What other time-management methods, other than GTD, have you tried?

@Ship69: I think it's worth asking yourself why you're having trouble getting to the more important things. Is it your approach to productivity, or is there another reason why you're gravitating to the less important tasks? If you're unclear about your priorities, or unconsciously resisting certain tasks for some reason, adding more layers to your life management system will be akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I recently played around with time-blocking after reading about @Longstreet's success with it. I haven't found it as useful as he has, but I think he and I would agree that it is only useful to the extent that you've made a rock-solid commitment to the thing you've blocked in your calendar.

For example, I've taken up competitive running. I've already decided that I love it, I know why I'm doing it, and where it fits into the higher-level horizons of my life. So I schedule times during the week to run. It works because I'm already 100% committed to running. Scheduling it is just a tool to prevent other people from grabbing up my running time.

My point is, whether you look into Franklin-Covey, kanban, time-blocking, Deep Work or something else, they won't help if the internal commitment isn't there. They'll just create more things to undermine your self-confidence and create frustration.
 
Ship69 said:
Question
What other time-management method & techniques have you tried? What were their strengths & weaknesses? How do they compare with GTD? Can any be readily used in parallel with GTD?
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Covey was basically what I used for decades.

Strengths, big picture view of your life
Weakness, ignores the tiny niggling open loops that keep you from really shining in your purpose

I still like the questions to determine your life's work/purpose that come from the top down approach of Covey. But for actually executing the actions that will allow you to reach those lofty aspirations there is nothing that beats GTD.

Key is consistency, review and a willingness to externalize much of your thinking.

GTD is my external brain.
 
Ship69 said:
Does it work well with GTD?
Do you still use it?
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I used to try and integrate the thinking, but never really embedded GTD. So now I'm ignoring all other systems and just focusing on the GTD guide and doing it as closely as recommended, and making far more progress than ever before.
 
Suelin23 said:
I used to try and integrate the thinking, but never really embedded GTD. So now I'm ignoring all other systems and just focusing on the GTD guide and doing it as closely as recommended, and making far more progress than ever before.
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I like this approach! Focus on GTD practices and principles....and let us know if we can be of help. CHeers!
 
It seems your question is around gaining perspective on your life and work and absolutely GTD does have the tools for that. Like most everyone I started implementing GTD with a focus on control rather than perspective and that took me a while to implement! But once I did, and it became second nature to me, I naturally found myself thinking about my higher horizons of focus and started getting that implemented in my GTD system.

What I did was create a mindmap in Mindjet MindManager. I still keep my mindmap there thought I don't refer to it nearly as much. I tag each branch and leaf with 50k, 40k, 30k and 20k. The linked 10k, 5k (actions) and 0k (habits) go into my List Manager (Asana now) and Habit Tracker (Today App). I reviewed that mindmap weekly.

My mindmap is organized into 10 life areas: Beauty, Health, Intellectual, Organization, Profession, Recreation, Relationships, Service, Spiritual and Wealth. I rate each one on a scale of 1 to 10, twice. 1 is low and 10 is high. The first time is how good do I feel that area of my life is, and the second time is how good do I need that area of my life to feel. So the first one is actual and the second one is target. Where I have gaps, I will go into that category and turn on projects to fill the gap, or turn off projects if there is capacity I can divert elsewhere.
 
Some of these can be incorporated within GTD, like time blocking and deep work. The only truly separate system that I found was very useful is Agile or Kanban. Even that was recently addressed during a webinar by instructors who use a bit of both. You can also practice GTD in bullet journal style or Franklin planner style.
 
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