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Getting Nothing Done.

A year or two ago I learned of Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s a great book that lays out a step by step path to managing large amounts of tasks and using your time more productively. Podcast personality Merlin Mann talks at length about it at 43folders.com. It’s a great methodology and tons of geeks have found it helpful in getting their lives under control. I hope to someday master the techniques discribed in the book, but so far my attempts have been unsucessful.

The primary focus of Getting Things Done (or GTD, as it’s adherants call it) are next actions. A next action is any isolated action that takes less than 2 minutes and will advance a project along. A project is defined as anything that takes multiple actions or steps to complete. For example, gathering up all your dirty clothes is probably the first action you take when doing laundry. In this example the project would be doing laundry and the next action would be to gather all the dirty clothes. So you gather ideas for projects, break down the projects in to bite-sized actions, and make a list of all the very next actions for all the projects. Notice you aren’t making a list of every action, just the next actions. This allows you to juggle projects, accomlishing bits here and there. Eventually you run out of actions on a project and that project is finished. The rest of the book tells you how to track all these projects and actions. It also tells you how to manage the time you have to do them in.

I get all of this. I understand the methods and see how  they can work. The biggest hurdle for me is overcoming distractions and mustering the energy to perform the next actions. I get easily distracted and I’m the king of procrastination. As far as the energy thing goes, I work 40 hours a week and most afternoons I get hit with a sleepiness that drives me to nap. These bad habits are really hard to kick. I’m going to keep stabbing at GTD, but it feels like an uphill battle.