Castanea_d.
Registered
One of the ways that GTD has transformed my worklife is in regard to what I call "spin-offs." I have gotten a lot of practice with it yesterday and today, when I had a couple of half-day blocks of time to work on a large project. It seemed like almost every step made me think of an idea that branched off - "Oh yeah, I ought to do X." Or "I'd better send Y an e-mail and see where she is on this."
In the old days, I would manage to stay on task most of the time, but I would try to carry such side-tracks in mind, and of course most of them would be lost and the rest of them would lurk somewhere down below and make me anxious about what I was forgetting. Or I would fall into the "rabbit hole" and end up frittering away the time and energy that should have gone into what I was working on.
Nowadays, I've become very good about scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper and throwing it in the IN box. If it is a less-than-two-minute thing I might go ahead and do it - but even for something short, I'd rather write it down than lose the thread of what I am doing if I am really in the flow with it. After two days, I have ended up with a good-sized stack of paper notes and it is going to take me a while to work through them. It feels very good to (a) have made progress on a project and (b) feel confident that I haven't lost anything along the way.
The spin-offs that are related to the project eventually end up in an appropriate place in the project materials and workflow, and the unrelated things become TBDs or new projects or "someday/maybes" or whatever. Once in a blue moon, the new thought is so urgent that the best thing is to bookmark the project and go ahead and attend to the new thing. But most of the time, once I get to a stopping place in the thing I was doing, the adrenaline rush that came with the initial spin-off idea has passed and it is easier to deal with it as it deserves.
So, not for the first or last time: thank you, David Allen.
In the old days, I would manage to stay on task most of the time, but I would try to carry such side-tracks in mind, and of course most of them would be lost and the rest of them would lurk somewhere down below and make me anxious about what I was forgetting. Or I would fall into the "rabbit hole" and end up frittering away the time and energy that should have gone into what I was working on.
Nowadays, I've become very good about scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper and throwing it in the IN box. If it is a less-than-two-minute thing I might go ahead and do it - but even for something short, I'd rather write it down than lose the thread of what I am doing if I am really in the flow with it. After two days, I have ended up with a good-sized stack of paper notes and it is going to take me a while to work through them. It feels very good to (a) have made progress on a project and (b) feel confident that I haven't lost anything along the way.
The spin-offs that are related to the project eventually end up in an appropriate place in the project materials and workflow, and the unrelated things become TBDs or new projects or "someday/maybes" or whatever. Once in a blue moon, the new thought is so urgent that the best thing is to bookmark the project and go ahead and attend to the new thing. But most of the time, once I get to a stopping place in the thing I was doing, the adrenaline rush that came with the initial spin-off idea has passed and it is easier to deal with it as it deserves.
So, not for the first or last time: thank you, David Allen.