So, I've been thinking about a substantial new element that I may be adding to my own practice of GTD: Narrative. Now, I realize that GTD certainly doesn't object to narrative, but it also doesn't specifically include it.
What do I mean by narrative?
The other day I was trying to work out what to do from among my bazillions of actions-priorities. I was stuck. And instead of writing lists or outlines or list-type brainstorming, I sat down and started writing sentences and paragraphs: Narrative. I didn't write this as a focused tidy problem description and solution, but instead as a brain dump, discussing topics as they came to mind and following tangents when they came up.
Within twenty minutes of starting to write, I had:
- Come up with a structure and strategy regarding the management and tracking of specific tasks and their resulting products--a problem that had been hanging around, suffering from an "almost good enough" practice, for more than a year.
- Brought a goal to the surface, a goal that had been "underneath" several tasks, but that I had never consciously surfaced and thought about. That goal changes the priority and order of a number of tasks.
- Clarified, in my mind, a series of dependencies that had not been clarified.
- Surfaced the reason for several stalled tasks, and a strategy for un-stalling them and preventing a recurrence of the same problem.
You may notice that the word "surfaced" keeps coming up. There seem to be many things that lists and actions refer to, and imply, and result from, but don't actually define. I was under the impression that I was aware of and understood these issues, but it appears that I don't REALLY understand these things as much as I think that I do. Expressing them informally in words, writing sentences and paragraphs until I feel that I've really dumped my thinking about them, seems to change and enhance my understanding far, far more than I would have been predicted.
Remember the Underpants Gnomes in South Park, and their business plan?
Collect Underpants
??
Profit
I feel as if writing this narrative has revealed pockets of ?? that I was previously unaware of.
Now, my first thought here is that perhaps this reflects a failure on my part to implement the higher-level parts of GTD, the goals and horizons and, um, stuff. But only the second of my examples above is really at the "above actions" level. The rest of them address things that are down in the trenches.
I'm concluding that at least for me, freeform narrative addressed to myself fosters a type of thinking that lists, and unwritten musing, and meetings, and emails and documents addressed to others, do not. I suppose that this is "journaling". I never really got the point of journaling before; maybe I see it now.
So does anyone else do this? Does anyone incorporate anything like this into their regular habits? Is there something that does this in GTD and I just missed it entirely?
I'm planning to incorporate it as a specific part of my practice, though I'm not sure precisely where. I was thinking that the journaling would benefit from the information that comes from the weekly review, but then I thought that I don't want to do the weekly review and the journaling as part of the same sit-down work session, because I think they call for a different mindset. The end goal of the weekly review is organization and decisions; the journaling apparently wants to be open-ended.
So I'm thinking that I may make an informal goal of spending half an hour of journaling for each day of, oh, the three days of the week that are farthest from the review. And after a month, see how it's been working.
Thoughts? Experiences?
What do I mean by narrative?
The other day I was trying to work out what to do from among my bazillions of actions-priorities. I was stuck. And instead of writing lists or outlines or list-type brainstorming, I sat down and started writing sentences and paragraphs: Narrative. I didn't write this as a focused tidy problem description and solution, but instead as a brain dump, discussing topics as they came to mind and following tangents when they came up.
Within twenty minutes of starting to write, I had:
- Come up with a structure and strategy regarding the management and tracking of specific tasks and their resulting products--a problem that had been hanging around, suffering from an "almost good enough" practice, for more than a year.
- Brought a goal to the surface, a goal that had been "underneath" several tasks, but that I had never consciously surfaced and thought about. That goal changes the priority and order of a number of tasks.
- Clarified, in my mind, a series of dependencies that had not been clarified.
- Surfaced the reason for several stalled tasks, and a strategy for un-stalling them and preventing a recurrence of the same problem.
You may notice that the word "surfaced" keeps coming up. There seem to be many things that lists and actions refer to, and imply, and result from, but don't actually define. I was under the impression that I was aware of and understood these issues, but it appears that I don't REALLY understand these things as much as I think that I do. Expressing them informally in words, writing sentences and paragraphs until I feel that I've really dumped my thinking about them, seems to change and enhance my understanding far, far more than I would have been predicted.
Remember the Underpants Gnomes in South Park, and their business plan?
Collect Underpants
??
Profit
I feel as if writing this narrative has revealed pockets of ?? that I was previously unaware of.
Now, my first thought here is that perhaps this reflects a failure on my part to implement the higher-level parts of GTD, the goals and horizons and, um, stuff. But only the second of my examples above is really at the "above actions" level. The rest of them address things that are down in the trenches.
I'm concluding that at least for me, freeform narrative addressed to myself fosters a type of thinking that lists, and unwritten musing, and meetings, and emails and documents addressed to others, do not. I suppose that this is "journaling". I never really got the point of journaling before; maybe I see it now.
So does anyone else do this? Does anyone incorporate anything like this into their regular habits? Is there something that does this in GTD and I just missed it entirely?
I'm planning to incorporate it as a specific part of my practice, though I'm not sure precisely where. I was thinking that the journaling would benefit from the information that comes from the weekly review, but then I thought that I don't want to do the weekly review and the journaling as part of the same sit-down work session, because I think they call for a different mindset. The end goal of the weekly review is organization and decisions; the journaling apparently wants to be open-ended.
So I'm thinking that I may make an informal goal of spending half an hour of journaling for each day of, oh, the three days of the week that are farthest from the review. And after a month, see how it's been working.
Thoughts? Experiences?
