Using Agendas and GTD

Also known as: Getting Things Done By Pushing Upwards

There have been a number of questions lately on both the GTD Forums and the Yahoo e-mail group about how to use the Agendas (or @Agendas  for the Outlook users out there) category.  I have been using the Agendas category for about a year now, and I think I’ve got this down to a way that works for me.  Your mileage may vary.

This is something that is suggested in David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” , but it seems to stymie many people.  The idea is that you keep a list of the people you communicate with regularly, and thereby keep a list of what you need to talk to them about – those pending things that other people have agreed to, that need to follow-up on and cover in future conversations with different people, that you need approval on, etc.

I’ve found that the Palm format, and Palm Desktop, is very flexible to dealing with Agendas.  All I’ve done is made a separate category under my tasks list for Agendas, in which I list each person I deal with regularly – either someone I task things down to, or someone I’m waiting for approval from before moving on.  I use the note section of the individual person’s “task” to act as the agenda, and record what it is I need to speak to them about or what I’m waiting for from them.  When I have them on the phone or in my office, I reach for the laptop or grab my Palm, and ensure that we are covering everything.  

It is remarkably effective.  I have far fewer of those moments where I hang up the phone and immediately think of three other things I meant to talkd to them about.  Being outside of our head office and therefore away from our executive core, I can make a record of what needs to be discussed or what I am waiting for their approval on.

This is really helping me “push things upwards”, ensuring that no timelines get missed, that directions discussed don’t get pushed aside – to ensure that our business is going forward in a tangible, dramatic way.  It is such a small, but dramatic, tool, and one that anyone can benefit from using.  This is how I’ve implemented it – I would appreciate anyone’s comments on how they have done the same.

As an aside, during some of the discussions I’ve learned that there is some functionality in the Palm Desktop software that isn’t in Outlook – namely, the ability to have different categories for each “application” – Calendar, Tasks, Memos, etc.  I have always used Palm Desktop, so I could not understand the constant need for people to put @ in front of their categories - @ being a context delimiter.  There was no need, in my mind, to have @Agendas, or @Someday/Maybe.  I always read those as “At Someday/Maybe”.  It turns out that Outllook only has one set of categories that are global for all of the portions of the program – Calendar, Tasks, etc.  So the @ symbol helps them to be sorted to the top of the list.  Now my confusion is resolved.

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