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Your commitments are managed somewhere... Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Quote from Making it all work:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Making it Work p40
Your commitments will be tracked and managed somewhere - and if they're not funneled into a system, they'll take root in your psyche.

But the psyche is truly handicaped in its ability to remember, to remind, and to automatically think and decide. If your mind had the capabilities that most people seem to believe it has, based on their trust of it instead of an external system, it would only remind you of things you needed to do, when you could actually do something about them.
The question arises: at what point is more energy spent putting something into the system than actually doing it.

This is where the 2 minute rule comes in when processing the inbox. If you can do it within 2 minutes do it now. If you can't do it within that time period, then it should take around 2 minutes to get the item into your system to do it later.

Last edited by SpiralOcean; 2009-02-14 at 01:06 PM..
 
This is where the GTD/OmniFocus system falls apart for me ... I can't get into the habit of recording my tasks to be done later. Capturing often doesn't seem to be worth the bother.

--Liz
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by LizPf View Post
This is where the GTD/OmniFocus system falls apart for me ... I can't get into the habit of recording my tasks to be done later. Capturing often doesn't seem to be worth the bother.

--Liz
I have the same issue Liz.

One thing that has worked for me is to tell myself, if I am doing anything, it has to be done from an action in OmniFocus. If you catch yourself doing something that is not in OmniFocus, then go and place an action item in OF and start doing it.

While this may sound extreme, it's helped me to get into the habit of capturing.

The widget krank is another tool that helps me develop the capture habit. The widget gives me that extra visual information of... this is the action I am doing now. If I want to do something else, or have another idea, I place it into the inbox and first complete the action I am doing now.

Commit and follow through
and
Just do this one action
are two mantras I'll repeat to myself.

One place where I often get sidetracked is processing the email inbox to 0. I'm developing the habit to place emails that I receive (this includes RSS feeds that are sent to my Mail Inbox) into OmniFocus instead of clicking on a link to read the RSS feed. I then have a home -> computer -> reading context that I place that action into and process that context at a later time.

All these tricks still don't answer the question... is it better to be using the GTD system? I'm still answering yes to that question.

Everyone is different. I hope you find something that works for you. Let us know if you happen upon a trick that helps you.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by LizPf View Post
This is where the GTD/OmniFocus system falls apart for me ... I can't get into the habit of recording my tasks to be done later. Capturing often doesn't seem to be worth the bother.
Similar to what Spiral said, you can ask yourself: "will putting it down on paper (OF) use more mental resources than it saves? If the answer is no, then don't write it down (and do it right away if it needs done). So, I don't write everything down. I don't write down "put bread in toaster" because it isn't an action that sits around in my head taking up mental resources. I either do it now or I don't. If I see that my scissors has inexplicably escaped from its drawer yet again, I don't make a project in OF, I just pick it up and put it away. If the action is something that stays in your head when you're not doing it, and you aren't going to do it immediately, then write it down to get it out of your head. If you don't have access to your mac/iPhone, then get a little mini-notebook (glued binding kind), keep it in your pocket, and write it down.

The two minute rule is for processing the inbox, not for capture of ideas. If you're the kind of person who gets distracted easily, like me, this is a crucial distinction. If I'm working on something I don't want to be distracted from, I will write down an action that may only take 30 seconds, because I know that if I get up and do it on the spur of the moment, I'll inevitably get distracted on the way, forget that I was in the middle of something important, and waste 30 minutes doing something that really didn't need to be done.

This also brings up automatic habits & GTD. If an action becomes a mindless, automatic habit that never consumes mental resources, then it doesn't need to be down in OF.

GTD is not your master, but your servant whose job it is to free up your mental resources, so you can live your life the way you want to. In DA's book "Ready for Anything", he has a chapter (13) where he lets us in on the secret that some of his most rewarding projects were never even on his lists. But he needed to have all the other stuff out of his head, knowing that it was all in order and taken care of, to be able to truly enjoy that impromptu project.
 
Excellent post ABH19! That sums up many great points in one post.
 
 


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