Thanks for the info...I'm INTJ as well. ;-)
Time spent on GTD overhead, integration of GTD with other approaches to life
S
shadowfirebird
Guest
How do I find out if I'm an INTJ? It certainly sounds as if I am...!
GTD is a perfect fit for my life. I have little short term memory, and continually worry about dropping things from my long-term memory. Picking up the collection habit was a doddle - and I got immediate stress-relief from it. Now I just look at my context lists, no worry at all...
I would say that I was the ideal personality type for GTD - an absent-minded worrier who loves to be organised....
GTD is a perfect fit for my life. I have little short term memory, and continually worry about dropping things from my long-term memory. Picking up the collection habit was a doddle - and I got immediate stress-relief from it. Now I just look at my context lists, no worry at all...
I would say that I was the ideal personality type for GTD - an absent-minded worrier who loves to be organised....
S
shadowfirebird
Guest
It would appear that I am an INFP...
(More as an I-figured-it-out rather than in case you were interested!)
(More as an I-figured-it-out rather than in case you were interested!)
shadowfirebird said:
The *real* Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is a copyrighted and proprietary test administered by psychologists, but you can get a decent approximation from tests like this one:
http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html
or
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
-- Tammy
Todd V
0
re: GTD Overhead
It's hard to say who most 'fits' with the GTD workflow. David Allen even jokingly points out in his book that the people it connects with the most often aren't the people who need it the most.
There are two things that I think are helpful.
#1: The 80/20 Rule.
Though not as prominent in the GTD books it is often found in similar literature and I think this is generally a good rule of thumb for most things in life. In general you should only be spending about 20% of your time "reviewing" your GTD inventory (say only 2 hours on a Friday afternoon) -- you should spend the rest of the time 'doing', following up, or doing whatever you want because you already know what it is you're not doing; and doing whatever you want right now is fine because you know that.
#2: The Percents Are Illusory.
There is a mental gap between what the mind sees when it looks over at the pending tasks, obligations, and actions sitting in a folder and the actual fact of how long it will take to get those things done. I remember when I was first getting into the GTD workflow I used to "cringe" looking over at my Read-Review folder which was amassing things for me to read. It was almost 2" thick with papers. I often wouldn't look at it for weeks. The reason is because -- and this is unique with Reading material in comparison to Next Actions -- is because it still mentally feels like "piles of piles". And thus the mind begins to go numb to the reading file because it doesn't want to process what it perceives as an insurmountable amount of time it will take to wade through it all (not to mention how boring some of that stuff will probably be to read). But my wife and I ended up having to take a two and a half hour train ride to visit some friends, I took the folder with me, and because I had the folder with me, I just decided to begin reading through as much as I could. I finished the entire folder before the end of the train ride!! And I thought it would take me at least a couple of weeks to get through it all. This is proof that there is a mental gap between how much time we think it takes to review something or to get something done and the reality of it. And so developing the habit of just stepping into the doing of it can really help shatter that perception, which is often just an illusion keeping us from reaching the other side of "done".
I still remember what it was like to stand in front of an Inbox with over 60 items in it (or my email with over 100 unread emails) and thinking "I'm never going to get through all of this!" Now having been processing my inboxes one item at a time as David Allen suggests in his books, I now look at my inbox and my email and think "No problem, this will only take 10 minutes."
So this is just something I've discovered -- the mental gap -- the illusion between the perception and the reality. It actually takes a lot less time to get it all done or to review the entire inventory of one's projects and actions. It's hard to believe at first, but it's like the first time one gets their inbox to empty. It seems like it takes the longest the first time (but even then, once it's empty, it didn't take as long as you thought it would). And as the inbox is regularly emptied and the habit is developed the mind begins to feel less encumbered by the pile of stuff because it now has a better sense of how long it will actually take to get IN to empty. And even if the mind still doesn't know how long it will "actually" take, the regular experience of seeing things take less time than previously thought begins to reinforce itself, and that makes it just that much easier each time to step into it. The same is true with the rest of the GTD workflow.
Todd V
It's hard to say who most 'fits' with the GTD workflow. David Allen even jokingly points out in his book that the people it connects with the most often aren't the people who need it the most.
There are two things that I think are helpful.
#1: The 80/20 Rule.
Though not as prominent in the GTD books it is often found in similar literature and I think this is generally a good rule of thumb for most things in life. In general you should only be spending about 20% of your time "reviewing" your GTD inventory (say only 2 hours on a Friday afternoon) -- you should spend the rest of the time 'doing', following up, or doing whatever you want because you already know what it is you're not doing; and doing whatever you want right now is fine because you know that.
#2: The Percents Are Illusory.
There is a mental gap between what the mind sees when it looks over at the pending tasks, obligations, and actions sitting in a folder and the actual fact of how long it will take to get those things done. I remember when I was first getting into the GTD workflow I used to "cringe" looking over at my Read-Review folder which was amassing things for me to read. It was almost 2" thick with papers. I often wouldn't look at it for weeks. The reason is because -- and this is unique with Reading material in comparison to Next Actions -- is because it still mentally feels like "piles of piles". And thus the mind begins to go numb to the reading file because it doesn't want to process what it perceives as an insurmountable amount of time it will take to wade through it all (not to mention how boring some of that stuff will probably be to read). But my wife and I ended up having to take a two and a half hour train ride to visit some friends, I took the folder with me, and because I had the folder with me, I just decided to begin reading through as much as I could. I finished the entire folder before the end of the train ride!! And I thought it would take me at least a couple of weeks to get through it all. This is proof that there is a mental gap between how much time we think it takes to review something or to get something done and the reality of it. And so developing the habit of just stepping into the doing of it can really help shatter that perception, which is often just an illusion keeping us from reaching the other side of "done".
I still remember what it was like to stand in front of an Inbox with over 60 items in it (or my email with over 100 unread emails) and thinking "I'm never going to get through all of this!" Now having been processing my inboxes one item at a time as David Allen suggests in his books, I now look at my inbox and my email and think "No problem, this will only take 10 minutes."
So this is just something I've discovered -- the mental gap -- the illusion between the perception and the reality. It actually takes a lot less time to get it all done or to review the entire inventory of one's projects and actions. It's hard to believe at first, but it's like the first time one gets their inbox to empty. It seems like it takes the longest the first time (but even then, once it's empty, it didn't take as long as you thought it would). And as the inbox is regularly emptied and the habit is developed the mind begins to feel less encumbered by the pile of stuff because it now has a better sense of how long it will actually take to get IN to empty. And even if the mind still doesn't know how long it will "actually" take, the regular experience of seeing things take less time than previously thought begins to reinforce itself, and that makes it just that much easier each time to step into it. The same is true with the rest of the GTD workflow.
Todd V