Getting Things Done 9: Processing Notes

At some point I realised that I was taking copious notes in team meetings, at conferences, in church and other  places and they were not being integrated into my system. I read a few articles about how GTD applies to note taking and began to develop an approach that worked for me.

1. Using a Notebook – I spent some time in an anti-paper-electronic-zone but found that I was missing using a pen and went back to using a quality journal and gel pen that I keep with me at all times. For every team leadership event that is coming I will start a page and use it to jot down notes for the agenda items that will be covered. Then during the meeting, I will start a new page in which I will take brief notes – particularly about things that need to be followed up or commitments people have made to take action after the meetings.

2. Creating Helpful Symbols – I want to be able to glance at the page when I look back later and not have to read the whole thing – so I have developed some symbols that help me. I use a small checkbox and put letters next to it to indicate what category of action item it is. Here are some of the categories I currently use:

NA – This is for next actions that still need to be more clearly defined.

WF – This if for items that I am waiting for from people.

E – This is for errands – ie. things that I need to buy or get.

C – This is for phone calls that I need to make.

A – This is for agenda items – in GTD an agenda is something you speak to someone about.

These are written in the margins – either top/bottom or left/right margins so I can see them at a glance.

3. Other Symbols to Use - I have read about people using symbols beyond what I have mentioned here – i.e: (a) If an item is particularly important or insightful, put a star next to it. (b)  If an item requires further research or resolution, put a question mark next to it. (c) If an item requires follow-up, put a ballot box (open square) next to it. When the item is completed, I check it off. (d) If you assign a follow-up item to someone, put an open circle next to it (similar to the ballot box but a circle rather than a square) and indicate who is responsible – when the item is completed, check it off.

4. Processing the Next Actions - I then need to work through my note book and transfer these next actions to my Next Actions page – otherwise they stay hidden away in my notebook. It is important to schedule time to review your notes – ideally it should be done during your Weekly Review.

5. Completing the Next Actions - When I have attended to the item I will put a tick in the text box – both in my Next Actions list and also in my Notebook – so that when I look back at a previous meeting I don’t have  to try and figure out whether or not I have completed the next actions.

Getting Things Done 8: Horizons of Focus

Getting Things Done is based around getting clarity about 6 levels of our life. The analogy of a plane on a run way is used. There are runway items – those are our current Actions; then the plane lifts off and move to 10,000 feet where the focus is on current Projects, then we lift to 20,000 fee and consider our areas of Responsibility, then we move to 30,000 feet and we focus on our Goals, then we move to 40,000 feet and we define our Vision, and finally at 50,000 we have the big picture view of our lives – or our purpose and our principles.

David Allen in Making it All Work describes the 6 levels like this:
Runway: Action – Current activities and action steps
10,000 feet: Projects – Tasks expected to take 12 months or less to complete
20,000 feet: Areas of Responsibility – Dfferent “hats” you wear in your life and what’s expected of you in each.
30,000 feet: Goals – Targets for yourself to complete within the next 1 – 3 years.
40,000 feet: Vision – The life you see for yourself within the next 5 – 10 years.
50,000 feet: Purpose & Principles – What you want your life to mean and how you want to be seen by others.

Here is another description of the 6 levels (starting at the top and working down):

50,000 ft is the ‘big picture’ view. Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its ‘word’ really is. It is the ultimate job description. In other words, your agreements at 50,000 ft. are the description of your life’s purpose. Once your 50,000 ft agreements are clear, you then start determining your agreements at the lower Horizons of Focus:

40,000 ft: Vision. What it will look, sound, feel like with successful implementation of your long term visions. This is a picture of where you want to be 3 to 5 years from now.

30,000 ft: Goals and Objectives. What do you need to accomplish within the next 1 to 2 years to make your vision happen?

20,000 ft: Areas of Focus and Responsibility. Important spheres of work and life to be maintained at standards to “keep engine running”. eg. What is the standard Health you’d like to maintain? How about your standard for your education, family life, spirituality etc. so that you can achieve your 30,000 ft and 40,000 ft goal.

10,000 ft: Projects or Outcomes you want to achieve that require more than one action and which can be completed within a year.

Runway Actions: Next physical, visible actions to take on any project or other outcome.

Trent Hamm who runs The Simple Dollar website posted the following description of the 6 horizons based on David Allen’s book, Making it All Work:

Getting Perspective
Allen looks at six different key elements of getting perspective over one’s situation. Allen’s basic argument here is that perspective helps you clearly distinguish the important from the unimportant and makes the elements of control you have over your time that much more effective.

Getting Perspective on the Runway: Next Actions
Allen starts off at the most basic place: what is your next action? In other words, if you’re sitting there ready to do something, what exactly are you going to do? Some of the time, this choice is very easy – you’ll merely engage whatever fire needs to be put out at the moment – but at other times, the choice is profound. Will you work on that PowerPoint presentation or play catch with your son in the yard? The choice becomes much less clear very quickly, and that’s why it pays to have a higher level of perspective.

Getting Perspective at Ten Thousand Feet: Projects
From the immediate action, Allen steps back a bit to look at projects, which he defines as collections of discrete actions that produce an outcome and can be completed within a year (although usually less). For example, my garden might be a project, or teaching my son how to write his letters. Usually, the projects you have on the table all have an immediate action to offer, but how important is that immediate action? It really depends on the relative importance of the project. Do I define it as more important to work on my son’s Qs or to get those tomatoes in the ground? Personally, I view the writing project as more important and would help my son before heading outside – however, perspective is important here, too. If my son wants to go outside and play in the yard, or if he’s taking a nap, that’s the perfect time for me to grab the trowel and head out back.

Getting Perspective at Twenty Thousand Feet: Areas of Focus and Responsibility
What aspects of my life need regular maintenance? That’s the question at this level – what are your areas of focus? More importantly, what areas take clear priority over the other ones – can you establish a hierarchy? I have several, with my writing and my family clearly on top of the pile. I also see the value of reflecting on this carefully, because if you truly understand the areas of responsibility in life and understand how they rank and relate to one another, it becomes much easier to just automatically prioritize smaller projects and tasks.

Getting Perspective at Thirty Thousand Feet: Goals and Objectives
Beyond your areas of responsibility are your wider goals. What do you want to achieve with your life, particularly in the next two to five years? What will you have accomplished? In many ways, I feel like I accomplished very little for the first twenty seven years of my life. I feel as though I began accomplishing things in the last three years – having children, launching The Simple Dollar, writing a book that’s already begun to turn up in unexpected places. What’s my eventual goal, the one that will probably cover the next few years of my life? I want to push some interesting changes in how people are able to access personal finance education for all ages (something you’ll be hearing about in the future but is already in the works). What Allen is driving at here is how exactly are you going to make your mark on the world? If you don’t know, it’s time to start thinking about it.

Getting Perspective at Forty Thousand Feet: Vision
So what’s beyond your life goals? Allen next moves onto what kind of life those goals, if successful, lead to. Let’s say I achieve every major goal I have set out for the next few years. Where will I be? What will come next? How much further can I reach? Do the goals I have in place for the next two to five years put me in a place that I actually want to be? If so, which of those goals are the most effective at putting me in a good place for the long haul?

Getting Perspective at Fifty Thousand Feet: Purpose and Principles
From there, we zoom out to your whole life. What principles do you live by? What is the purpose of your life? What do you hope to accomplish with your life, and are you actually setting long-term goals to get there? What do you want written as your epitaph?

Read the full Review of Making It All Work at the Simple Dollar website.

Getting Things Done 7: Next Actions vs Projects

Everyone has their own idea about the most critical part of GTD and the GTD guys themselves will probably agree that it is the Weekly Review. Hard to argue with that – because the time each week when you get to make sure you are CLEAN, CURRENT and CREATIVE is a powerful time of getting on top of all your commitments.

But in my journey it was not the weekly review that took me beyond dabbling with GTD, but setting up a Project List. Somehow I managed to implement the whole GTD system and never actually got the distinction between Next Actions and Projects.  I had all my lists set up and knew about the Project list but did not see it for what it really is. Let me describe each of these lists in detail:

1. The Next Actions List. A Next Action is a specific task or action that I need to take on any commitment that comes my way. I’m meeting with someone and I promise to send them an article to read – what do I do with that commitment? If I don’t record it somewhere in an action management system that I can trust I find that my mind keeps reminding me all the time that I have to do it – and mostly I am reminded when I can’t do anything about it – like when I am having dinner or when I am out shopping. When I should be using my mind to think about things (ie. how I can improve something or create something new), and than of things – it will keep reminding me because it suspects that I am about to drop the ball. GTD helps out in this regard but getting us to keep a Next Actions list – a list of everything we need to do! And no, this is not the same as a To Do list that we have traditionally been told to keep – with  1-2-3 or A-B-C prioritisation system. The problem there is that we keep on looking through long lists of things – most of which we can’t do because we are not in the right CONTEXT to do it. And that is where GTD helps out: our Next Actions are groups in Contexts – like @Work or @Phone or @Errands, etc. I have described this more fully in my second GTD post – check that out for more details.

2. The Project List. Now, here is why in my experience the Project List was the big kicker and what actually helped me plug a huge hole in my system. My life is not just a series of unrelated actions. I lead a ministry, I lead a team, I have responsibilities at home, etc. I am actually a project manager – and there is no way that I could manage all my projects successfully if my sole focus was on the miriad of little actions that I need to take. Plus, when I am finished one next action and I cross it off my list, how do I know what is the next thing that needs to be done? That is where the Project list comes in! A project is any commitment that requires more than one next action to complete. Planning an event is not a next action but a project which consists of a series of interrelated next actions. And the project list enables us to define and track all the items that need to be done for the each project we are moving towards completion.

A good project list will ensure that you describe what the project looks like when it is completed (this is similar to Stephen Covey’s Begin With The End in Mind principle). Then it makes us think about the next couple of steps that will move the project towards completion. I don’t always set out to list every step towards completion – I define the next 2 or 3 steps and start working on those next actions (and I make sure EVERY Next Action starts with a Verb – ie. Call for a Quote). Then I transfer those next actions from my Project List – where the whole project will be tracked – to my Next Actions list and start completing them. When I do my weekly review (or in my case mid-weekly too) I go back to the Project List and define or find more items that need to be tacked and keep transferring them to my Next Actions list. When the project is completed I can delete it from my list and move on to the next project.

When I got my mind around this distinction between Next Actions and Projects I really found that GTD started to work for me! In fact, in a future blog I will describe who these two steps are actually the first of 6 steps or Horizon’s of focus – that is a critical part of understanding how the whole system works!

Getting Things Done 5: My Blog Reading

I have automated my blog visiting and reading by using Google Reader which brings new posts from about 30 different blogs to me which I process through about three times a week. It is so much easier than visiting each site individually. I have a list of all the blogs that I follow (if you are interested in taking a look – many are focussed on Productivity) at my website: http://www.ymresourcer.com – look at the bottom of the Links page.

Getting Things Done 4: My Computer System

I have adapted my computer to reflect what I have learnt from the GTD system:

1. My Desktop
I have created an interesting computer desktop layout that helps me get organised with files and stuff that I have downloaded, articles I need to print (I create short cuts and place them on the desktop in the print section and then just bang them off when I am near a computer), files to transfer to my desktop, presentations to run, files for projects that I am working on, articles to update as new blog posts are posted, stuff to watch or listen to, etc. I have uploaded two screen grabs as examples: Older and Newer.

2. My Filing System
My main data is stored in My Documents - where I have GTD related folders such as:

A. Action (for items that require a next action from my part)

B. Listen (for audio files that I need to listen to)

C. Watch (for video files that I need to watch)

D. Projects (each project I am working on has it’s own folder)

E. Read (for documents I need to read before filing)

F. Share (for items I need to pass on to people)

G. Transfer (for items I need to transfer to another PC)

H. Update (for items that I am continuously updating and don’t want to hunt for all the time);

I. Waiting For (for items I can’t finalise until I get something from someone else)

J. Print (for items that need to be printed and then read or processed)

K. Reference folders - then there is my main set of reference folders, including (Church, Computer, Consulting, GTD, igniteYOUTH, Power (were all my presentations are stored), Personal, Resource (this is my main folder with resource material in sub-folders), Sermons and Software (where all my utilities are stored for reuse or for sharing with others).

3. My Search System
David Allen suggests that you have a simple A-Z filing system and use the power of the processor to find what you are looking for. I find my work is too interconnected for that approach and use a comprehensive filing system instead but I do use the power of Google Desktop to find what I am looking for on my computer. It is like having Google search your hard drive and IMMEDIATELY help you find what you are looking for. A double tap of the Ctrl key brings up a search box and after typing some key words you can either click on the file you want or open up the search results in a browser. You can download it from: http://desktop.google.com/

4. My Backup System
I use freeware software to back up and synchronise my data to another computer in my home. It is called PureSync and I have been most impressed with it. You can download the free version for non-business use at: http://www.jumpingbytes.com/en/puresync.html