Getting Things Done

I just fixed my iPod! After at least a year of being without it, I have it back! My wife told me about this trick, and it worked! I have such a feeling of accomplishment, and not just because of the iPod fix. For the past couple of years, I've been adhering to David Allen's Getting Things Done system. I have my ups and downs, but each time that I have an up, the concepts and habits become more strongly reinforced, and I'm building a system over the years that is based on the core concepts in GTD.

Over the past few months, I have been so swamped with work, that I have literally been working every evening and every weekend for several months. In the past month or so, the pressure has mounted so much that I had to juggle multiple development tasks on multiple machines and multiple platforms at the same time. So, while a build was happening for 5 minutes on machine A, I would work on a different task on machine B. Or while I'm testing on machine A, machine B is doing a build. I also used the interstitials to go through the few emails that have built up since the last time I checked. I get to Inbox Zero almost every time. Here's Merlin Mann's talk on Inbox Zero.


I've kept the Inbox Zero habit for two years now, again with inevitable periods of backsliding. I think that it is the most critical piece of the puzzle for achieving success with GTD. It is the sine qua non of GTD. Ok, so I've had this habit, and have been able to keep at Inbox Zero even during my most trying of times. So now that the pressure has been reduced somewhat, I have found myself with a tremendous amount of work energy, and I've rekindled the other parts of GTD. I processed my entire home desktop, which was piled with folders, papers, routers, and other stuff. I got to Inbox Zero at home. I got to Inbox Zero at Yahoo. I had never seen an empty inbox in the latest Yahoo interface. It felt more than a little strange. I actually lost an email or two during my Yahoo purge, but good ol' search found 'em for me.

After being at Inbox Zero everywhere, I was cleared to truly start Getting Things Done. We had roofers waking us up at 7:00 this morning, stomping and smashing to break up the ice on the roof. That new rubber roof is something that had been hanging over our heads for months. I got it contracted even in the middle of one of the busiest work periods of my life. We have our new HD Tivo received and ready to accept the cable cards from the Verizon installers on Monday. Dinette has the Tivette downstairs ready to accept the Ethernet cable and be up and running. I signed the kids up for ski lessons, the leaves have been blown away, I called my sister for her birthday, and I did party planning with the wife. I am Getting Things Done.

Now, I recently read a somewhat disturbing article about David Allen in Wired. He is apparently a member of a religious cult, and possibly originally developed GTD to recruit members for the cult. For the past two years, I have been haranguing family members about GTD, and urging them to try it, do it, read it, listen to it, here, have some literature. Despite the fact that Allen has a cult-like following(tm), I don't think that people who follow the methods described in his book are in danger of being sucked into the religious cult. So, in case anyone was worried, I'm not a member of a religious cult.

The next things I have to form habits around are the daily and weekly reviews. I'm often hitting the snooze button on my Outlook reminders to go home (set phone forwarding, review task lists). I guess a habit is formed in 21 days, so I will try to do the daily and weekly reviews for 21 days, and see what happens. I did an in-depth weekly review this week, and got lots of stuff crossed off. I also devised a custom view in Outlook that allows me to see the items I've crossed off that day, and that helps with the daily reviews.

Here are some pictures of my iPod before, during, and after.



I used the smallest screwdriver on my trusty Leatherman, and eventually was able to pry up the cover.



I had no problems with ribbon cables, nor was there any padding back there. I accidentally turned the damn thing on a few times by pushing down on it while it was upside down. I squeezed the hard disk with my fingers, and it made a final crunching sound, and sprang back to life!




I sacrificed a Guinness beer mat, using two thicknesses, for a total of maybe 3 mm. I squeezed the case shut, and voila! It was fixed! I quickly navigated to Audiobooks > Getting Things Done, and it had saved my place after all these months. It was within a minute of the line about the second item in your pile being a letter from the president, and the first being a piece of junk mail. Not coincidentally, I had just been expounding on the virtues of Inbox Zero, and the evils of cherry-picking last week at a family dinner. Don't cherry-pick, or you will soon be overwhelmed with junk mail, making it that much harder to cherry-pick!

OK, that's enough for now; I have to go get our house ready for Thanksgiving next week.