Processing: dedicated or in-line?
- Thread starter Chesnokov
- Start date
Chesnokov;85808 said:
That is exactly why it is better to use dedicated time (1-2 per day) for processing your stuff. Also as it is suggested in the GTD book once your mind switch to "processing" mode you'll be doing it more efficiently. I believe it is possible only with dedicated time.
Oogiem
Registered
Both
Both, I try to dedicate about an hour or so a day to processing, in the morning and again in the evening but I will also do some during the day if I get a chance. Esp. in summer when I need a break from outside work I'll come in and try to finish some processing during lunch.
Chesnokov;85808 said:
Both, I try to dedicate about an hour or so a day to processing, in the morning and again in the evening but I will also do some during the day if I get a chance. Esp. in summer when I need a break from outside work I'll come in and try to finish some processing during lunch.
What about the urgent things?
Hi everybody,
Surprisingly, at least for me, this thread is so short. I expected many replies regarding processing urgent items on the fly, keeping them from blowing up.
Do you all just write urgent things directly into the Day-Specific section of your calendar and that's it?
In fact, applying GTD in an intense, interruption-prone environment, and readiness-for-everything is supposed to be black-belt-GTD, how do you see the method and system helping you here?
Mic
Hi everybody,
Surprisingly, at least for me, this thread is so short. I expected many replies regarding processing urgent items on the fly, keeping them from blowing up.
Do you all just write urgent things directly into the Day-Specific section of your calendar and that's it?
In fact, applying GTD in an intense, interruption-prone environment, and readiness-for-everything is supposed to be black-belt-GTD, how do you see the method and system helping you here?
Mic
bishblaize
Registered
I normally process to zero each morning if I can, but Im quite happy to do a bit here or there if I get the chance. Could just be my job, but since i deal with the public there's never a time when I can guarantee I wont be interupted, so I dont bank on getting that bit of time free each day.
How do I make sure it doesnt eat up my whole day? Just being mindful i suppose.
How do I make sure it doesnt eat up my whole day? Just being mindful i suppose.
Cpu_Modern
Registered
Mostly in-line after completing a big task when I am too exhausted to do real work. Or at the beginning of the day to get into the jive.
No, I also think about how it could be posssible that something become urgent in my world. In the model of the three-fold nature of work you have the house is burning kind of stuff. I am ok with that, it's part of life.
But projects and NAs that are urgent? Not with me. No stress for us, just because some other kid didn't do the homework - is a houserule here. So I think who dropped the ball on that one? What process needs to be changed so that in the future no further urgencies come up from that source? (And to be clear: this is a 50k - 40k issue for me, I could earn more mulah if I wouldn't be so stubborn there. But I am and happy with it.)
Mainly that I am totally comfortable in jumping into the fire because I know what I am NOT doing. You know, that point about knowing what you NOT have to do now. So a quick glance at the calendar/tickler makes sure I will not cause another fire to start while putting out the first one.
No, I also think about how it could be posssible that something become urgent in my world. In the model of the three-fold nature of work you have the house is burning kind of stuff. I am ok with that, it's part of life.
But projects and NAs that are urgent? Not with me. No stress for us, just because some other kid didn't do the homework - is a houserule here. So I think who dropped the ball on that one? What process needs to be changed so that in the future no further urgencies come up from that source? (And to be clear: this is a 50k - 40k issue for me, I could earn more mulah if I wouldn't be so stubborn there. But I am and happy with it.)
Mainly that I am totally comfortable in jumping into the fire because I know what I am NOT doing. You know, that point about knowing what you NOT have to do now. So a quick glance at the calendar/tickler makes sure I will not cause another fire to start while putting out the first one.
Personally, I've found the best way to deal with this sort of thing is to stop being a victim/responder of my Inboxes, and to take ownership and control of them.
If I've got a level of inputs from all sources that exceed my ability to deal with them all, or that makes me unhappy, then it behooves me to take control, make choices, and throttle things back to a level where I am happy.
I'm not sure why some people seem to think that's impractical, impossible, immoral, or all of the above. Maybe that's a topic for a new thread.
Cheers,
Roger
If I've got a level of inputs from all sources that exceed my ability to deal with them all, or that makes me unhappy, then it behooves me to take control, make choices, and throttle things back to a level where I am happy.
I'm not sure why some people seem to think that's impractical, impossible, immoral, or all of the above. Maybe that's a topic for a new thread.
Cheers,
Roger
Oogiem
Registered
Urgent for me is usually an Emergency
My urgent on the fly items need to go immediately from input to decision to doing with no stopping so they never make it to a list of next actions. Most are emergencies that happen in the course of doing something on my next action lists.
Recent example:
Routine check on the adult rams to deworm them. Bring them all in to the sweep for a check and wormer as needed. Discovered 1 ram had a horn injury that was flystruck. This new input resulted in an immediate change of plans to cut the horn off, disinfect and kill the fly larvae and bandage the ram up. Part way through sawing the horn off we hit a blood vessel, now it's an immediate emergency to finish sawing the horn quickly to cauterize the horn core, and grab some paper towels and duct tape to apply a pressure bandage. Ram is fine BTW. My "inbox" went from input to emergency to solution in the space of about 15 minutes.
Mic;90403 said:
My urgent on the fly items need to go immediately from input to decision to doing with no stopping so they never make it to a list of next actions. Most are emergencies that happen in the course of doing something on my next action lists.
Recent example:
Routine check on the adult rams to deworm them. Bring them all in to the sweep for a check and wormer as needed. Discovered 1 ram had a horn injury that was flystruck. This new input resulted in an immediate change of plans to cut the horn off, disinfect and kill the fly larvae and bandage the ram up. Part way through sawing the horn off we hit a blood vessel, now it's an immediate emergency to finish sawing the horn quickly to cauterize the horn core, and grab some paper towels and duct tape to apply a pressure bandage. Ram is fine BTW. My "inbox" went from input to emergency to solution in the space of about 15 minutes.
@oogiem
@Oogiem: I always love the examples you give, because they often show GTD in a very understandable way, with very practical cases. The fact that the examples are abolutely not from my (and others) everyday life adds even more interest to them.
I must admit sometimes I just click on a post that has a heading that is not appealing to me, just because I see you were the last one to react and I wonder what example you will have used this time. It's always a pleasure to read your posts!
Myriam
@Oogiem: I always love the examples you give, because they often show GTD in a very understandable way, with very practical cases. The fact that the examples are abolutely not from my (and others) everyday life adds even more interest to them.
I must admit sometimes I just click on a post that has a heading that is not appealing to me, just because I see you were the last one to react and I wonder what example you will have used this time. It's always a pleasure to read your posts!
Myriam
A task/project for today
I would like to explain what I meant with a simple example:
Suppose you come back from a car ride you made to take care of an errand. In the middle of the trip you received a phone call from a prospect client regarding a product you sell, and finished the call promising the client to send a quote today because his boss is leaving soon to Europe. Now this is not really "urgent", you can always let it go away, but let us assume that by your higher-level priorities you decided not to drop this possible sale.
Now, after finishing the conversation you stopped the car and wrote a note explaining in short what is needed and how to contact this person, and threw the note to your inbox as soon as you came in to your office.
It's a project obviously, and you committed to advance with some of it's actions today, when will this note get processed?
Usually I simply add a line to my calendar in the day-specific section for today saying something like 'send quote to x'. And that will make me dig the note from the inbox and do what's needed. What do you do?
I assume people who work with a lot of incoming calls from clients have these situations all the time. Think of a secretary in a law office receiving dozens of calls a day from clients who want all sorts of answers regarding their cases. She will need a special form or board or whatever to put all of those Today-to-be-finished-projects. No room for "I process my inbox once a day" attitude. What would you suggest her to do?
Of course it is possible to take it easier and tell the client that - One of the lawyers will get back to you with answers within the next week or so - but it well could be that our standards would not permit such an answer
Mic
Mic;90403 said:
I would like to explain what I meant with a simple example:
Suppose you come back from a car ride you made to take care of an errand. In the middle of the trip you received a phone call from a prospect client regarding a product you sell, and finished the call promising the client to send a quote today because his boss is leaving soon to Europe. Now this is not really "urgent", you can always let it go away, but let us assume that by your higher-level priorities you decided not to drop this possible sale.
Now, after finishing the conversation you stopped the car and wrote a note explaining in short what is needed and how to contact this person, and threw the note to your inbox as soon as you came in to your office.
It's a project obviously, and you committed to advance with some of it's actions today, when will this note get processed?
Usually I simply add a line to my calendar in the day-specific section for today saying something like 'send quote to x'. And that will make me dig the note from the inbox and do what's needed. What do you do?
I assume people who work with a lot of incoming calls from clients have these situations all the time. Think of a secretary in a law office receiving dozens of calls a day from clients who want all sorts of answers regarding their cases. She will need a special form or board or whatever to put all of those Today-to-be-finished-projects. No room for "I process my inbox once a day" attitude. What would you suggest her to do?
Of course it is possible to take it easier and tell the client that - One of the lawyers will get back to you with answers within the next week or so - but it well could be that our standards would not permit such an answer
Mic
Mic;90429 said:
In my experience, these sorts of systems are more complex than they first appear, and deserve more care than most people give them. The devil is really in the details.
It probably requires some sort of dedicated processing protocol. I would start with the standard GTD process, but there would likely be some important customizations.
I'm cautiously optimistic that something could be crafted to keep the entire front-end process down to two minutes or less, and I'd probably be happier with something under one minute.
Anyway, at that level, it's probably starting to get outside the realm of GTD at large, although I would expect our eventual process to be informed by GTD.
Cheers,
Roger
Suelin23
Registered
I process for an hour when first getting to work (unless there is a meeting or something that needs to be done first thing). After an hour I review my calendar and make a decision about whether I need to change to working on my defined work or keep processing. This depends on the relative importance of things I've seen in my inbox compared to what's on my calendar. Usually though I process three times a day so I like to keep the morning processing limited to an hour so it doesn't take up too much of the most productive part of the day.
Oogiem
Registered
Another Example
OK Here's how I'd handle a similar thing. I'm downtown dealing with the contractors for the building remodel we are doing for our rental building. I get a phone call from the vet who needs me to check something on a ewe with mastitis we have been treating and call her back that day. I write the note on what I need to check and the vet's mobile phone number in my little spiral bound notebook I use as a capture device. When I get home and go inside to drop purse and receipts and other paperwork off in my desk inbox one of the first things I do is pull out my notebook to add the stuff in it to my inbox. I always read the notes as I put them in because often my scribbles are somewhat illegible or cryptic and I can add more info to them as I do that if needed. So I pull off the 4-5 pages of notes I took on that trip and read them as I put the papers in my paper inbox. Most are for things that are not critical so I just add whatever additional words I need to be sure I will understand my note to the paper and toss into my inbox. However, this item is critical. I process it immediately by adding the next action of "Go catch Alaine and check the consistency of the fluid from the affected half of the udder and call Dr. X with results at (mobile phone number)" to the context "outside with help" in the "Deal with 866 Alaine's Mastitis" project and put a due date and time of when I got the phone call. That makes it overdue and so highlighted red so I see it easily. This information is on my iPod touch in Omnifocus and I carry it with me all the time. The data are also on my desktop mac. While my husband and I are getting some water and deciding what to do next I let him know I have an action I need his help with that I need to do today. He's got something he has to do before that so we agree that I'll get the crooks and jug panels and meet at the pasture where the ewe is in 30 minutes. We do, I get the check done and while we still have the ewe caught I call the vet on my mobile phone from the pasture. That way if the vet needs any additional info while I am looking at the sheep I can get it without the stress of catching her up again. I take a few more notes of stuff and we let the sheep go.
So in my case I do some almost pre-processing regularly at logical breaks in my routine and when I see something coming in to in that needs a fast response I go ahead and do the full processing at that time.
In your case I'd process the notes when I reached my destination and discover the issue and deal with it.
OK Here's how I'd handle a similar thing. I'm downtown dealing with the contractors for the building remodel we are doing for our rental building. I get a phone call from the vet who needs me to check something on a ewe with mastitis we have been treating and call her back that day. I write the note on what I need to check and the vet's mobile phone number in my little spiral bound notebook I use as a capture device. When I get home and go inside to drop purse and receipts and other paperwork off in my desk inbox one of the first things I do is pull out my notebook to add the stuff in it to my inbox. I always read the notes as I put them in because often my scribbles are somewhat illegible or cryptic and I can add more info to them as I do that if needed. So I pull off the 4-5 pages of notes I took on that trip and read them as I put the papers in my paper inbox. Most are for things that are not critical so I just add whatever additional words I need to be sure I will understand my note to the paper and toss into my inbox. However, this item is critical. I process it immediately by adding the next action of "Go catch Alaine and check the consistency of the fluid from the affected half of the udder and call Dr. X with results at (mobile phone number)" to the context "outside with help" in the "Deal with 866 Alaine's Mastitis" project and put a due date and time of when I got the phone call. That makes it overdue and so highlighted red so I see it easily. This information is on my iPod touch in Omnifocus and I carry it with me all the time. The data are also on my desktop mac. While my husband and I are getting some water and deciding what to do next I let him know I have an action I need his help with that I need to do today. He's got something he has to do before that so we agree that I'll get the crooks and jug panels and meet at the pasture where the ewe is in 30 minutes. We do, I get the check done and while we still have the ewe caught I call the vet on my mobile phone from the pasture. That way if the vet needs any additional info while I am looking at the sheep I can get it without the stress of catching her up again. I take a few more notes of stuff and we let the sheep go.
So in my case I do some almost pre-processing regularly at logical breaks in my routine and when I see something coming in to in that needs a fast response I go ahead and do the full processing at that time.
In your case I'd process the notes when I reached my destination and discover the issue and deal with it.
Kudos
I appreciated these comments. Thank you.
As for my own processing, I do in-line processing on small tasks that require no additional thought. For example, if I remember I want to buy bread, and I already have an appropriate list to jot that reminder on, I will type/scribble it in and move on with my day. Most of these are common tasks that are part of daily maintenance and living.
On the other hand, if the item will require any more attention that dropping something into an existing and appropriately labeled bucket, then I usually gather those for dedicated processing time.
Curiously, then, if I get behind on dedicated Processing, I will have all my tiny things in order already and the bigger items waiting for attention.
The single biggest thing is actually to DO that thinking at some point. For a few years, I gathered all sorts of stuff--maybe even over-collected--and did not Process regularly enough. As a result, my system was not current or complete, so I'd miss stuff even though I felt like I was trying to do GTD.
I have read on the forum here of some people who will simply process everything in-line. When they get off a phone call, they will put all of the information in the appropriate permanent locations and refuse to move on to the next task until there is "no residue". The approach has its appeal.
Roger;90419 said:
I appreciated these comments. Thank you.
As for my own processing, I do in-line processing on small tasks that require no additional thought. For example, if I remember I want to buy bread, and I already have an appropriate list to jot that reminder on, I will type/scribble it in and move on with my day. Most of these are common tasks that are part of daily maintenance and living.
On the other hand, if the item will require any more attention that dropping something into an existing and appropriately labeled bucket, then I usually gather those for dedicated processing time.
Curiously, then, if I get behind on dedicated Processing, I will have all my tiny things in order already and the bigger items waiting for attention.
The single biggest thing is actually to DO that thinking at some point. For a few years, I gathered all sorts of stuff--maybe even over-collected--and did not Process regularly enough. As a result, my system was not current or complete, so I'd miss stuff even though I felt like I was trying to do GTD.
I have read on the forum here of some people who will simply process everything in-line. When they get off a phone call, they will put all of the information in the appropriate permanent locations and refuse to move on to the next task until there is "no residue". The approach has its appeal.
Secretary in law office
I like this example, as it very much relates to my daily grind. Often my day will reshape itself without any input from me, due to new meetings or cancelled meetings, etc.
When I am moving fast, and an important input bangs on the door and hollers to be let in--usually in the form of text messages and phone calls--I may scribble a note to myself on my UCT. If I have enough time, I'll type a quick reminder in my Calendar "Processed notes re XYZ yet?" If I don't even have enough time to scribble into my Calendar, I will try to concentrate for a moment and make a mental note of the priority to Process sooner rather than later. "When I get back from this meeting, I will need to get that file faxed over ASAP". The imagery can help, like in DA's jogging example re if you don't have a UCT with you.
Mic;90429 said:
I like this example, as it very much relates to my daily grind. Often my day will reshape itself without any input from me, due to new meetings or cancelled meetings, etc.
When I am moving fast, and an important input bangs on the door and hollers to be let in--usually in the form of text messages and phone calls--I may scribble a note to myself on my UCT. If I have enough time, I'll type a quick reminder in my Calendar "Processed notes re XYZ yet?" If I don't even have enough time to scribble into my Calendar, I will try to concentrate for a moment and make a mental note of the priority to Process sooner rather than later. "When I get back from this meeting, I will need to get that file faxed over ASAP". The imagery can help, like in DA's jogging example re if you don't have a UCT with you.
JohnV474;90501 said:
Hi John,
I didn't see DA's jogging example - where did you see it?
But anyways, If I don't even have enough time to scribble a few words into my calendar, I usually can't concentrate for a moment and make a mental note either.
And besides that, a mental note would not be that bad when you're jogging, but if you are in the middle of a meeting/phone call/conversation - I think DA would recommend you to appologize and make that scribble in your calendar.
Not to mention situations where I have many of these at the same day. I wouldn't want a few mental notes in my RAM. I can't stand it.
Mic
Mental notes and jogging
I believe DA's jogging example may have been in the Getting Things Done Fast! audio CDs. Basic idea: if you are out jogging, with no pen and paper, and think of something you need to remember, imagine yourself doing walking through your door and doing that thing or writing it down right away. This will help set up a trigger when you walk through the door to be reminded.
Let me fill in a few details on how I use the "mental note" idea: it is an emergency-only tactic that I use when I am in a position that making a note is impossible. Like you, if I was in a meeting, I would scribble down the note.
This occurs most commonly when I am actively driving in busy traffic and get an urgent call. I will carry the mental note with me until the first moment of relief. At the next light or exit, I will get out my UCT and pen and scribble the quick note (or my phone but is slower).
Note that the mental note idea is very temporary, and emergency only, storage. Occasionally I have had to be moving at full-speed due to some emergency or deadline, but if I have time to go to the bathroom I can get the note scribbled. It only takes 4 seconds to get out my pen and paper, write a reminder, and put them back... but sometimes I don't have 4 seconds to spare for 20 or 30 minutes.
I can't think of a situation where I have had to carry more than one thing this way, but it's theoretically possible. It's pretty hard to forget such a thing because usually the item is so emotionally charged it sticks well. Again, on better thought, I should have included that this was an emergency tactic for when neither in-line nor dedicated time is possible.
I believe DA's jogging example may have been in the Getting Things Done Fast! audio CDs. Basic idea: if you are out jogging, with no pen and paper, and think of something you need to remember, imagine yourself doing walking through your door and doing that thing or writing it down right away. This will help set up a trigger when you walk through the door to be reminded.
Let me fill in a few details on how I use the "mental note" idea: it is an emergency-only tactic that I use when I am in a position that making a note is impossible. Like you, if I was in a meeting, I would scribble down the note.
This occurs most commonly when I am actively driving in busy traffic and get an urgent call. I will carry the mental note with me until the first moment of relief. At the next light or exit, I will get out my UCT and pen and scribble the quick note (or my phone but is slower).
Note that the mental note idea is very temporary, and emergency only, storage. Occasionally I have had to be moving at full-speed due to some emergency or deadline, but if I have time to go to the bathroom I can get the note scribbled. It only takes 4 seconds to get out my pen and paper, write a reminder, and put them back... but sometimes I don't have 4 seconds to spare for 20 or 30 minutes.
I can't think of a situation where I have had to carry more than one thing this way, but it's theoretically possible. It's pretty hard to forget such a thing because usually the item is so emotionally charged it sticks well. Again, on better thought, I should have included that this was an emergency tactic for when neither in-line nor dedicated time is possible.