Collect Stuff and Process It

I'm paraphrasing and simplying quite a lot to make my point but you could sum up the first steps in the Getting Things Done (GTD) process as Collect Stuff and Process It. If you are going to enjoy the benefits of the stress free nature of GTD you need to trust your approach to collection so that it has a "never miss" feel to it.

The goal is to process all the stuff that's coming at you from all angles: the conversations, the telephone calls, the e-mails, the snail mail, the post-it notes and the thoughts & ideas and process them until you have a trusted list of the next actions that need to be undertaken to achieve high productivity. The "thoughts & ideas" is an important concept for me. Most of the day, when I'm on the go, my mind isn't quiet and processing. It's active and doing. There are times however; in the car, in the shower, just as I'm drifting off before sleeping when I have that thought; the answer to a problem I'm dealing with, the nagging thought, have I done X, did I remember to tell Y. That's where my Olympus digital voice recorder comes in. It's my mobile memory, and I find it incredibly useful now that I'm reaching an age when I'm just beginning to sense that my short term memory isn't quite what it used to be. I keep the recorder by my side all the time. When I have the thought I capture it. And then I process the recorder daily to make sure the thoughts are transferred to my trusted list of next actions.

My other tool of choice for thinking and capturing (collecting) is mind mapping. I'm trying to eliminate linear note taking from my work life as much as possible. With mind mapping, as I capture and visualise the information I'm capturing, I'm much more likely to think laterally and comprehensively. When I've mind mapped and derived the outputs, they go to my trusted list as next actions. My tool of choice for mind mapping is MindManager from MindJet.

In my mind I visualise all this capture activity as a funnel. Everything is thrown in, and out the bottom pops my list of next actions. My trusted list is kept in Outlook, but not in my inbox. The inbox is the kiss of death. I still see people at work with hundreds of items in their inbox and shudder. Every day when they open Outlook they have to process that list; what's important, what do I have to do today, what shall I keep ignoring. I use Outlook tasks. A much underused Outlook component. I must admit that I've supercharged mine with the GTD Outlook plugin from Netcentrics. I know, I know; I'm a geek.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Getting Things Done, Lifehacks, Productivity, David Allen, mind mapping, Mindjet, MindManager, information visualization, outlook