Recently a ROWE discussion hit the blogosphere. Especially those, like myself, that are interested in any productivity related topics. ROWE, which seems to originate from a concept that Best Buy has adopted, is essentially about working whenever and from where ever a employee likes. Combined with a strong view on meetings (”Ditch them!”), it seeks to revolutionaries traditional work environments.
So here we go: After using GTD heavily for now nearly 24 months, I just realised that I have misused the term project since the beginning. Not that I read the definition of it again, no, I just got frustrated with some of my projects hanging in there literally forever. So how come?
Essentially I found some of my project mirroring what in standard terms you would indeed call a project. A project in my GTD system equaled a delivery project to a client, another one an larger internal project dealing with a new service delivery model/methodology that I’ am involved in, a third one a large deal which I’ am managing.
So what’s wrong you’d ask. Everything. All of the three examples I’ve given, and I’ am sure you have similar projects yourself, take a very, very long time to close. Anywhere between 3 and 12 months. And whilst other, smaller projects disappear rather quickly from my GTD lists, these guys keep staying.
Not only do they deliver a lot frustation to me by doing so, they also tend to just pile up actions that loose order and more importantly relevance over time. Just as described in a post at tools for thought in an article about ‘Getting unstuck: How to jump start a listless action list‘ you will only find legacy issues in these projects. No only have they lost relevance, they also don’t come in any logical order any more.
Yep. Just go and delete them. Don’t bother on all those actions in there. They’d be lost and you could not care less. Most of them were legacy, meaningless and irrelevant to the projects success. Those immediate actions related to a particular aspect of that project will come back as soon as you setup a new project for exactly that aspect of the project.
So what is tiny and what is little? Depends on the context. A project such as a client delivery project, an entire marketing campaign, a product development effort are fare too hugh. So tiny means aspects of these projects. Things you are currently doing, not those that might need to be done in 3 months from now.
Even single phases of a typical project life-cycle might be to big for a GTD project. Planning, Analysing, Designing, Implementing, Testing, Rolling-Out could be come impressively large animals each. Hence focus on smaller junks and eat the elephant in pieces:
Many of these small projects can run in parallel. Some might be on hold for some time, some might get dropped as they loose relevance as the ‘large project’ progresses and e.g. changes scope slightly. But still, you will get your motivation from setting more and more of these small projects to completed.
But do not create all the small GTD projects you think are required throughout the course of the large project. Just those in your line of sight. No artificial ones, e.g. ‘We need to think of this!’
I’ve just delete five or six of my real-business-life/large projects from my GTD project list and created small ones focussing on the next important events or activities of these projects. Each of them does not contain more than 10-15 actions, all well sorted and ordered and I’ am looking forward to check each of those small projects off in like one, two or latest three weeks time. What a relief!
Certainly I’ am trying to be organised and effective. And certainly one good starting point for this is to be as lazy as possible. And this was exactly what made me think about how to most effectively create my GTD David Allen like A-Z folders in Entourage for my project reference material/archive.
Entourage is pretty unfriendly when you want to create a high number of folders: It’s all mouse click here - mouse click there. Also the newly created subfolder gets selected, so you need to click back on the top-level folder, get the context menu, select “Create Subfolder” and so on.
I use multiple top-level folders, for example:
I also use numbers in front of the names to keep my desired order, e.g. 010 or 020. Anyway, since I needed A-Z folders in these top-level folders, I thought about writing a simple AppleScript to do the job for me. And here it is:
set folder_list to {”A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “E”, “F”, “G”, “H”, “I”, “J”, “K”, “L”, “M”, “N”, “O”, “P”, “Q”, “R”, “S”, “T”, “U”, “VW”, “XYZ”}
set folder_name to “Tester”
tell application “Microsoft Entourage”
set theSelection to selection
if class of theSelection is folder then
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the folder_list
set folder_name to item i of the folder_list
make new folder with properties {name:folder_name, parent:theSelection}
end repeat
else
display dialog “You need to select a folder in which you want to create the A-Z subfolders before running this script”
end if
end tell
Download Entourage Mass Reference Material A-Z Folder Creation.scpt
This is how you use it:
To add this script to the Entourage Script menu by copying to /Users/[username]/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items. To access it with a hotkey add for example “\cM” at the end of the filename to access it via Control+M
If you wish to separate the VW and XYZ folders edit the folder_list.
When I recently wrote about my Morning Routine that gives me a great, easy and structured start into the day, I’ve mentioned the need to also have an Evening Routine. The Evening Routine makes sure that you can start the next day with 20 minutes of planning using the Morning Routine. As you would imagine, if you leave a mess at the end of the day, it’ll take you a lot of time cleaning it up the next day. As a consequence you would start out looking backward (to the last day) and the first 60 minutes of your day may also ready yield frustration.
Also the Evening Routine is part of my concept “leave work at work” - it makes sure you have closed the day out and prepare the key elements for the next day. Hence nothing will bug you in the evening when you spend time with your family - no “I need to think of this for tomorrow” or “Gosh, I forgot to send the doc to Anja - need to do this first thing in the morning” or even “Damn, what meetings do I have tomorrow”.
Taking a look at the Evening Routine you will find similarities to the Morning Routine. However, I’ve designed it slightly different since I tend to have less time in the evening. Usually I run a bit late with some tasks, get a phone call in the last minutes or sit in a conference call that takes longer as planned. As a consequence, and primarily to get out of the office and be on time for dinner, I cut down effort in my Evening Routine.
And this is how it looks like:
One of the more challenging things about GTD is to get your daily work done. At least a lot of people I’ve seen fell into the organise and plan trap which gets you focussed on having everything planned, in your lists and trusted systems. But making sure you get your minimum done and your system up-to-date on a daily basis is where the rubber hits the road.
I’ve started using to repeating ‘projects’ in OmniFocus to start and end my day with some level of diligence. My ‘Morning Routine’ is repeating itself daily and is due at 8am, when I’ve typically settled myself in the office, had my go at my news sites, RSS feeds and a bit of email pre-screening.
Let’s look at the individual tasks in my Morning Routine:
Surely your morning routine might be different or more comprehsive, but I like to keep it down to the bare minimum and completed in the first 20mins of my working day. So no matter what you need to do, here is how to create the repeating “Morning Routine” project.
Setup a new project by using the “+” button at the bottom of OmniFocus left-panel. Best to keep it on the root-level of the Library as you will constantly refer back to it (ideally daily). You may also use the menu item under “File > Add New Project” or the equivalent keyboard short-cut.
Next give it the “Morning Routine” name and add, in the right sequence, all those actions to it, that you want to complete in the first 20-30mins of your day. I would recommend to not go overboard here, since it is very likely that once your day gets going you will be interrupted by calls, meetings, emails or annoying office fellows and consequently fail to complete your Morning Routine.
Once you have all your actions defined, you need to set the reoccurrence of the project and it’s due time using the Inspector in OmniFocus. If you do not have the Inspector open all the time like myself, use the menu “Inspectors > Show Inspectors” or the equivalent keyboard short-cut.
Next select the project we’ve just created. Make sure you have the “project view” in the Inspector and set the reoccurrence to “Repeat every 1 days”. The due date should be the time you are ready for your morning review - in my case it is 8.30am. In the case you run late with your morning routine make sure you set the “Repeat from” to “Assigned date” so that OmniFocus sticks with 8.30am every morning. Otherwise it might simply set the next due date to the time you’ve managed to complete your morning routine.
That’s it. Pretty simple, but keeps you on track every day. Would be great to see which actions you have in your morning routine. This typically delivers a lot of inspiration for other people.
