How do you change when you've tried it all?

Audacious goals, I'm thinking.  

I have the same goal types that everyone does:

Fitness

Finance

House

Relationship

Personal

(The rest are really only subtypes of the above... yes?)

So here I am in lateish November with a few abandoned projects on this blog.  My 30 day plan to get organized with Toodledo crashed.  I've since started using another tool, but abandoned it also, tentatively, if you can abandon tentatively.

So, now what?

I set some bigass goals.

Now what?  All I have to do is keep them.  What that really means is somehow avoiding the seemingly inevitable pitfalls that have beset progress in the past.  How do you really make it different this time?

October GTD and Toodledo #??

Blamo.  Total crash.  For me, at least in my current state in life, this was unsustainable.

Sorry if I crashed on expectations.  I started with the honest intent of doing this for 30 days, the idea being that most plans have problems and 30 days would be enough to overcome some, find solutions and prove it all out to be worthy.  No can do.

This isn't a condemnation of Toodledo or GTD, just a flat out statement that it didn't work for me.

I'm using a different tool now I'm I'm hesitating to make this all about the tool, because it's probably about the person.  Most things are.

I'm going to go back and put a spoiler alert on the posts and start something new.

Building a life strategy

This isn't a manual for how to do it because I don't have one.  It is a personal conversation (or brain dump) about the process and how I get things together.

I've always believed that goals are important.  I've been taught this and once you understand the idea it seems obvious - how can you be happy if you don't know what you want?  Maybe it's right, maybe not.  Do you have to know the answer to this question to move forward?  I typically think there are few things that you really must have 100% nailed down before you can do other useful things, but maybe this is one of them.

In my attempts to find my happy, I usually think in a diagram and I start on the right with HAPPY.

Inevitably, this leads upstream really really far.  Each of the 'happy with' bubbles does this:

You can see that if these are drawn together, it quickly becomes an unmanageable level of bubbles.  I already didn't draw all of them.  How to make sense of so much stuff and boil it down into simple actions?

April - GTD and Toodledo #13: Just Get Things Done

Ironically, when I need GTD the most, it's the easiest to fall off the wagon.

David Allen says one of the best things about GTD is that it's easy to get back on the wagon - which is good, because it's also easy to fall off, and even as the originator of this particular wagon, he falls off and gets back on all the time.  I learned this in a great intro-level video of a talk David gave at google.  Here's the video of David Allen at Google.

So, I fell off and got back on, a few times, in recent days.  As I have noticed, I learn the most when I iterate through problems, and this 30 day project has forced me to remain continuous in my resolve to find a way when I am in the gap between iterations of 'on'.  So, I tried something new.  I was working on some content for a client that does Iceland Excursions and I thought that maybe I could do the right thing at a client level and continue to refine my process without the mass of my entire workload to deal with.  It seems to be working.

Here's a tiny version of what it my 'working' screen looks like:

Key observations:
- More projects, fewer actions.  When I scan, I realized that my mind attempts to comprehend the top level items, so 5 items is as distracting as 5 projects - even though 5 projects might mean 25 actions.  Hmmmm.

- Most things actually ARE projects, so this is natural when you do it.

- Sorting by Tag puts all the 'super projects,' or in my case, clients, together.

- Because I can sort subtasks, I can reorder things as I see fit

- I have projects that never end, like doing web promotion for things like Iceland Excursions where tasks flow through, but the project never ends.  Truly, this is like exercise and eating, where I could have discreet projects that DO end, but I like this method.  It allows me to tick things off and feel advancement, add things to the end of the list and keep an eye on overall workload.

- I can put PROJECT-LEVEL waiting, someday/maybe, and reference items in this system.  In the tiny graphic above, I have a project at the top with several waiting items and reference items.  They are neatly sequestered where I need them, not taking up me-level overhead.

I think it's starting to come together.  If you just found this post, please visit the whole series; 30 days of Getting things done and Toodledo.com.

April - GTD and Toodledo #12: Breaking the system

Try as I might, I haven't been able to overcome a problem, I haven't fundamentally stayed in the styem; rather, I've relied on a notepad file that I can open with a few keystrokes and the superfast entry of a few lines of text.

When I have something new, I simply insert it where it goes in the priority list.  There are some clear positives to this method, namely speed and... okay, there's one positive.  Speed.  Tools whose only virtue is speed are pandering to laziness, however, which brings me to the downside.

The downside is that the notepad only contains the things I put in it right at the moment, and when I did a minor desktop icon cleanup the other day, this happened:

I know it's small.  I didn't want to show my desktop icons, but here's the gist of what you see.  I had a desktop with lots of icons.  I drug them around into groups before moving them to where they go, and the group in the lower left shows 5 notepad files - notepad files of the same kind that I'm talking about as my 'emergency' files.  This means that not only do I have a 'current' notepad file which isn't one of these, but there are 5 other files, containing what one could only assume were the most important activities I could be working on at the time - relegated to the status of ignored desktop crap.

Want to know the scary thing?  I actually put it as a line item in my current notepad to review those old notepad files to make sure there's nothing forgotten.  It would be a safe bet to assume there ARE forgotten items that will elicit a loud "D'oh!" from me when I read them.

So - I'm NOT getting the GTD benefits when I do this.

Not that we've looked at the ugly sympton, what's the root cause?

I was using a system proffered by a Toodledo power user in the forum, with folders indicating the GTD elements of inbox, action, waiting, etc. and Stars indicating next actions, applied only to actions.  The original scenario I sought to emulate used custom searches for next actions.  I did this but found that there were too many next actions for me to comprehend consciously, the very problem which GTD seems to avoid,  and occasionally there were clients, etc. for which I had NO next actions for certain time periods.

I added tags and made lots of custom searches but this meant I had to look at all the searches.

Hmmm.. both scenarios still had me using notepad and receiving no benefits.  So, I culled the next actions back from the things I could to next to the things I WOULD do next.  This reduced the number, but at this time, remember I had custom searches for many areas.  When I ditched the custom searches (AFTER having culled the next actions), I found a manageable list.  WHOOOOOOOO!!!!!

So, if I had followed instructions, ostensibly, I would have saved time.  This isn't the case however - it was a matter of needing to try it in earnest to really understand the shortcomings personally to be able to make the plan work.  I had to feel the pain of the personal evolution.  This is indeed something that Toodledo tell you, essentially in the deceptively simple advice to 'try it out and experiment'.  But maybe I'm thick and just had to experience it myself.

So now, the next key was using tags as the sort priority and getting intimate with the collapse function.  This, miraculously, gives me a project list.  Who knew?  Probably lots of people.  But again, I had to do it to really 'get it' and I've found this to be a common thread running through the GTD story of many successful users.






Lessons:
(again) must avoid temptation to stay in system
Project list is attainable when sorting by tags and collapsing.
Collapsing is a great way to keep everything visible but not overwhelming
I'm aware that with all this I haven't actually talked about doing work, and I'm still concerned that this process, though definitely progressing in effectiveness, will be something that I effectively move from the development phase of into the doing phase.  I get secretly worried that I'll work out the perfect system and still just not feel like working, but I really don't think this will be the case.  I enjoy working, I just don't enjoy the fear of forgetting something or being overwhelmed in minutiae.

30 days with GTD and Toodledo


This is what its all base on, BTW, David Allen's Getting Things Done.  I listen to the audio instead of turning pages - it's a great way to make useful time of my commute, and despite novels, I enjoy listening to these kinds of books more than once - making the purchase worthwhile for me.  Borrow a copy if you can and talk to that person for tips!