The Art of Getting Things Done
In his classic study on the nature of war Carl Von Clausewitz observes that: “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction…”(1) If you’ve ever fallen off the Getting Things Done bandwagon, or struggled to keep going with a creative side project, the words of this wily old Prussian will be eerily relevant.
Everything in David Allen’s GTD method(2) is simple, after all. You write down your commitments and clear your brain, process these into next actions, get stuff done, and regularly review the whole system. And yet, for many of us: “difficulties accumulate and end by creating a kind of friction”. I’ve been teaching productivity workshops and coaching would-be GTD’ers for years now and it’s unnerving how often someone says: “I’m still kind of doing GTD, but I haven’t finished a review for a while” or: “yeah, I was all in on GTD, but fell off the wagon and now I’m just trying to get started again.”
This matters because, without some kind of trusted system to keep track of all the stuff coming at us, it’s way too easy for our work, creative, and social lives to start drifting. Then we’re reduced to just dealing with whichever crisis is currently erupting. In the words of David Allen, we end up “reacting to the loudest or latest.”
After falling off the wagon a couple of times myself, I’ve come to appreciate that GTD is more a practice that you need to exercise – like learning a musical instrument – than a technique you learn intellectually. David Allen has often compared GTD to his own practice of martial arts. And, with any practice, the key to success is good habits.
For your trusted system to work, every task or commitment of significance has to be captured. Then you have to be absolutely consistent about processing these into actionable next actions. And you have to review your system regularly to identify what’s been overlooked or become redundant. If these practices aren’t maintained with disciplined consistency, Clausewitzian friction accumulates as an ever-heavier layer of cruft: those captured tasks accumulate in your GTD inbox, un-processed, un-organized, un-reviewed and unloved – only forgotten. (Usually this happens alongside overflowing email and paper inboxes – which also accumulate and end by producing a kind of overwhelming guilt…)
The question then is: how do you develop good habits? I have three suggestions.
Time
Doing something at the same time every day is a powerful way to create strong habits. This makes keeping to a consistent daily routine the essential foundation for both your GTD practice and actually getting all that stuff done. Start building yours by roughing out a daily schedule from the time you wake up to when you go to bed. Fill in time blocks first for your fixed or required daily activities and obligations (work, meetings, family, and professional obligations…).
Then make a list of all the discretionary activities you want to maintain on a daily basis: your GTD Daily Review, exercise, meals, new creative or personal goals, movies and television, (naps!) etc. Note how much time each should take and how difficult they are on a scale from “high focus and high energy” to “I can do this in my sleep”.
The real work is fitting these around the fixed time blocks in your schedule. The main consideration is probably your energy level through the day; are you a morning or an evening person? If a morning person, important high energy tasks should go early in the day (and vice versa). It may take some shifting and shoving to fit everything in but, once you have a workable timetable, write it out as a checklist and keep it somewhere easy to reference (my Daily Routine is a project in my task manager app).
Change is hardest in the early stages, so keep your checklist handy as you start practicing your routine. Try to stick it as closely as possible but be mindful of what’s working and what’s not. After a few days you may find a time block is too specific: you scheduled a specific task that doesn’t need doing every day. Other jobs pop up, though, so this would be better as a general maintenance time block. Other activities might not be working when you scheduled them. If you just keep missing them, your timetable might need to be adjusted.
In my case I started implementing a daily routine with the goal of sleeping better and spending more time writing. As I’m a morning person and writing is a high energy, focussed activity I made a writing session my first time block in the morning and scheduled it for a pretty early start. That way I could get in a good session before leaving for work or dealing with any other distractions. To support an early start, I also concluded my daily routine with a fairly early bedtime. This has worked very well for me.
The morning exercise time in my first draft didn’t work out nearly so well. Despite good intentions, I was never motivated enough to go out running before work for more than a day or two in a row. My writing session, which was more important to me, was using up all my pre-go to job energy. So, I changed my exercise time to the lunch hour instead, and this immediately clicked. I’m ready for a change of pace by then, and I love how an outside walk or run breaks up the workday. After years of this now, it’s harder for me to not exercise at lunch than just go outside and do it – a sure sign the habit has set.
After supper I’m usually not up to much mentally, so that’s my time for hobbies and entertainment (reading, Twitter, YouTube, movies, etc). Social media, especially, is engineered to be the ultimate distraction, algorithmically feeding you bite-size morsels of entertainment that don’t seem like much in themselves but hit you with just enough dopamine to get you clicking on the next one. I quit Facebook a while ago, but Twitter and YouTube remain my vices, so I allow time for them in the evening, when my energy level is low anyway (and ban them completely before lunch).
Given how important it is to get the timing right for your tasks, is there a best time for the GTD Daily Review? There are a couple of popular options. Early morning has the advantage of immediacy; you make your plan for the day and get right at it. Late in the evening, just before you start shutting down to go to bed, is also an interesting possibility. In this case you’re planning the next day ahead of time, which does help me sleep easier. And, the next morning, there’s no futzing about – you just dive in and get cranking.
That’s why I’m starting to favour the evening option. It isn’t a high energy time for most of us but, once you’re completing Daily Reviews on a regular basis, they become pretty quick and easy. Something like the following should do it: clear your inbox; review any @waiting tasks; identify and tag/flag tasks for tomorrow; review your calendar for tomorrow; and complete a quick mind-sweep. A Review in the evening also means you’re saving your high energy time for actual work.
It’s harder to develop reliable habits for weekly tasks that don’t get the benefit of daily repetition. Which probably explains why the Weekly Review is the most common point of failure for GTD’ers. This is a Big Deal because the Weekly Review just may be the most important single element of the whole GTD system. It’s when you review your goals; set a weekly plan; and review the complete project list for stalled, outdated, and forgotten projects and other cruft. It is your main weapon against system entropy.
Sad to say, this is something else I’ve struggled with. Rather than stick with the regular daily routine (adding weekend events), or take a holiday from routines altogether, I’ve come to think it’s better to have specific routines for each weekend day. This way you can assign dedicated day/times for activities that only occur once a week (your GTD weekly review, for sure, but also shopping, laundry, etc). I try to concentrate most of these in one day so the other can be left open for spontaneous family, social, entertainment, travel and other fun activities. Embrace the weekend!
As to which specific day/time is best for the Weekly Review, there’s a good argument for starting your weekend on Friday. A lot of GTD’ers find it works well to schedule a Weekly Review as their last task before leaving work on Friday afternoon. The previous week’s accomplishments and next week’s requirements are fresh in your mind, so getting into it is quick and easy. Since the Weekly Review isn’t a particularly high energy task it’s also doable at the end of the day. And this does leave more of the weekend free.
Another popular time for the Weekly Review is Sunday evening, when the weekend is done and you’re starting to feel the urgency of preparing for next week. This can also work well – if you have the discipline to start a review when your nice, warm bed is starting to call. As always, the important thing is to find a day/time you can stick with. Even then, the Weekly Review will remain the hardest element of your GTD practice to keep current. If a daily routine isn’t working, you can tell within a few days and adjust accordingly. It takes several weeks to reach the same point with a weekly task. So, it pays to be particularly mindful of how well your weekends are working.
You know your routines are working when the habits they build are consistently letting you work on the goals you’ve set for yourself. Of course, you also need to know when to interrupt the routine for spur-of-the-moment opportunities. I have a friend who’ll call when he’s in the neighbourhood to suggest lunch. No matter how short the notice I always say yes, knowing my routine provides a framework for quickly getting back on track after this enjoyable interruption, along with a checklist for everything that’s still outstanding. (Before I had a good routine, anything unexpected would throw the whole day off.)
David Sparks (of MacSparky fame)(3) has a system he calls “Block Calendaring” which, is both highly structured and very flexible. So, it supports this dual character of daily routines extremely well. As the name implies, it consists of listing (in addition to your normal appointments and events) all your routine tasks in a calendar as time blocks. David speeds up task entry into his digital calendar with an automation that squirts in his generic Daily Routine template. And, of course, it helps to keep Daily Routine tasks in their own calendar so they can be toggled on and off.
Block calendaring is intriguing for a couple of reasons: it consolidates both routine activities and calendar appointments in a single place; and it displays each day’s schedule of routine tasks as its own set of entries (unlike the generic checklist in my task manager, which I currently use for reference). So, instead of just listing “Writing” as the 06:00 to 07:00 time block, you can specify “Writing Mac Power Users Script” for this Wednesday at 06:00 to 07:00 and “Writing Photos Course” for Thursday at the same time. On days when you have an appointment or special event you can adjust the templated time blocks to show the modified schedule. So, your calendar provides a complete and customized checklist for each day as you work through them. Hmm…
There are some who might still argue that keeping to a set daily routine is a regimented, un-fun way to live and death to creativity. I think this gets it totally backward. There’s a certain amount of basic life-maintenance we all have to get through and, the more you can turn this into a routine, the less time, energy, and attention it takes away from the fun, creative things you want to spend time on. And, even for fun, creative work, the best way to accomplish anything worthwhile is to make a habit of showing up consistently every day (that is, to have a routine). This is true regardless of your field of endeavour. Successful artists (by which I mean those who actually create stuff, not your friends who claim to be “creative” souls), almost always have very powerful and disciplined habits. Twyla Tharp’s classic memoir, The Creative Habit(4)*, does a great job of illustrating her own system for supporting creative work.
Place
Place is also a surprisingly strong tool for forming habits, because our mind readily forms associations between activities and the places where they happen. I went through a busy period at my day job when I’d frequently take work home with the pious intention of finishing it in the evening. And, the next morning – with nothing done – I’d take that same work right back to the office. My home computer was just not a place I associated with work; it was my web surfing, email, and video game machine. In consequence I just never got started on that pile of work-work I’d carefully placed beside it.
This finally became annoying enough that I grabbed my laptop after supper one day and headed to a local café. Sitting there, at a quiet table, with a hot drink at hand, it was almost ridiculously easy to get to work. An hour or so later I’d met my goal. Now I regularly head to this coffee shop for extra-curricular tasks and, having built its association with these, they’re amazingly easy to complete. (Of course, I’m now reluctant to visit this particular venue for coffee as I don’t want to weaken its association with work!)
You can use this principle to help cement your habits by identifying specific locations, as well as times, for your various tasks. As the coffee shop experience shows, these don’t have to be just at home.
Interestingly, the wellness people recognize this principle too. Their advice for getting better sleep often includes the guidance that you shouldn’t hang out in your bed to read, take short naps, watch YouTube videos, etc, because you then associate it with activities other than sleep.
Repetition
Finally, nothing sets a habit like repetition. This takes a focussed effort at first, so I’ll repeat the advice to write out your routine and post it in an accessible spot. Then try to stick to it as closely as possible as you start implementing your daily routine, only becoming more flexible about stretching or shortening time blocks as needed, or skipping and adding activities due to circumstances, as you find your daily routine becoming – well – routine.
It takes discipline to stick with a habit at first, and the Asian Efficiency website(5) is a big advocate of using rituals to help with this. I’m not always sure what they mean by this, but I think the essence is kicking off a regular activity with a series of small and very specific actions, which become automatic (or ritualistic). In their podcast Brooks Duncan gave the example of always starting a writing session by putting on a certain album for background music – always the first thing he does, and always the same album. Despite some scepticism about how woo-woo this sounds, I have found it actually is effective. Going through a little ritual of very specific, small steps at the beginning of a task does, indeed, build a kind of muscle memory that just naturally flows into the actual work.
Also, we shouldn’t forget about fun; it’s easier to stick with a task if it’s enjoyable. So, as a coffee lover, I combine pleasure with ritual by starting my morning writing session with a very specific sequence of actions: putting the kettle on, opening the blinds, sitting at the computer, and opening the apps and windows I need for the day. By then the kettle’s boiling and I get up to make that first, hot cup of coffee. When I sit back down and take a sip of the delicious brew, my muscle memory has kicked in and the writing starts automatically.
If, despite all your efforts, you’re still finding it impossible to consistently start a daily task, you may be tackling it at the wrong time of day. Especially at the start, it’s important to be mindful of which elements of the routine work and which don’t. At some point you may need to re-jig the timetable and start over.
End
The power of habit resides in a fundamental truth: we only have control over our actions, not their outcomes. If your goal is to get fit, you cannot, with any amount of determination, guarantee a beach-ready body. Your progress will be buffeted by all manner of chance: work might get busy, the family might object to your healthy meal choices, the weather might discourage running outside, you may just not have a skinny metabolism. The only thing you do control is whether or not you lace up your running shoes every day and go outside to run for fifteen minutes. Action is what counts, and habits reinforce action.
This is why so many New Year’s Resolutions fail. We make them in terms of goals (the outcomes of action) rather than in terms of what we can actually so. This year, if physical fitness is your goal, try making a resolution instead just to go for a short bike ride (or walk or run) five days a week.
If habits support action, then a strong daily routine, with a time and place for each daily activity, is the foundation for your habits. This focus on the routines of day-to-day life might seem dry and non-aspirational to some. There is a personality type that likes to dream big, to live in terms of grand ambitions and goals. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But, to realize their vision, even dreamers need to start work sometime. And that’s when they’ll be much more effective focussing on habits and actions.
In any case, I think there’s something intrinsically healthy about focussing on actions – the thing we can control – rather than on outcomes, which will always be susceptible to chance and circumstance. There’s wisdom in the saying: “focus on the journey, not the destination”. Even considering our life’s journey as a whole, this seems to me a good and productive way to live.
NOTES:
(1) P119, On War, by Carl Von Clausewitz, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, 1976
(2) Getting Things Done (updated edition), by David Allen, Penguin Books, 2015
(3) macsparky.com
(4) The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, Simon & Schuster, 2006
(5) asianefficiency.com
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