Recently, I’ve done a bad job with managing my time. I have things I want to get done, but failing to make the time to do them makes time spent trying to rest stressful. In an attempt to battle this rising bad habit, I’m taking a crack at implementing the Ultimate Brain template by Thomas Frank and principles he used in it’s creation from David Allen’s best seller Getting Things Done.
Getting Things Done
To get started this month I wanted a better understanding of the the GTD system used in Ultimate Brain. Without time to read the whole book, I read through the main ideas via Blinkist. The quick read was a solid run down of system.
The system overall goes extremely well with the PARA system I mentioned last week, which is likely why Thomas Frank used both in his template. Both are focused on collecting the ideas and tasks that arise in a given day with time spent later to organize and address them. Each has an acronym with both “capture” and “organize” as items. PARA’s “CODE” (Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express) and GTD’s “CCORE” (Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage) go well together.
The system is largely built around key lists of what needs to be done. There is a do next list, a deferred list for things that need to be done later, and a delegated list for those things that are passed to someone else. The Ultimate Brain process dashboard makes it easy to get tasks into these specific lists.
Something I really like about the system is the principle that if something takes less than two minutes, it should just be done immediately. Allowing something that small to get into the overall system offers more work to manage than simply covering the act on the spot.
So Why Deal with This System
Lately, I’ve been trying to build out concrete plans for projects and the lists in Getting Things Done are helping me do just that.
I’ve needed a little more structure than randomly throwing out deadlines without a real idea of the work that needs to be done. GTD encourages working towards the specific tasks that need to be done. Deadlines help to apply some pressure, like getting these posts out every Sunday, but relying only on them hasn’t been as fruitful as I would like.
For a while I’ve been working with daily to do lists built around deadlines to manage what I try to accomplish on a given day. The trouble I run into is the uncertainty of a given day. Days can go far better or far worse than I can plan for and having a list constrained to a specific day gets in the way of what I can actually get done. This is something I actually started with at my job with an email to managers, and while it helps when it comes to the structured time of work, I haven’t applied it as well to my free time.
Having all my tasks in the appropriate list saves me the time of having to think about what to get started when I have the time and energy to do so.
Envisioning the End
Something I’ve been thinking about since the end of the last trial is what I want to get out of this month of “getting things done.”
The biggest goal I have out of the coming weeks is to have a couple projects for the summer broken down into small enough bites with estimated due dates. I’ve already laid out one project, formalizing a Dungeons and Dragon’s one shot I wrote.
I have the high level strokes of other projects as of now, but still need to break them down into the smaller individual tasks. These include both a home automation expansion project, as well as a game jam later in July.
While all of the projects will persist beyond this month, following the GTD method should lay a solid foundation for the weeks beyond. I’m hoping going about projects in this way will help to make sticking to them and following through on delivering some degree of a completed product.
Trying Out Before Buying In 