From what you’ve described here, it sounds like you’re dealing with two big obstacles: you’re getting interrupted (by your job, in the process of doing your job) so frequently that you can’t focus on report writing; and the information you’re collecting during meetings is locked in composition books and Word docs and you’re having trouble accessing it in order to write reports. It sounds like you’re doing well with dealing with the emergency calls that are a central part of your job. Is that right?
I’d suggest you focus on two areas: (1) collect in a form that makes it easier to process, organize and review (remember that the system has five parts: collect, process, organize, review, and do); (2) create protected, dedicated, uninterrupted, focused time to process, organize, and review.
Collection: handwritten note taking seems to work best for you because its fast, but the fact that the composition book keeps information bound together seems to slow down processing, organizing, and reviewing. Free the pages by switching to legal pads, and organize your note taking by separating next actions from project resources. Given the speed that information comes at you in meetings, you might have to wait to do this separation until after the meeting.
Processing: When you have a meeting with a client or one of your consultants, you have got to take time – protected, dedicated, focused, uninterrupted time – to process your notes into lists. Your pad or composition book is nothing but a bucket. The bucket has to be emptied. You need to extract from your notes the next actions, waiting for items, and project resources, and get them into a form that you can use and a place where you can review them. This is a skill you have to develop through practice. You have to be very disciplined about this: after each meeting, take five minutes to process your notes into those three categories, then move on. Shutting the door, closing Outlook, and sending calls to voicemail for five or ten minutes after every meeting is a skill you must practice. Part of that practice may involve finding ways of dealing with the consequences of being unavailable to others for ten minutes, especially since you’ve trained them to expect you to be available at all times. One of the realities of being accessible as part of your job is that you enable people to interrupt your workflow. That’s fine, but it’s better to enable them to interrupt you on terms that suit your ability to help them.
Organizing: There are three basic categories: next actions, waiting for, and project resources. In processing your notes and e-mails, move items into one of these three categories and put those lists and folders aside for review before turning your attention to whatever task requires your attention next. If you’ve pre-sorted pages on the pad by these categories, then just tear them off and drop them into the appropriate folder.
Reviewing: GTD fails if you don’t review your commitments as frequently as necessary to keep your mind clear and focused. It sounds like you have no time to review any of the notes you’re taking, or else you’re reviewing at the same time you’re doing. This is the biggest change you need to make in your work flow. You have got to create protected time, without interruptions, to review what you’ve collected. Given what your work day sounds like, this time may have to be early in the morning before the phone starts ringing, or it may be at the end of the day after the close of business (if such a thing exists for you). But you must make time, every day, to process, organize, and review what you’ve collected. The review has to happen whether you’re on the road or in the office.
Following the review, you get to make decisions about what you’re going to do in the time you have. For you, one decision involves answering this question: “out of the notes I took today, what information needs to go into the report I need to write?” Placing that information into a paper folder or a digital folder will make the process of writing that report – whenever you get to it – easier. You accumulate a lot of information very quickly – 300 e-mails a day, pages and pages of handwritten notes and Word docs during every meeting – so frequent processing is key. Dropping specific items you’ll need to write the report into a dedicated bucket will simplify and speed the report-writing process.
Portability: I have the same need, since I work in multiple locations. I experimented with methods for carrying paper around with me, until I finally realized that it was impossible, and I’ve gone completely digital. That means that I scan everything. It’s the only way to be sure you have everything with you wherever you are, whenever you need it. Scanning is part of my processing, and I make time for it daily (usually at the end of each day). My hierarchy of digital files in Windows File Explorer matches the hierarchy of my Outlook e-mail files matches the hierarchy of my paper files exactly so that I don’t have to think about it. If I have time, I tag the hell out of everything, but my first and most important way of accessing this stuff is through a simple but thorough file hierarchy. I access these files using Explorer, because it enables me to see all the file types in one place: Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, and .pdf files. But you could use Evernote for the same purpose. Because it’s often easier for me to think on paper, I travel with a portable printer and print things out at the drop of a hat. Sometimes you have to print everything, spread it out on the bed in the hotel room, and do what they’re paying you to do. And because I hate paper, I’ll go down to the front desk and run all of it through their shredder when I’m done.
Assigning tasks to Next Action lists versus Project lists: I think this was the question that you started off with. The idea behind working from a context list is to facilitate doing your work. A question for you: right now, how are you deciding what to do at any given moment? It sounds like a great deal of your time is already spoken for by meetings and dealing with emergencies that come at you via e-mail and phone calls. Opening an e-mail or answering the phone or processing meeting notes therefore involves making a decision: must this task be done now or later? You have discretion only over the tasks that can be done later (report writing is clearly one of these, and an important one). So your next action list has to be quickly scannable when you have time. Because your work is so project-focused, I’d recommend organizing your next action list by project first and context second within that list. The frequent processing that you need to start doing after each meeting must involve transferring next actions onto your Next Action list, by context as those contexts make sense for how you work, and then keeping that list open in front of you to help you decide what to do when you’re not jumping in to a fire. You can develop the skill of creating a consolidated next action list while you’re taking notes in meetings, but it’s a change from how you’re working now. It involves keeping this list with you at all times, entering tasks onto it as you take notes and listen to your clients and consultants, and revising, updating, and re-writing that list at frequent intervals so that it’s always clean, updated, and readable. On paper, in Word: whatever is fastest and easiest to edit. (Paper is tough to edit, as you know.)
I’ll say something about contexts. I used to believe that my work was completely Project-oriented and that organizing tasks by context wasn’t helpful. I was wrong about this. It’s true that there are times (less often than I thought) when I am completely immersed in a project and context is irrelevant: I must do what is necessary to move the Project forward, regardless of context. But there are other times when working by context enables me to move many different projects forward a step or two and lay the groundwork for a focused attack on a Project at a later time (such as report writing). Augusto Pinaud (google search Virtual GTD Study Group and @context podcast) advocates a very creative use of contexts to unlock productivity, and after initial skepticism I’ve become a believer. In your case, useful contexts might be something like @Scanner or @5 Minutes of Silence at My Desk. Contexts are focusing tools. Your work environment robs you of your focus. Contexts may help you to reclaim them. The way I discovered the value of contexts was by diligently writing all of my next actions down on one consolidated Next Action list and then attempting to organize them in useful ways that worked to move me toward the outcomes I’d defined.
