Since trying to use GTD I think I have lost all ability to prioritize. I am ready to go back to Franklin-Covey! So many things just slip away from me. I put actions on my lists and I do not know how to pick from them. I am thinking that in fact just about every project and routine activity has a date factor, whether it has a deadline or not. Activities lose meaning or value if done too late, or even too early. It seems to me that the first action of the day should be to ask myself "What needs to get done today?" but without a lot of penciled in artificial deadlines, I have no cues as to how proceed and without the project deadlines next to the action and some capturing of the scope of the project I am at loss for what action to takes.
How do you reconcile what you actually want to get done on a given day with all of the next actions you have on the different lists, especially if the date you want to be finished is not encoded with the action?
What happens when you entered actions based on a lot of lead time, but don't have much of an idea of how long the actions will take, much less the whole project?
Four days a go I did what I thought was a very thorough weekly review and updated my next action lists. In the days that followed, I did few if any of my actions because my family asked me to do other things. I was not aware of any conflict or at any point distressed because I did not have anything to cue me on the dates in my action lists. But here it is Monday evening, and I look at my calendar for tomorrow and I see that I am not prepared for Tuesday at all. I now realize that I very much wanted to start the day on Tuesday with the following done but I had only tiny little actions on my lists and I did not even do these because they were not dated.
Organize papers for a class by reading notes for each lecture, comparing to previous lectures on same topic from prior year, cross referencing with texts, prepare glossary, and create a table of contents.
Sort out brief case--take everything out and put it where it goes.
Prepare clothing for formal business event.
Re-type front matter for brochure, collate brochure and staple.
How do you reconcile what you actually want to get done on a given day with all of the next actions you have on the different lists, especially if the date you want to be finished is not encoded with the action?
What happens when you entered actions based on a lot of lead time, but don't have much of an idea of how long the actions will take, much less the whole project?
Four days a go I did what I thought was a very thorough weekly review and updated my next action lists. In the days that followed, I did few if any of my actions because my family asked me to do other things. I was not aware of any conflict or at any point distressed because I did not have anything to cue me on the dates in my action lists. But here it is Monday evening, and I look at my calendar for tomorrow and I see that I am not prepared for Tuesday at all. I now realize that I very much wanted to start the day on Tuesday with the following done but I had only tiny little actions on my lists and I did not even do these because they were not dated.
Organize papers for a class by reading notes for each lecture, comparing to previous lectures on same topic from prior year, cross referencing with texts, prepare glossary, and create a table of contents.
Sort out brief case--take everything out and put it where it goes.
Prepare clothing for formal business event.
Re-type front matter for brochure, collate brochure and staple.