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Technology Thursday
Before we had a child, my husband and I felt that we were barely staying on top of things in our household. We're both well-educated reasonably organized individuals, but between two jobs, various activities, keeping a house, and trying to make sure to find time for each other, it was a challenge - a real challenge. As anyone who's had a child knows, adding our son to the mix has only complicated matters further on the organizational front. Now, we're trying to do our jobs, maintain the household, keep the baby (almost toddler) safe not to mention happy, and find time for the four relationships that now need attention and maintenance (me and my son, my son and my husband, my husband and I, and all three of us together). Most of our other activities have been abandoned while we all seek to survive the little guy's infancy.
A few year's back I started implementing David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach to life and work organization and maintenance.
Complete details can be found in his book and there are now numerous websites and blogs that offer tips and suggestions for refining the process (see GTDTimes, 43Folders, and Lifehack for starters). The whole approach really appeals to me on many levels. It's abstract enough to apply to almost any kind of work, and specific enough in its suggestions to be effective and practical. It's also a holistic system in that it offers way to think about your grand 5-year plans as well your minute-to-minute decisions about what to do next. Thinking in terms of the "next action" for any given activity -- a key component of the more fine-grained aspects of the approach -- can be transformative. I now rarely leave an interaction at work (or even in my personal life) without clarifying, at least in my own head, what the next expected action for me is. Moreover, if there's no action item associated with something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about, then I know I'm just wasting time.
From the David Allen Company's website:
Sophisticated without being confining, the subtle effectiveness of GTD lies in its radically common sense notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment. GTD embodies an easy, step-by-step and highly efficient method for achieving this relaxed, productive state.
One of the more interesting things to me about GTD is that it is aggressively technology-neutral. If you prefer to work with pen and paper, or 3x5 notecards, or sophisticated outlining, database, and weblogging tools, you can make it work. My system has completely blown up since my pregnancy and birth of my son, so I'm on the lookout for a new tool to maintain my project and action lists - fortunately there are plenty of options.
A friend of mine suggested that as I slowly find my way back to organizational sanity - or at least back to the barely-hanging on we'd managed before the kid arrived - that I blog a little bit about how GTD techniques fit with raising a child. Since I'm so, so, so far away from being on top of my stuff right now, I don't have a lot of insights yet. But a couple of tricks have been helpful while my son is an infant.
First: lists, lists, lists. I'm slowly getting my brain back, but in the sleep-deprived fog of the first year, I've found checklists to be indispensable. We have a nightly chore checklist, a morning chore checklist, a 'things to bring to daycare' list (that includes "baby"), a 'things to bring to work' list (that includes "purse") and we've created grocery store lists containing the usual items we buy at each of the 3 grocery stores we frequent.
Second: calendaring. I've written about calendaring technology before here. There is still no great solution for shared schedules, but even since the baby I've been able to maintain the GTD-recommended tactic of only having hard appointments on my calendar. If it's not needing to be done at a particular day and time, it goes on another list, not on the calendar. So a quick glance at my Outlook calendar for the week gives me a sense of how over-scheduled I am. I'm not sure how the over-scheduling happens, given that we've removed as many activities and obligations as we could for the time being, but it does.
Third: the tickler file. The GTD tickler file has been indispensable to me since well before my son arrived. A tickler file - either an actual physical file or some sort of electronic reminder system (or both) - is a place to stash reminders to your future self. At home I use it to remind myself to change the HVAC filter, to schedule doctor appointments, to stash paperwork that doesn't need to be permanently filed but that I'll need in the near future, and so on.
Finally, the GTD notion of "projects" and in particular "someday/maybe" projects has been helpful. In the remnants of my system, I still manage to occasionally jot down ideas and notes for projects I plan to get to once things aren't quite so crazy. That alone keeps from thinking that I'm totally losing my mind. Even if I'm really not Getting a whole lot of Things Done, at least the rudimentary pieces of my once-smoothly-running system remind me that I probably will be able to once again. Someday. Maybe.
PS: I should note that I haven't even mentioned a core GTD principle: Inbox Zero. It's important, but I'm so very far from Inbox Zero at the moment, I just don't want to think about it!
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