter is helping me pick.

I have so many meetings in a working week that I'm constantly in these weird windows of time, as DA calls them. 20 minutes here, 40 there, then 10, then 90, and so on. They’re part of the hard landscape in a way that contexts used to be for me but aren’t any more.

How accurate can you be judging time?

My biggest worry going in was about judging how long things took. This turned out to be a total non-issue. Firstly, you already judge time anyway. I overlooked this fact, but when you choose what you’re going to do next, you factor in how long it will take, so I was already fairly adept at judging how long it would take. All I’m doing is asking myself the question up front and recording the results of that thinking in my trusted system – classic GTD behaviour. And of course the more I did it, the better I got.

Secondly, if you’re wrong, it probably only matters if you hugely underestimate. If I thought an NA would take 30 minutes and it takes 15 minutes – great! Lucky me.
The main risk is that you thought it would be quick and it took a long time. This just didn’t happen much. Since I know that my tasks do not, in fact, take precisely 15 minutes, its just an approximation, I avoid trying to do things like fit a 15 minute task in a 17 minute window. I do occasionally get it wrong, but the impact is not all that severe if you think about it, and its hugely outweighed by the benefits.

Final thoughts

I actually learnt a huge amount about myself and GTD doing this, but this post is long enough without my ruminations on the various aspects of GTD that this shone a light on.

The main thing is that this isn’t an argument in favour of using time as a primary filter per se. Rather its an argument that you should use your "hardest" filter first. My previous job had very hard context filters – I had a desktop Mac that was based in one office, our company finance office was somewhere else that I had to go regularly, and we had 3 other buildings where I needed to do bits of work. So my @computer, @building1, @building2 type contexts worked great. And if these work for you, you probably don't need to worry about it.

But I know from the comments online that many people have the same issue as I do in my current job. People are inventing contexts that are essentially arbitrary and recognising that they’re not getting the same payoff they used to. If it isn't working for you, maybe trial out using time.
I am in a VERY similar position to you and recently retooled my system and it has worked wonderfully. I am the President and COO of a family business (partner in the business in terms of ownership) with also about 40 employees. Majority of our team are in our NY office with some remote and we do work all over the country.

However, I only have a few things that can only be done in the office. 80% of my work is done on my computer and 10% on the phone. So the traditional contexts did not work for me. I found estimating time to be very difficult as it was not always an accurate representation and it didnt fit my energy or mood. Here is what I landed on.... It has worked wonderfully for me!

I also use Omnifocus and my contexts are:

  • Agendas (everyone I meet with as part of a check-in has an agenda tag specifically for them. I also have agenda tags for recurring meetings such as my bi-weekly operations meeting, monthly team meetings, etc.
  • Calls/Text (anything I can do on my phone only)
  • Focus Work (this is for my heavy lifting and heavy thinking work)
  • Hanging Around (When I'm fried, tired, or just lazy while watching a show on the couch some easy things I can knock out)
  • Home (anything I can only do at home)
  • Office (anything I can only do at the office)
  • Quick Hits (I use these for relatively quick, less than 15 minutes or so) tasks that are not related in a string with other tasks. So let's say I am working on a financial report, while one part of that might only take a few minutes it is part of a larger focused effort so it goes on focus work). These are literally for single unrelated next actions that can be done quickly between meetings
  • Review (this is for items I need to review, I keep them separately as I know as the leader in the organization anything sitting here for long is holding up my team so it becomes a stronger priority for me)
  • Shopping/Errands (anything I need to buy physically at a store or online or if I need to run out for something)

This context list basically broke out my next actions into a function of time and energy. I typically orient my day with a workday startup routine at 8 AM (or earlier when traveling) so that I can organize my day. I block my calendar from 8:30-10:00 for high energy efforts and I work on the Focus Work tag primarily. I check my email at 10:30-11:00. The rest of my day is free for meetings until my workday shutdown routine from 5 PM - 6 PM. During this free time I am often scheduled for 5-6 meetings a day. If they are back to back, I already did my work in the morning. If not I will often duck into my quick hits in between meetings to knock off somethings.

Around 3:30-4:00 I start to feel the energy drain. If I have free time that is when I duck into my hanging around or quick hits (depending on energy level) to knock off some things.

This has been wonderful for me. I used to use the contexts in the book and they failed terribly since I was all computer based.
 

bishblaize

Registered
I am in a VERY similar position to you and recently retooled my system and it has worked wonderfully. I am the President and COO of a family business (partner in the business in terms of ownership) with also about 40 employees. Majority of our team are in our NY office with some remote and we do work all over the country.

However, I only have a few things that can only be done in the office. 80% of my work is done on my computer and 10% on the phone. So the traditional contexts did not work for me. I found estimating time to be very difficult as it was not always an accurate representation and it didnt fit my energy or mood. Here is what I landed on.... It has worked wonderfully for me!

I also use Omnifocus and my contexts are:

  • Agendas (everyone I meet with as part of a check-in has an agenda tag specifically for them. I also have agenda tags for recurring meetings such as my bi-weekly operations meeting, monthly team meetings, etc.
  • Calls/Text (anything I can do on my phone only)
  • Focus Work (this is for my heavy lifting and heavy thinking work)
  • Hanging Around (When I'm fried, tired, or just lazy while watching a show on the couch some easy things I can knock out)
  • Home (anything I can only do at home)
  • Office (anything I can only do at the office)
  • Quick Hits (I use these for relatively quick, less than 15 minutes or so) tasks that are not related in a string with other tasks. So let's say I am working on a financial report, while one part of that might only take a few minutes it is part of a larger focused effort so it goes on focus work). These are literally for single unrelated next actions that can be done quickly between meetings
  • Review (this is for items I need to review, I keep them separately as I know as the leader in the organization anything sitting here for long is holding up my team so it becomes a stronger priority for me)
  • Shopping/Errands (anything I need to buy physically at a store or online or if I need to run out for something)

This context list basically broke out my next actions into a function of time and energy. I typically orient my day with a workday startup routine at 8 AM (or earlier when traveling) so that I can organize my day. I block my calendar from 8:30-10:00 for high energy efforts and I work on the Focus Work tag primarily. I check my email at 10:30-11:00. The rest of my day is free for meetings until my workday shutdown routine from 5 PM - 6 PM. During this free time I am often scheduled for 5-6 meetings a day. If they are back to back, I already did my work in the morning. If not I will often duck into my quick hits in between meetings to knock off somethings.

Around 3:30-4:00 I start to feel the energy drain. If I have free time that is when I duck into my hanging around or quick hits (depending on energy level) to knock off some things.

This has been wonderful for me. I used to use the contexts in the book and they failed terribly since I was all computer based.

I have to say I've not read any material straight from David Allen for some time, but I notice from time to time he'll update the core terminology of GTD (like changing Review->Do to Reflect->Engage). I wonder whether at some point he'll update the core material to reflect the increasingly ubiquitous nature of work and the way that changes how contexts work?

I guess the worry is that my bespoke solution, like yours, probably needs someone with plenty of experience of GTD to make it work. There's already enough to take on board for new starters with GTD.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
It’s great that you found something that’s working for you. Please keep us updated. I’m fairly sure that using my “hardest filter” wouldn’t work for me. The standard “context > time > energy > biggest pay off” is not quite right either. Like many people, I have some control over my context and time available. “Biggest pay-off” is not workable as a primary selector, because choosing between errands like “groceries” and “pick up prescriptions” versus “awesome work project” is not straightforward. Put differently, my choices are based on a combination of all four factors at once. Based on time and energy, I may choose “@email” over “@computer” because the “@computer” context contains mostly longer actions requiring mental horsepower. Using contexts for sorting next actions into lists seems to give me the best results for making those kinds of quick decisions. But again that’s me. If my life were filled with meetings and I did not have staff to guard my calendar, I might find your approach useful. David Allen has some useful remarks about sorting next action lists in the 2nd edition of the GTD book under “Creative Context Sorting”:

“Over the years I have seen people effectively use categories such as “Brain Gone” (for simple actions requiring no mental horsepower) and “Less Than 5-Minute” (for getting quick “wins”). At times people feel more comfortable sorting their reminders by the areas of focus in their life and work—“Financial,” “Family,” “Administrative,” etc. Recently someone shared with me the value she found in categorizing actions based upon the immediate emotional reward for doing them—service to others, life stability, abundance building, etc. There is no “right” way to structure your Next Actions lists—only what works best for you, and that part of your system will likely change as your life does.*
If you are a novice to this process, these details and distinctions may seem unnecessary or overwhelming. Just keep in mind that when you actually identify all the next actions you are committed to taking to fulfill your commitments in life and work, you will likely have many more than a hundred. To truly implement an effective “external brain” and garner its amazing results, managing this ground-floor level of your work with this degree of sophistication will pay off immeasurably.”
 

ivanjay205

Registered
I have to say I've not read any material straight from David Allen for some time, but I notice from time to time he'll update the core terminology of GTD (like changing Review->Do to Reflect->Engage). I wonder whether at some point he'll update the core material to reflect the increasingly ubiquitous nature of work and the way that changes how contexts work?

I guess the worry is that my bespoke solution, like yours, probably needs someone with plenty of experience of GTD to make it work. There's already enough to take on board for new starters with GTD.
I really believe the material does need to be updated. I promote GTD to all of my team and after looking at it they all brush it off and a lot of it is not being able to get around the contexts. It does take a seasoned GTD'er to drift from the book and create the system that works for themselves.
 

bishblaize

Registered
It’s great that you found something that’s working for you. Please keep us updated. I’m fairly sure that using my “hardest filter” wouldn’t work for me. The standard “context > time > energy > biggest pay off” is not quite right either. Like many people, I have some control over my context and time available. “Biggest pay-off” is not workable as a primary selector, because choosing between errands like “groceries” and “pick up prescriptions” versus “awesome work project” is not straightforward. Put differently, my choices are based on a combination of all four factors at once. Based on time and energy, I may choose “@email” over “@computer” because the “@computer” context contains mostly longer actions requiring mental horsepower. Using contexts for sorting next actions into lists seems to give me the best results for making those kinds of quick decisions. But again that’s me. If my life were filled with meetings and I did not have staff to guard my calendar, I might find your approach useful. David Allen has some useful remarks about sorting next action lists in the 2nd edition of the GTD book under “Creative Context Sorting”:

The context > time > energy > biggest pay off comes from Getting Things Done Fast, where he talks about it at length, but that's before the 2nd edition book (I think). Whether that's an acknowledgement of the changing nature of the material over time or just because its for a different audience, I don't know. But he definitely contradicts himself if its the latter.

On the time it takes to complete NAs, I wonder if you could share your contexts? (Apologies if they're elsewhere on the forum already). I was interested that I found relatively little correlation between context and time taken, other than my 1hr+ tasks, which were basically the same half a dozen recurring tasks. Im wondering if that's just how I have my contexts are structured, or whether its just the nature of the work you do. While the time bit is working great for me, my contexts aren't really adding much to the equation so I'm open to improving them. At the moment they are helpful when I'm feeling low energy since I find some tasks easier than others, but I wouldn't say that's a particularly critical way of using them.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
The context > time > energy > biggest pay off comes from Getting Things Done Fast, where he talks about it at length, but that's before the 2nd edition book (I think). Whether that's an acknowledgement of the changing nature of the material over time or just because its for a different audience, I don't know. But he definitely contradicts himself if its the latter.
I have heard that the new GTD seminar course material is very good for encouraging customization. The way anyone teaches or presents material evolves over time, even in the hardest of the hard sciences, so it would be surprising if advice on the very human art of getting things done didn’t evolve, or change depending on the audience. There is always also nuance: I notice you use “biggest payoff” where I would use “priority.” The difference is that my highest priority may be a simple and easy next action right now, even though my highest payoff might be associated with a 3-5 year goal.
On the time it takes to complete NAs, I wonder if you could share your contexts? (Apologies if they're elsewhere on the forum already). I was interested that I found relatively little correlation between context and time taken, other than my 1hr+ tasks, which were basically the same half a dozen recurring tasks. Im wondering if that's just how I have my contexts are structured, or whether it’s just the nature of the work you do. While the time bit is working great for me, my contexts aren't really adding much to the equation so I'm open to improving them. At the moment they are helpful when I'm feeling low energy since I find some tasks easier than others, but I wouldn't say that's a particularly critical way of using them.
I’m happy to share my contexts, but they are pretty conventional: @Tickler, @MAC, @Anywhere, @Email, @Web, @Home, @Work, @Out for next actions, augmented by Waiting For and Agendas. I would guess at any one time 80-90% of my actions are in Mac, Anywhere, Email and Web. The time scales of motion in lists can be very different: stuff in @MAC often require not just more time, but more mental energy and thought. Email is the chief medium over which I communicate and transact, so it has to be a list which can move fast. Web can be slower, with more casual R&D, which is why I don’t try to combine it with Email any more. Anywhere is a bit odd: a lot of it is stuff easily done on an iPad, but could be done on a Mac or an iPhone in a pinch. Some of it is paper, though. In a typical workday, I will move through all four of these pretty seamlessly. After an hour or more of writing, I will move to something simpler for a break. After a long, difficult meeting, I will do something easy to help get back into the next action groove. Pretty simple to describe, not always so easy to do.
 

TesTeq

Registered
What I realised is that, in my job, windows of time are a more meaningful limitation than tool or activity. I have all my tools and can do any activity from any location, more or less. However, if I have 25 minutes til my next meeting, that’s a real limit on what I can do. If I can’t do 30 minute tasks or above, don’t even show them to me. This works both ways too. If I have a free afternoon (which is rare) then I can go straight to my 1hr+ tasks, since I know it might be a week or more before I get another chance. Again, the filter is helping me pick.
@bishblaize I find your idea very interesting! I must try it! Could you please explain one thing?

Let's say you've got:
up-to-5-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-15-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-30-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions (by the way, you haven't specified this category);
over-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions.

If you have 10 minutes til your next meeting it is obvious that you browse the up-to-5-min-NA list only.

What happens if you have 25 minutes? Do you browse both up-to-5-min-NA and up-to-15-min-NA lists?

What happens if you have 90 minutes? Do you browse all your NA lists?
 

schmeggahead

Registered
Contexts are a way to filter down your full list of NAs by the “hardest” filter available.
I never thought of it as the hardest filter, and so it is.
Almost on a whim I saw another post by someone on the GTD Forum and decided to start trying to filter by time. I split my tasks down into 4 types – 5 mins or under, 15 mins, 30 mins and 60 mins+. Instead of trying to accurately predict the task, I just estimate it to the nearest round segment.
Every time a list gets too large to manage, I've looked for ways to divide it all up into usable chunks.
I'm finding that later in the day, I'm starting tasks that run into quality time with my family. Might be good for me to have longer tasks marked that way. Estimating time might also help with my perfectionist tendencies: Use this much time to get 80% of the benefit and re-evaluate if that last bit is needed.

@bishblaize - very well written post that helped me see seeds of a solution for my ever changing system.
Thanks,
Clayton

The yang of firehoses contains the yin of the location of the shutoff.
 

bishblaize

Registered
@bishblaize I find your idea very interesting! I must try it! Could you please explain one thing?

Let's say you've got:
up-to-5-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-15-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-30-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions (by the way, you haven't specified this category);
over-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions.

I didn't bother splitting 60 and >60-minute tasks because I don't have enough of them. At most, I`ll have 10 in that range and one week I had none. If you had a lot of tasks of that length it could certainly be worth dividing it up further though, just depends on your work.

If you have 10 minutes til your next meeting it is obvious that you browse the up-to-5-min-NA list only.

What happens if you have 25 minutes? Do you browse both up-to-5-min-NA and up-to-15-min-NA lists?

What happens if you have 90 minutes? Do you browse all your NA lists?
I always start with the longest tasks I can do in the current window. If I have a 90-minute window, I'll look at the 60+ list. If nothing on there is suitable (due to context or energy or whatever) then I'll go down to the 30-minute window, and so on. Since there are always more opportunities to do the shorter tasks, it makes sense to use the longer windows of time for the longer tasks.

The exception to the rule is when I'm feeling low energy. Since short tasks are, generally speaking, easier than long ones, I might start with the shortest tasks.
 

TesTeq

Registered
I always start with the longest tasks I can do in the current window. If I have a 90-minute window, I'll look at the 60+ list. If nothing on there is suitable (due to context or energy or whatever) then I'll go down to the 30-minute window, and so on. Since there are always more opportunities to do the shorter tasks, it makes sense to use the longer windows of time for the longer tasks.
@bishblaize Thank you! I like this approach!
I didn't bother splitting 60 and >60-minute tasks because I don't have enough of them. At most, I`ll have 10 in that range and one week I had none. If you had a lot of tasks of that length it could certainly be worth dividing it up further though, just depends on your work.
So, to avoid a hole in your system, the over-60-min-NA list should be renamed to over-30-min-NA. ;)
 

bishblaize

Registered
@bishblaize Thank you! I like this approach!

So, to avoid a hole in your system, the over-60-min-NA list should be renamed to over-30-min-NA. ;)
I know youre just kidding, but it does actually highlight something about the times. Obviously, the tasks aren't precisely 5, 15, 30 etc minutes long. Rather its the closest approximate time. So if a task takes a bit longer than 15 mins, Id still call it a 15 minute task. But if it was more like 25 mins, I'd call it a 30 minute task.

What I found is that for tasks up to about 20 minutes, you can pretty accurately judge how long it will take, but after that it becomes increasingly difficult. At one point I trialled a 45-minute time frame as well, but I found it difficult to say whether a task was closer to 30 minutes or 45 minutes. Its easy to tell if a task is 5 minutes rather than 15, but much harder to tell between a 35-minute task and a 45-minute one.

So in the end I just went with 30 and 60. As a result, 30 is really "30, or a bit longer" and 60 is really "anything quite a bit a lot longer than 30". Which is about the level maximum level of accuracy I think you can offer.

This was part of the reason I considered just calling it short/medium/long. I didn't like that though because its so subjective - a short email might be 3 minutes but a short report might take 15 minutes, and I wanted to be more timebound than that. But there's still a degree of judgement involved in the length of tasks.
 

ivanjay205

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I don't think it's the material that needs updating, just the examples. Contexts are still valid just what they are may have changed for a lot of people.
I don't necessarily thing they need changing per se but the explanation does need to change. The context of the book is very much around the tool. So the list of contacts naturally follows suit. David even mentions he maintains a separate context for plane with no internet. Well, that is really no longer a thing either.

The idea of a tool to a newbie is taken literally as the tool to do the action. And often that is not the case for knowledge workers. It does not work well enough. I think he needs to explore alternate context setups such as using time and energy, or customized contexts for state of mind to help newbies understand they can take this idea and morph it into what works for them.

I have used GTD for about 8 years, it wasnt until about 6-8 months ago I personally had this realization. Most new people reading the book are going to implement it literally as outlined in the book and say "this doesnt work."

One of my favorite books from a management perspective is the One Minute Manager. They recently released the book to address just that, that the workplace has changed and they needed to modify some of the context of what was in the book.
 

gtdstudente

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@bishblaize I find your idea very interesting! I must try it! Could you please explain one thing?

Let's say you've got:
up-to-5-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-15-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-30-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions;
up-to-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions (by the way, you haven't specified this category);
over-60-min-NA list with 10 Next Actions.

If you have 10 minutes til your next meeting it is obvious that you browse the up-to-5-min-NA list only.

What happens if you have 25 minutes? Do you browse both up-to-5-min-NA and up-to-15-min-NA lists?

What happens if you have 90 minutes? Do you browse all your NA lists?
TesTeq,

Due to you, avoided missing this good post. Thank you
 
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Murray

Registered
I've been using time as my primary filter for about 6 weeks now, thought I’d feed back on how it's gone.
On the one hand, I'm not quite in the same situation as you: while my computer list definitely tends to be the longest, I still also get a lot of value out of my home/office/errands/calls/agendas/anywhere lists. On the other hand I really appreciate the time and attention you put into reflecting on your processes and putting your thoughts into writing so clearly. Especially in a way that allows for others' perspectives. I really enjoyed focusing on reading this post during my breakfast. Thanks!

Looking forward to going through the replies too.
 
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