For last few years GTD shortcut become very popular in IT people community. GTD state for  Getting Things Done, a time-management method, described in a book of the same title by productivity consultant David Allen. First published in 2001,  but author still make an improvements. You will find a lot of stuff related to this idea on the internet. And  this post is my personal point of view. I am writing about my personal organization and productivity, something which finally I was able to achieve. I hope…

What is GTD?

The whole idea can be described in 5 words, which are related to the main points of GTD:

I will not write here about details, if you are interested in please read for example Wikipedia or even better David’s Allen book. From my personal point of view there were two points which were crucial: capture and reflection. Capture is just stuff collecting. We can collect plans, ideas, commitments, etc. It was critical point of my previous trials, where I always failed. Some stuff has been placed into OneNote, some of them were stored in Outlook, some yellow post-it, some in my mind… In the result many things just get lost, and others wasn’t done as they should. Chaos… You must remember to collect EVERYTHING!  It should be conscious decision if something should be moved to recycle bin. Some ideas which look stupid at the begging could give you amazing results.

The second clue was reflection. David Allen suggests checking all projects, stuffs, boxes, etc at last one per week. This is the second thing which has been missed by me and it’s crucial! We should have at least one time per week time for ourselves. You should think about passing week, as also about upcoming ones. Think what you should do next… Do you think that all plans are going as they should? Or you should make some changes. Do you have an idea for new business or application? Think about it for a while if it’s worth it to spend time for this. Or three days ago an idea could change your life. Don’t put your ideas to “maybe later” mode. It will not make you more successful, whatever it is for you…

Why should we organize our life?

Why I am writing about this? Well, for a long time I was thinking that I am missing something. I lived in chaos and time was slipping through my fingers.  Scott Hanselman says that we have limited number of keystrokes in our life and he’s right! If you never seen any of his presentation you can look on this one DevDay. We should thing about our plans. But not only business plans, but also others. Do you ever really think your latest idea? Do you think that it’s worth your time? Or maybe you just cheating yourself.

I always have a lot of ideas, but many of them never has been complete or even started. New application, new business, something at home… But very often I missed something or lost main point of the idea. It was so disappointing… Also, from time to time I lose my motivation, so also, I need something which helps me to keep good attitude. On the other hand, I waste my time for things which were useless.

I don’t encourage you to organize your entire life as a project. No, it would be crazy idea, at last from my point of view. But I think that the clue is to have some time for ourselves, to thing about our ideas, plans, personal life… And money and things are not the most important in our life! But we should be aware of what would we like to achieve. Would you like to be a programmer? Great! Think which step should be taken to achieve this. If you just think: “I wanna be a programmer” nothing will happen! Would you like to travel to Australia? Great! Just make a new “Australia” project and start doing this!!! Not just think about it…

And this is the place where GTD start playing key role, but the details of my approach you will find in my next post :).