I recently began using GTD in my work life. Previously, I attempted to organize my personal life with GTD for about 2 months, now I decided to start over with a more complete system that covers all areas of life.
I find myself 1-3 times per day in a meeting kind of situation at work during which I use two pieces of my GTD system:
From your experience, what is the best way to handle such meeting situations? To which part of the five step workflow does a meeting belong? Should I strictly separate capturing and processing here, even though it takes some extra time?
I find myself 1-3 times per day in a meeting kind of situation at work during which I use two pieces of my GTD system:
- a NA context with questions I need to ask and/or tasks I have to delegate (for recurring meetings I have fixed agenda context lists, for one-off meetings I create a temporary list that I discard after the meeting)
- my waiting for list(s) of everyone else who's in the meeting (for people who have many items on my waiting for list I created separate lists)
- I receive some new task during the meeting (and it's usually obvious in which context it belongs)
- a NA like "discuss X" becomes a task for me (again the context is obvious)
- a NA like "discuss X" becomes a task for somebody else (i.e. I need to put it on my waiting for list)
- I can delegate a task as planned (and have to put it on my waiting for)
- Immediately during the meeting, put new tasks as NA's in the appropriate context, and put tasks that others agreed to do on my waiting for. The upside here is that everything in my system is always up-to-date. (I don't need extra time to review meeting notes afterwards.) But I noticed that this is quite stressful. It seems to me that it slows down meetings, I always need an extra moment to assign the proper list label to my note and make sure it's properly phrased (e.g. contains a NA verb). And sometimes it turns out that I made a mistake, a NA wasn't really a clear NA, I needed to convert it into a project afterwards etc.
- Take typical meeting notes during the meeting, without thinking in GTD terms. Put those in my inbox and take care of them some time later. This would give me time to process the items properly when I have a calm state of mind. But it makes the process more complicated. Do notes really have to take this "inbox detour" even though in 95% of cases it's obvious on which list they'll end up anyway? I'm also worried that I might forget some important detail if I don't get around to processing the notes before the next morning.
From your experience, what is the best way to handle such meeting situations? To which part of the five step workflow does a meeting belong? Should I strictly separate capturing and processing here, even though it takes some extra time?