@Pending vs @Waiting in GTD

When I orginally set up my email programs (Gmail for personal, Outlook for work) for David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) method, I created folders for @Action, @Someday, and @Waiting, as well as named folders for projects to contain support and reference material.

As time went on, however, I found a new type of email that didn't really fit in those categories: things that are mine to do (I'm not @Waiting for someone else) and there is a next action on it (so it doesn't go in the project folders) but I can't do that action yet (so it doesn't go in @Action).

In short, I'm waiting not for a person, but for the time to be right, such as a meeting coming up this week that I'll need the directions to, or a webinar announcement with its login information. I was worried that if I put it in @Waiting, it would get lost.  Since it's time based, it should probably go on my Calendar, but the email contains more information than I want to copy to the Calendar.

So I added a folder named @Pending. Here are the "hard edges" rules I use to decide what goes where:

• If the email is just a notice, I add it to the calendar and delete the notice.
• If the email has significant details, I add it to the calendar and file under @Pending until the event occurs. Then I delete it (usually) or file it under the proper reference folder.

My GTD Weekly Review process

I created a simple Excel worksheet the other day, called Checklists. Each tab in the spreadsheet file is one checklist of how I do various processes, such as setting up a new task.

Here is my GTD Weekly Review checklist.  It doesn't cover every step, but is basically a set of reminders to make sure I don't miss an important step.

• Collect loose stuff.  I check my pocket notebook, travel Inbox folder, etc. to make sure all my captured "stuff" is in the Inbox.
• Weigh and measure myself for the week.  (most violated step on the checklist!)
• Update logs.  I keep various logs to track my progress over time. For example, my fitness log has records of my weight and measurements back to the late '90s.  I have capture forms that I carry with me for some of this stuff, but I want to get them into electronic form periodically.
• Move pagefinder forward in planner.  I'm still using a paper planner for calendar and action lists, and it's a week-on-two-pages format.
• Copy appointments from monthly pages, last week, Outlook. When I make a future appointment, it goes only on the monthly calendar page. During weekly planning, I build the calendar for the upcoming week. I also reschedule anything incomplete from last week's calendar page. Unfortunately, I can't integrate personal with company calendars at this time, so during weekly planning I add any meetings created via Outlook invites.
• Reconcile calendar. My company uses a task scheduling system. I synchronize my paper calendar with it weekly and do new task setup for any new assignments.
• Process electronic Inboxes.  Work and personal.
• Process physical Inbox. The Inbox on my desk gets to zero less often that the electronic ones do.
• Review @Watching. This Outlook folder is for potential upcoming tasks that I've not been assigned to yet, but want to track the email discussion. Some of these can go away after a while, some need to be setup as a new task assignment.
• Review @Waiting. Do I need to send reminders to anyone that I'm waiting for an answer from?
• Review Someday/Maybe list.  Does anything on here need to go away or get promoted to a current project?
• Review Current Projects list.  Make sure that everything has a "next action" identified and on the proper action list, or that I'm consciously deciding not to move forward on it this week. Some things may need to be dropped or moved to Someday/Maybe. I don't do this step every week, but that's okay because it shouldn't get out of whack over the short term.

This currently takes longer than I would like, and I'm looking for ways to streamline it. But for now, this is how I do Weekly Review in my Getting Things Done system.

Another use for the blind copying (BCC) email field

Many email etiquette guides caution against using the blind copy, or BCC,  feature of your email program. One article on Business Email Etiquette calls the practice "impolite and sneaky". Another, from Net M@nners.com, allows that there are both polite and impolite reasons to use BCC.

The most common and acceptable use of BCC is with mailing lists, says this article on LifeHack. You send a message to many people without revealing all their email addresses to each other. This protects their privacy.

Recently, I've begun using it for a different purpose. I'll include my own email address on an outgoing email, but in the BCC field so it doesn't show on the message that others receive. This plants a copy in my Inbox so I can easily drag it to my @Waiting folder as a tickler to follow up if I don't hear back.  It's easier for me to stay in the Inbox and drag the new message, than to switch back and forth between Inbox and Sent. This is especially the case if I'm accessing my email from a client's network via Outlook Web Access, in which switching folders is a bit more work.

GTD = Just Enough Structure

Last week I was able to attend a webinar given by Dan Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us .  He's started a new webinar series called "Office Hours", in which he and a special guest just take questions the whole hour, much like a professor's office hours in college. (You can listen to past episodes, such as Seth Godin, on the Office Hours page.)

The special guest last week was none other than David Allen, the Getting Things Done guy. It was a funny and informative hour.

One of the best discussions of the hour was about what tool to use to implement GTD. Dan was impressed by how the system itself is "tool agnostic" -- it doesn't matter what tool you use as long as you are comfortable using it.The key thing, he said, is to get stuff out of your head and decide what it means.  David said that until you get it all out of your head (capture) and then be very discrete about each item and what to do about it (processing), the rest of the system doesn't matter.

"I'm running across a lot of high tech people who are going back to paper, because paper is a good way to keep track of stuff running through your head," David said. The computer can be a dangerous animal, he added, because out of sight, out of mind. A computer screen or PDA screen cannot display all the relationships you have to keep in mind all at once.

Someone suggested using a database system, and while David was supportive of anything that works for you, he cautioned that if it's too much work to keep the system up, you won't use it. This was the key takeaway from the session for me, because I tend to over-engineer things. 

"GTD needs to be just structured enough, but not so much that you have to think too much, or you won't use it when things get fast-moving."

Google Apps Migration

I'm midway through a migration of my GTD system to Google Apps. It's been a bit of a challenge. Here's what's been accomplished so far, Phase 1 was to migrate my electronic services:

• Migrate domains bwatkins.com and bnlventures.com to new registrars. My old registrar was the same as my hosting company, and it turned out I wasn't able to create custom DNS records with them if I also didn't host my email and website with them. This was more stressful than it needed to be, because I had taken the time to talk with their support staff and was assured I could still control my domain on the free parking account. They were wrong.  Or maybe they just didn't have the same definition of "control" that I had.
• Migrate email to Google Apps Mail.  Their free level of service now includes custom domain names, so I could keep "@bwatkins.com" for my email addresses. On the old service, I had actual mailboxes for various uses; on Google Apps Mail I just created aliases for all of these but my main email address. I only created all those boxes as an anti-spam measure; Google's spam filtering seems to be good enough that I don't need to do that any more.  I'm slowly working through the list and changing my address at various sites to use my primary again.
• Migrate blog from Typepad to Blogger. This, too, was a challenge, until I discovered a tool that let me convert my Typepad export file to Blogger format. I was able to import most of the content including comments.  I imported without publishing, then went through the posts to decide which ones I wanted to leave behind.

I'm currently in Phase 2, which is to convert my paper planner into Google Apps. Here's what I've done on that:

• Migrate my calendar to Google Apps Calendar.  I now have four calendars to maintain:  my paper planner, my work Outlook calendar, a scheduling system my employer uses (which doesn't sync with Outlook so I have to do that manually), and now Google Apps Calendar. I spent the better part of a day synchronizing all four. I also jotted down some process notes on what to do when changes happen. Four calendars is insane: but it will get better.  I'll eventually replace the paper planner with occasional printouts from Google Apps Calendar, and I've been told that the scheduling system will eventually be able to auto-update Outlook.  So I'll only have two.  I wish it could be one, but given my employer's policies, it's not gonna happen.
• Migrate my GTD review lists -- Projects, Someday/Maybe, and Waiting -- to Google Apps Docs. I typically only review these once a week, so it wasn't a big impact on my daily workstyle to move them. Bonus: I can now review and update them while on the road; before they were in Excel documents on my desktop at home.

The hardest part of Phase 2 is still ahead: migrating my Action Lists. Although some say that Google Apps Calendar's task list is not powerful enough for GTD, I like the minimalist approach of simple lists. I've created separate lists for each GTD context ("Calls", "Errands", etc.). My next step is to dump all the items in my paper Action Lists into this structure.  I don't know if I will feel constrained by having to be online to look at my action lists. I may have to do an occasional printout of them. I'm not sure how this will work, and it may be that I'll have to re-engineer this later.  But I want to try the simple way first.

Phase 3, and where this is all heading, is that I plan to upgrade my plain phone to a smartphone in a while. At that point, I'll have all this information sync'ed on a regular basis and be able to carry it with me. The work I'm doing now may seem odd from a paper planner viewpoint, but it is laying a foundation of moving all my planning information from PC to the cloud, so once I get the smartphone it will all be in place and ready to switch over.

My Outbox

I've had an IN box for as long as I can remember. But it's only comparatively recently (a year or so) that I've had a formal OUT box. Here's what I've discovered about using it.

It's not actually a box or tray, like my physical IN box. Rather, it's more of a "landing zone" on top of the printer stand - a designated bit of clear space which, in my mind, carries the label "OUT".

When something needs to go out of my office, I put it there. Bowl from this morning's cereal? OUT box. Completed expense reports that need to be mailed? OUT box.  Mail that needs my wife's attention instead of mine? OUT box.

In the same way that a pad of paper lets me capture thoughts without acting on them immediately, the Out Box lets me stage items that need to be moved somewhere, without interrupting my flow of work. I can let go mentally of the thought that this item needs to be put away. When I do want to take a break and stretch, all these "somewhere else" items are in one place so it's easy to scoop them up and walk them to where they need to be.

What I DON'T put in the OUT box are things "to be filed".  I've learned that that doesn't work. It grows without bound, and then OUT is useless because it's cluttered.  I file most things immediately, though I'm ashamed to say there's still a bit of a TO FILE pile that needs attention.  (It's on my "IN OFFICE" action list to clean that up.)

So, the two habits I'm working on right now have to do with comings and goings: (1) when I enter my office, I need to toss any notes I've taken into my In Box for processing; and (2) when I leave my office, I need to check the Out Box to see what can be delivered elsewhere.

Simple things, but they help.

Tear Up Your Moleskine

I've been conducting an experiment that may seem like heresy to those who swear by the Moleskine brand of pocket notebooks.

I rip the pages out.

Now before you organize an angry mob of townspeople with torches and pitchforks, let me explain why I'm doing such a thing, and how I use my Mokeskine 3.5" x 5.5" ruled pocket notebook with my GTD system.

As I wrote in my previous post on Capture and Focus, it's important to have a notePAD not a noteBOOK as a capture tool, so you can toss loose sheets, 1 per idea, into your In Box for later processing. I don't use the Moleskine as a journal; I have another solution for that, so permanence is not an issue as it would be if I were using the sketchbook like my son does.  (Yes, he keeps them.) 

The durability of the Mokeskine stitched binding actually put me off from buying it for a while. I looked in all the office supply stores for a nice cover with a refillable notepad and a pocket for loose papers, without success.  Finally, I decided to try the Moleskine -- and I'm glad I did.  It's just the right size, and the unfolding pocket in the back is perfect for collecting ATM and debit card receipts.

I was mesmerized by the beautiful binding at first, so I just wrote my notes and checked them off as I processed them into my GTD system. Except that it was too easy to forget.

Then one day I figured what the heck, and the next time I got back home I grabbed hold of the three sheets I had used that day, and slowly ripped them asunder from that oh-so-perfect binding. I was surprised to find that the skies did not open and smite me with lightning, the earth didn't shake, and most important, the book seemed unfazed by it all.

If a couple of sheets come loose by my doing this, well, the elastic strap will certainly keep them in place until I need them. (The book supposedly has 16 perforated pages designed to be torn out, but I didn't see them.)  And at $12 at Barnes and Noble, it's a heck of a deal compared to the $80 leather Notetaker Wallet kit sold in the David Allen Co online store.

By the way, since the Moleskine doesn't have a pen like the Notetaker Wallet, I've found a marvelous companion to my Moleskine in the Zebra F-301 Compact Pen, which folded in half is less than 4" long and protected from leaks because the cap snaps into place. You get two in the package for under $10 at Staples and refills are available in fine point in various colors.

UPDATE 7/20/2010:  My latest experiment is the Mini Booksling with Pen from The Container Store. I replaced its plastic pen with my Zebra, and I'm good to go.  I taped the elastic that comes with the Molestine inside the back cover so it's out of the way, and use the Booksling across the width of the Moleskine instead. This places the pen along the long edge of the notebook. It still fits in my pocket.

Capture and Focus: I Don't Have to Do Everything RIght Now

On my business trip last week, I listened to an older David Allen podcast on the Best Practices of Collect. I download these podcasts to my iPod so I can listen to them on airplane rides. I seem to hear something new each time I review them.

What struck me this time around is the impact that having a good collection system has on your ability to focus. David was describing his own capture tools, such as a tray of loose sheets of paper on his desk. When he gets an idea in the middle of doing something, he writes it down and throws the paper into his Inbox tray. Then he can let go of it, because he knows it's in his system and he will see it again the next time he processes his Inbox.

A lot of what I do, such as software installs or courseware development, requires intense focus. Interruptions blast my concentration to pieces, and it takes time to put those pieces back together again so I can make sure I'm not forgetting a step (installs) or that I'm keeping the big picture in mind as I write (courseware).  Although some interruptions demand immediate attention (such as an instant message from my manager) many more of them really don't need to be acted on in the moment.

So the past few days, I've been trying to ask myself, "Do I need to do this now?" Even if it will take less than two minutes to do, if it will interrupt something and cause a context shift, I capture it and keep working. I don't need to do everything Right Now for fear of losing it, if I can capture it for later processing.

Another tip: all three speakers in the podcast were insistent that they captured thoughts on a notePAD, not a noteBOOK.  You have to be able to tear out the individual sheets and put them into your Inbox for later processing.  It's too hard to go back through a whole notebook to hunt for action items. With one item per sheet, it's easy. They recommended half-size legal pads so they didn't waste a whole 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper for each idea.

Two thoughts on Deciding What to Do Next

It's easy to get stuck in between tasks, trying to determine what is the best thing to do next. This leads to an excess of planning and strategizing, and not enough doing. I had two anti-procrastination thoughts today about the Doing phase of the Getting Things Done methodology.

1. You don't get better at making decisions by thinking or planning, only by doing. It sounds counter-intuitive, but sometimes you can't tell what the best choice is in advance. Only when you choose something and actually do it, can you see the results and use them as feedback to make better choices later.

2. If you're stalled because you don't want to choose "wrong", think about this: if it's in your system as an action item, it's not wrong.  You've already processed the item and decided what it means for you, what the next action is, and put that action on your calendar or an action list.  So if you can't decide what to pick, pick anything at all, rather than continuing to stew.  Anything on your list will move some priority forward, and will provide feedback on what to choose next. Plus, once you're in motion, it's easier to stay in motion and pick the next action... and the next one after that.

New GTD folder - @Watching

I've been using David Allen's Getting Things Done method (GTD) to organize my time for over a year now.  I have a fairly typical set of "@" folders in my Outlook mailbox, such as:

@Action - things to be done as soon as possible, but not on a specific day
@Reading <listname> - things to read when I have time (several of these, one for each mailing list I'm on)
@Someday - ideas for Someday/Maybe
@Waiting - things on hold while I'm waiting for a response from someone

I also have many folders with no "@" on them, which are my project support materials and reference. When I'm assigned a task, I create a folder for its correspondence. But I was having trouble with emails that didn't fall into any assigned task -- typically things that I've been copied on but have no immediate action. However, I want to keep a closer eye on them than burying them among my reference folders, because they may turn into an assignment quickly.

So I added the folder @Watching. I create a subfolder for each topic, and track the email traffic to these subfolders as it arrives. Now, by expanding @Watching, I see a list of topics I'm tracking. If nothing happens or the task is assigned to someone else, I can delete the folder and its contents easily. If the task is assigned to me, I can just drag it up out of @Watching so that it becomes a regular reference folder.

So far, I'm liking this refinement. But of course, I will keep evaluating it as I go.