Actually, I'm feeling kind of harried...

This has been one of those crazy, hectic times where you wonder where the day goes.  By the end of it, you’re just happy that it’s over, and that you’ve managed to accomplish something.  However, these are the times that show exactly how effective GTD can be.

I admit (sorry, SWMBO) that I left work late tonight – in a bid to ensure that I had emptied all of my in-baskets.  I am going to be super-busy tomorrow, the continuation of a 2.5 week trend, so I prioritized those few tasks that I must do tomorrow morning, to ensure they get done before I head off on my merry, busy way.  I will once again be in and out of the office.  But this is where GTD shines.

On my Palm Tungsten E handheld, my lists are with me.  I can make my calls, I can hammer away at other tasks – anything that doesn’t need my computer or my office, I can do while I’m in my car.  All because I have my lists.  I’ve also started to take a page from Michael Hyatt in his blog article Working Smart: Recovering the Lost Art of Note-Taking, although this only reinforces something I never did under the Covey system – the Daily Record of Events.  Within my notes I also record all of my voicemail messages, with this notebook becoming an indispensable part of my “trusted system”.

The thing is, GTD doesn’t make these periods any less busy.  But it does make them much more manageable and much less stressful.

December 10, 2005 - The Start

So, I've started to re-read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" , which is an outstanding book, but needs you to take the first action before you see any results. I wasn't successful at implementing anything the first time around, so what do I figure will make the difference this time?

Well, to start with, I want to do it. I often purchase a book to read when I have downtime at home, and "alonetime" - that precious commodity when I'm on my one, such as having lunch when I'm on the road, when I'm on a plane, or in a hotel room. I purchased GTD about 2 years ago, and have never followed through with the implementation. Wanting to do it is the key here.

The other part of this is that I've been using a Palm for about 9 months now, and love it. I had a Palm III back in the late 1990s. It met its final demize in about 2000, when it had a fatal collision in the overhead bin on a flight back to Vancouver. Having a new Palm Tungsten E is a dream - it is still simple, no connectivity to distract me (although the darn games available now do the trick...), and it just works.

I have been using Agendus for Palm OS and Agendus for Windows - Palm Desktop Edition (they also have an Outlook integrated edition) for the past several months, and have been happy with them. In fact, I cannot recommend the program highly enough, although there are the typical development errors that are getting patched over time. I'm in a bit of a quandry, though, as my corporate environment runs Outlook over Citrix, which is neat, but difficult to integrate to. (I've resolved to getting all my contacts into the Palm Desktop, then firing them to Citrix via a vCard file.) So I need to use two programs - one for tasks and scheduling, and one for e-mail. So, I will also be trying to integrate GTD with Agendus - something not many people seem to have tried.

Now that the GTD bug has bitten again, and harder this time, I have begun to set up my GTD system. I came into my office today (Saturday) and processed my 3 in baskets. I converted one of them to a "pending bucket", and logged anything that I wasn't going to do right then. I purged the purgeable. I did the less-than-two-minute tasks. I haven't categorized the tasks, or set up my Outlook mail folders, or anything else yet - it will all come in time. I hope to have the task list framework completed by tomorrow, in time to do my first "Weekly Review". I'm getting ahead of where I am in the book, but really does it matter - as long as you're being proactive about it, I don't think so.

Wish me luck! I'll update my progress every couple of days!