Recovering from GTD Slipping

[eth1]

Like many, I started GTD as part of a New Years resolution. I found
the book, I started reading it, felt transformed, bought the equipment,
got myself set up and loaded kGTD onto my Mac and started "getting it
all down". It felt great, and a month of regular reviews and working
from context lists, carrying context folders, etc. made a world of
difference in my life. 4 months later, however, and I feel that things
have slipped to the point that recovering a strong GTD practice is
almost beyond reach. My Inbox in kGTD often has 2-300 unorganized
tasks, I'm working mainly from my head, and I can't remember the last
time I did a monthly review. Further, I'm a little reticent to start up
again because part of me feels that it's just destined to unravel yet
again in a month or two. Certain things have stuck around and are still
useful: as a freelancer with multiple clients, folders with needed
materials for each context are indispensable, and my desks Inbox,
though often overflowing, keeps base level organization feasible.

I'm curious what others have done to get back on the GTD wagon once
things have slipped a bit out of control. I know I'm just going to
have to set aside a day and deal with this, but does anyone have any
advice on how to go about this practically/psychologically?

Thanks.

[JoshD]

eth1 wrote:

> 4 months later, however, and I feel that things
> have slipped to the point that recovering a strong GTD practice is
> almost beyond reach. My Inbox in kGTD often has 2-300 unorganized
> tasks, I'm working mainly from my head, and I can't remember the last
> time I did a monthly review. Further, I'm a little reticent to start up
> again because part of me feels that it's just destined to unravel yet
> again in a month or two. Certain things have stuck around and are still
> useful: as a freelancer with multiple clients, folders with needed
> materials for each context are indispensable, and my desks Inbox,
> though often overflowing, keeps base level organization feasible.
>
> I'm curious what others have done to get back on the GTD wagon once
> things have slipped a bit out of control. I know I'm just going to
> have to set aside a day and deal with this, but does anyone have any
> advice on how to go about this practically/psychologically?

Congratulations: you've reached the first major milestone in your GTD
life. :)

Seriously, the first thing to do is to realize that this is normal; you
got caught up with life, and your systems got out of control. It
happens, and the real trick is to learn how to stop circling around and
blaming yourself, and gather your head back together.

The next thing to do is to forgive yourself, so you can move on.
Whipping yourself is _not_ helping, it's just loading you up with more
guilt and frustration, and that always makes it harder to get moving.
So, relax: think of this as an exercise.

In fact, it _is_ an exercise. I get out of control every week; that's
usually the day before I do my review. In fact, the trick to making
certain I get a review is to diminish my tolerance for mental crud, and
the only way to do that is to keep getting the feeling of being out of
control, a little earlier that the time before.

And then you stop, take stock, scrape your head back into its
container, and tweak your inputs and outputs. Just a tiny bit. Next
time, it'll take less time to feel out of control, and it'll be less of
a mess. And again, and again.

Finally, hopefully you end up on a once-a-week schedule. It takes time.
I've been doing this for over a year, and it's still not an entirely
tame horse that I'm riding.

Off your own back? Okay, let's begin.

Scraping your head back together comes first. You're right, you
probably need a day. But don't psych yourself out, and don't freak. You
_can_ get your sh*t together in much less than a day, with a couple of
tricks.

You'll probably want to print your kGTD inbox, and throw it into your
physical inbox. Gather all your inbox stuff, your emails, your poor,
your hungry, your huddled printouts, and dump it in there.

Wow. That's quite a pile.

In fact, it may be too much. What you will likely want to do is triage
your physical inbox; just run though it, from top to bottom, and
anything that's not going to bite your head off in the next week(s),
put it aside, next to your desk. What I like to do is, I get a manilla
envelope or folder, and use that to mark the spot, and I label it "to
purge." That way, it's not a dump, it's project support material for
the project "get back on the horse."

Make that a project, with a daily, recurring next-action: process stuff
in the purge pile.

Now put the inbox on hold, you'll get back to it.

(This may be heresy, but I've found that it's best, in a reboot, to see
to what you've got before putting new input in. It keeps you from
feeling like you're hiding the new inputs in a bunch of fossilized old
stuff.)

So: rototill your existing system.

You'll want to then run through your projects in kGTD, and there's a
trick for anything that hasn't been moving: in the "notes" for the
project heading, you write why that project is important in your life
(purpose), and maybe a description, in past tense, of the success
criteria (outcome). (If you can't answer those questions, why are they
in your projects list? Maybe you really just need to delete it. Or
maybe it's really something for your "back burner" (Someday-Maybe), or
it's something you're done with, but you never took the time to mark it
off.)

Remember to create a project for processing your purge pile.

Thinking through your projects often takes a lot of energy; go have
some coffee or water and stretch, let yourself feel a bit of relaxation
and control, to remind yourself why you do this. It's worth it. It
really is.

Next up, kill your fossilized next actions: with each one, ask
yourself, is this _still_ the thing I want to do next? Sometimes, "call
Bill" made sense last month, but now what you really want to do is to
sketch some ideas or write something, and you're resisting calling Bill
because it's not what you really want to do. Everything in your next
actions list needs to be something that you really want to get done as
soon as possible.

Once you've reviewed all that, it's time to look at your kGTD inbox,
with a jaundiced eye. Given what you've just surveyed about what you
have in your life right now, do these things _really_ need to be done
_now_? Or can you delete them, or defer them for the future?

You probably don't need me to run you through processing your inbox. :)
Just remember, you will probably end up dumping things out of your head
as you go. Just get to those as you go, too, start at the top and work
down, etc.

Take it one step at a time, and shrug at all the voices that will
shriek at you when you see the project that needed to be done two
months ago; you're getting to it now, and they're not helping, so what
else can you do? Just move on.

You may also want, once your systems are together, to try and reduce
some of the inputs in your life. How many RSS feeds and mailing lists
can you _read_? Remember that it's all about maintaining a flow from
input, to system, to complete. Clogs in the flow are symptoms of
trouble somewhere. And that may be too much input (including the "I
said yes to foo" input) for you to handle. Or, you may need to build a
habit of processing your inbox more often.

Find the one thing that's slowing you down the most, and fix that.
Don't worry about other clogs you aren't noticing, you'll find one or
two of those, next time.

Finally, you're going to need to pay a lot more attention to this stuff
again in the next week or so. Try and work off your lists during the
day, and if you aren't, ask yourself why. Is it because you didn't
really get all the stuff out of your head and into your system? Stop
and put it in there.

Good luck, and enjoy having your head back together. Try to see if you
can recognize the point at which you're slipping out of control
earlier, this time, and see if you can get back into control in less
time. That's the real measure of success.

Finally, remember that that's what weekly reviews are: you are likely
beginning to get out of control, just a tiny bit, at the end of a week,
and you need to take a little time to fix it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to go take some of my own medicine.
:)

Cheers,
Josh

[Bartolome Mayol Genovart]

Dear Josh and eth1,

Sorry for stepping into this conversation, but just to let you know that I am printing your email and fixing it to my wall. Why?

Next week when I blow up, I will read it again and will start from the begining.
Best Regards
Tolo

2006/5/2, JoshD <jdim...@gmail.com>:

[beelers]

I'm saving this post, printing it out and sticking it on my filing
cabinet. Thanks Josh!

--
Never be afraid to tell the world who you are. -- Anonymous

[Rene Tony Donnes]

One thing I would recommend is taking your copy of "Getting Things
Done" with you everywhere you go. That way you'll always have the
opportunity to read a litlte bit here and there, and it will act as
that constant reminder.

t

[beelers]

Aha! A brother in arms. Nice to know great minds really DO think alike ;)

[JoshD]

Heh. Thanks. :)

This is real "drunken preacher" talk, here. It's really easy, reading
blogs and things, to get the idea that GTD is a switch you throw, and
nobody else is having this trouble.

Obviously, something must be wrong, because all those flickr photos
show clean inboxes, perfect desks, and perfect Lake Woebegone lives,
where all your next actions are things you look joyfully forward to,
and all your reviews are above average.

But how many people here have done a blog post or a flickr photo or
whatever, just because in order to _get_ there, you would have to clear
up a huge pile of stuff, and you needed the novel kind of mental spur
to action? Or was that just me?

(I really hope I'm not alone in that... :))

As much as we may secretly fantasize about it, we are _not_ inhumanly
perfect organizational ninjas, and we need to stop beating ourselves up
about it.

(Well, okay, I suspect Merlin is actually a Voltron-style mecha that
self-assembles out of binder clips, index cards, and a Brother label
printer, sent here to spam us with organizational memes until we commit
seppuku out of grief and guilt, but that's just me. An active fantasy
life _is_ important, after all.)

And when you've discounted the ninjas, and the robots, what's left?
Monkeys.

No, really.

Because in the end, we're just a bunch of flawed humans, trying as best
we can to figure out how to use tools, in order to compensate for the
weaknesses of our poor confused monkey brains. But that's all we got,
so we should make the best of it; it's what we've been doing for the
last six thousand years, after all. Eventually we're bound to get
better at it.

Until the cylons rebel.

Cheers,
Josh

[Bartolome Mayol Genovart]

Umm..... Do the cyclons have an inbox????????

Clip Mecha??

2006/5/3, JoshD <jdim...@gmail.com>:

[Bartolome Mayol Genovart]

Sorry the last email just got through, talking about Clip Mecha can be dangerous....

Seriously, if we all are subscribed to a group like 43 folders, it means that we were unsatisfied with what we did in our  work, personal life, whatever.

We like or dislike our jobs, but the worst thing was the sense of being overwhelmed by whole life all day.

Maybe I am too conservative, but my plan for  using GTD, at least nominally, is based on a 6 month schedule. I know myself, going faster will be losing time and effort.

Also, I am perfectly sure that in the next 6 months things will blow up again, once, twice, thrice....., but as said on the film Essence of a Woman: "Life it's like Tango.."


See you, going to workplace to face the RL.

Tolo

2006/5/3, Bartolome Mayol Genovart <bartolome.ma...@gmail.com>:

--
Bartolomé Mayol
------------------------
"War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost." ~ Karl Kraus

--
Bartolomé Mayol
------------------------
"War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost." ~ Karl Kraus

[Diego Zamboni]

JoshD: what a great post. Thank you!

I've found myself slipping as well, after many months of relatively
good discipline and weekly reviews. The trigger? A larger-than-life
project at work, with many people and tight deadlines, and for which I
just need to work and work and work. So now, when I would need GTD more
than ever to keep things in check, I've abandoned it in favor of always
working in the current urgent thing. Your post really helps putting
things in perspective.

Thanks again!
--Diego

[rcr]

Diego,

I've had the same experience re: slipping a little b/c of huge projects
with huge deadlines. BUT I took a morning out in the middle of this and
did a bunch of inbox stuff and that inner voice calmed down enough to
let me get back to work, peacefully.

And I also do not dread the end of this project. In the past, pre-GTD
days, a big project would mean miles of chaos stacked up and waiting
for end of this disaster--so celebrating was a bit like a last
meal--what came after was not to be cherished. But now, I feel like I
can afford to take a little break after the deadline, and then come in
a fresh to a relatively nicely organized life with a clear path for the
next steps.

Last thing: has anyone else experienced a feeling of having more time.
It has happened to me a lot since starting GTD. Without all the head
clutter I can stop and plan something fun with the kids and feel
completely great about it--no nagging inner demons saying I should tend
to all the things I just know are waiting for me.

Enjoyed this thread!

Rob

[orangeandbrown]

Thanks for the thread. I've been using GTD for more than a year, but
recently worked under some very heavy deadlines where everything just
got done now...and the process slipped a little. So, these tips on
getting back in the game are appreciated.