James Williams dot Me

At this point, everyone knows about Getting Things Done. The users of this system are almost cult-like in their adoration of it and new blogs posts about GTD tweaks and hacks show up in my feed reader weekly.

With all of this positive attention (and the chance to try new tools, from the low-tech to the high-tech), how could I resist getting things done the David Allen way? But attempt after attempt at organizing my life this way has failed. I’ve carried around a Moleskine. I’ve set up folders and tags and rules and labels and colors in Mail.app and Outlook and Google Calendar and Gmail, and iCal and Media Wiki Remember the Milk and who knows what else. I’ve prioritized and I’ve categorized and I’ve contextualized, but my use of the system never lasts for more than a week at a time.

But here’s the thing: I still get things done. I meet my deadlines at work. All my bills get paid. There are groceries in the house. Christmas presents get bought by the 25th.

My work projects tend to be pretty big and monolithic. “Implement feature X”. And I have to break feature X into manageable four or five hours chunks when crafting an estimate so by the time I actually start working on feature X, I’ve got a pretty good idea in my head of how to logically proceed from step one to step two to step three and finish it. I cross these steps off of a list, but it’s not on my master list in the @featureX context; it’s on the list I keep next to my computer on my desk at work. That’s the context for it.

My other main task at work is fixing bugs. And those are already listed out in our bug database. I don’t even have to cross those off of a list; I just mark them fixed in the database. Again, they don’t need to be on a big master list; the bug database itself is the context.

Things that aren’t implementing features or fixing bugs (like writing my annual self-review or something like that) come up pretty rarely for me. Rare enough that there’s no point in having a system to deal with these tasks (the system would sit idle for so long that I’d forget to use it when the time comes); I can just add an appointment in Outlook and it will pop up a box telling me to get it done. And there’s the context for that: I’m sitting at my desk with Outlook open.

So I don’t have to come in to work every day and review my tasks. I know if I’m working on implementing a new feature or fixing bugs today because I can remember if I was assigned a new feature or finished work on one yesterday. I can just sit down and get to it.

At home, it’s pretty similar. For the most part, I don’t have things to do at home. I lead a pretty laid back lifestyle. When I get paid, I pay bills. When the cabinets get empty, we go grocery shopping. When the house gets messier than I can stand, I stop watching TV for half an hour and clean up a bit. I don’t need a “@house” context because when I get annoyed by the mess, I’m already in my house. That’s the context for me.

So, I guess I’m pretty lucky. In a world where consultants can make a pretty good living teaching people how to get things done, my life is simple enough that I can get things done just by looking around and saying “Oh. Let me do that and then I’ll watch more TV.”

That simplicity makes me pretty happy, all in all.

(For the curious, this blog post was inspired by finding yet another “How To Use Tool Y to GTD” post I came across; in this case, it was a blog post about using GTD with Evernote.)