Jamie Elis;87806 said:
I am no expert and I think the steps to getting better are incremental. When it works for me, here are some of the things that work for me.
Thank you Jamie for such a detailed response. I am going to re-start my GTD soon (spent last two days of the Easter break to get a deeper understanding of all the particulars of GTD and now I think I know where my mistakes were).
The most important is to have a calendar in a format that you re comfortable with, maybe even a two or three year calendar and fill in all of the important dates that can impact you, even if they are not appointments, your parents 50th anniversary in two years might impact you. The year your car turns 7 or 8 or gets 150000 miles might be significant if you doing some planning of your finances. If you see your dental hygienist every 6 months pencil that in and if you go to the barber every month, do that to on the calendar. Pencil is fine. I really dug using my Palm for repeating events, but that is ancient history and now I am back to paper. I have a desk size calendar for current year and page-a-month for next year that I printed from internet. There are also little fold out calendars for years ahead, one page per year but some people like to see a year in quarters..
Good advice - seems like something that I could implement pretty easily. I haven't been doing such planning (but I will in my forthcoming GTD restart) in the past, and I didn't have problems (almost) with "important dates" planing, but perhaps I just don't know how much important dates I have really missed...
Another approach is called "backward chaining". Starting with the outcome you define in words and the date you are aiming for, write in the very last thing you need to do and then continue to work backward, either in a tight-linked sequence or with bench marks, identifying what you would need to do and when. The best ready-made example of this college graduation. You pretty much know when you start high school what year you will probably grauate, from college and you can work backwards to determine the sequence of actions of exams, etc.
This is where I have the most of the problems. When I have a goal which say I plan to achieve in a one year
time I break it into several projects, then into subprojects, then into sub tasks. The sub-projects usually is to read the whole book, where the task is to read the chapter and to write down my thoughs on what I have read. After that I start reading several books in a parrallel, writing down my progress in a .txt or Excel sheets and after a few chapters I usually stop writing down my results because either the .txt or Excel (or other reference materials) files with the results are lost on the vastness of my filesystem and this does discourages me to continue and/or the new projects are keep piling up and so I am urging myself to give them a bigger slice attention thus my old projects are being deprioritised and as a result are forgotten.
One other helpful steps is to really visualize and describe what you are aiming for. I have a hard time picturing some things in the future. I once did a collage from magazine pictures and that was helpful when I was trying to resolve what had the potential to become a long term crisis. I actually I used only a little from magazines and cut out a lot of shapes and arrows and pinned them to a bulletin board that then added some collaged materials. If I was doing that today, I might pick the images from the internet or from specialized magazines with photos of the kind of thing I am thinking of. Most magazines have advertisements as the main viisuals and these are not always what we really want, they are either scary or overly glamorized.
I have never read it but a friend gave me a book and kit called "Blue Printing" and I think it has to do with this.She was totally into this.
Thank you, great advice, used to like to do such things when I was a kid (I also notice that I am advance
with a task a much better if I fleah out a sketh of what to do first - I guess I am a "visual" person) - will
give it a try - probably with a PowerPoint.
I think you will find a lot of suggestions to sort through here as people contribute. It is a funny skill or talent. I think about it, the long term planners seem pretty happy to keep things simple in the short run--they eat the same meals over and over, wear the same cloths week after week, subscribe to the same events...but they surprise you with the photos from their 3month canoe trip in a foreign country...the family reunion in a remote area with 200 people.
Well, my father was a that type of person - always very organized, keeping the records of everything... but people thought about him as a boring person. But he had always delivered on his promises, never missed anything and earned a lot of respect because of that... Want to become like him. Hope it is not a talent but I skill I can learn with some help.
