Getting Things Done Differently

Since the late-2000s I've been interested in David Allen's Getting Things Done philosophy and methods. I always found it difficult to follow strictly, though. So, while the fundamentals of GTD are sound:

• Our brains are for having ideas not for storing them, and

• We need a reliable system to store those ideas and to remind us of them when we need.

I felt the GTD methodology itself needed changes. One of the reasons I felt it needed to be changed was that it was just a lot of work. So I made an addition to these fundamentals:

• For a system to be reliable, it should be easy to follow, taking up less time to organise allowing you more time to do the actual work.

I also felt that there was something else that bothered me about GTD. For one, most GTD tasks are divided up into projects and all of them are also divided up into contexts that are based on our constraints within which we can do those tasks. I found that today the vast majority of our tasks can be completed online and since we're always online, we're not constrained anymore. Any constraints we have for online tasks are not placed on us but we place on ourselves to maintain our sanity and peace of mind. That's when I saw this blog by Carl Pullein. Carl talks about how you can drop the contexts and organise tasks by when you need them done instead:

• This week

• Next week

• This month

• Next month

All these tasks can go into a calendar app or a list or to do app like Microsoft To Do or Google Calendar. Since I use Google calendar for work, I end up opening Google Calendar every half hour anyway during a regular work day, so I just add my tasks to my calendar as a task. I'm sure there are better Task management apps that might work better for others but this one works for me because I don't need to open yet another app.