Getting Things Done - a tale of two systems

A couple of months ago, a friend very kindly lent me Getting Things Done. I read the first third of it - the theoretical part - on the way to work one morning and, serendipitously, had a free day at work in which to implement it. (This almost never happens.) I didn't follow it to the letter, because I've been doing my job for five years now and I know what works and what doesn't. But I held onto the key principles.

After I'd created my GTD system, I read the rest of the book, including the second part, about implementation, and discovered that I'd more or less got it right. This is testament to the brilliant clarity of the theoretical section of the book, and the simple workflow diagram that encapsulates the whole system - if we lived in a just universe, at this point I'd have had to re-do everything.

Since then, I've had an extraordinarily busy time at work, and whatever my good intentions, I'm not sure that I would have sustained my momentum were it not for GTD. I used to drop the ball occasionally; although nearly everything was recoverable, it probably made me less efficient; and I'm pretty certain it made me look less efficient. Now I have a clear list of things that are to be done, and another list of things that I am waiting to hear back from people about. So far, very little has fallen through the cracks, and the confidence that I get from this alone is worth ten or even a hundred times the price of the book. It's surprisingly empowering to be the person who has the time and wherewithal to chase things up, rather than being chased oneself.

While GTD has self-evidently succeeded for me at work, I'm struggling to implement it at home. I have a home filing system, and aside from a "to be filed" pile that I have at least stopped adding to, it's in good shape. But I find that when I come home, I don't want to look at a list of stuff to do. I want to dork out online or browse and reply to email. I'm not really using my "Next Actions" or "Waiting For" email folders and I'm still living out of my inbox (though it's much, much smaller than it used to be).

The message is clear: home is somewhere I want to slack, not be productive.

(I have elected not to integrate my GTD systems for home and work. There are various reasons for this, most of which involve technology, but some of it is simply about not wanting to look at work-related things when I am not working. On days when I work from home, I use the work stuff.)

What I do achieve at home is largely a product of two sentences in the book (I paraphrase):

There is no point in having the same thought more than once, unless you really like having that thought

and

If something is going to take less than two minutes and needs doing, just do it.

These were the things that stuck with me on my first readthrough of the book, and to me, they are gold-dust (though I suspect that everyone takes away something different, depending on their preoccupations and needs). The flat is much tidier these days, which leaves my brain feeling a lot more peaceful.

That, in essence, is the point of the book. Empty your head of the noisy stuff and concentrate on being happy. It works - and I challenge you to get better value from a tenner.