For a brief, glorious 15 minutes today, I achieved a version of Geek Nirvana – an Inbox that was completely empty.
No, I don’t mean everything unread – I mean empty. Not one single email in it.
And of course, 2 minutes later, I had a flurry of email (sigh).
A very long time back, I had hoped to get started on using GTD.
I’m sure you can guess that it hasn’t worked out. However, I have in my own way tried to start bringing some semblance of order to my life and have been surprised by just how much difference that has made.
My wife told me recently about having received an attractive leather day planner at work and having no use for it. I asked her to pass it on to me thinking I might have some use for it.
Surprising even myself, I’ve found myself using it religiously – updating all the little things I’ve needed to (mostly personal things) in this and sticking to that schedule, more or less.
I’m sure one part of it has to do with the look of the planner – a nice business-like cover with no tacky company branding. That compels me to use it, which in turn compels to actually complete things setting up a nice little loop.
I can only hope that this keeps going!
I have been reading the book Getting Things Done by David Allen the last few days.
I haven’t actually started implementing GTD yet in my life though in the course of reading the book I have tried to start putting atleast the 2 minute rule into effect.
What I just wanted to say is that it has been a long time since I found myself nodding to things written in a book or even saying aloud “That is so true”. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to underline a sentence in the book because it sounded so much like what happens to me 
More than anything, that experience gives me some hope that GTD is a technique that will actually help me get my life back on track.
I am hoping to start on the “pyschic RAM” sweep this weekend – let’s see how it goes.
I think it’s pretty obvious from this site that I have a serious problem with getting things done – the first post you see on this site is a list of things I need to do!
And that is pretty much the story in other parts of my life as well – too many things competing for a limited attention and energy span.
I’ve been trying to use a small To-do widget, but I don’t think that’s nearly enough planned effort to whittle down my list.
So I’m going to start looking at GTD. I just checked and found the original GTD book is available in my community library. So the next time I stop by (it’s in 2 weeks time), I’m going to pick up the book and get started on getting my stuff organized.
I’m really nervous about this, in part because I’m very worried about not sticking to this program, as a lot of these kind of programs are heavily oriented towards people living in the US and thus become to difficult to implement if things are not available and that can be very discouraging.
But at the same time, I feel that my lack of getting things organized has really hurt my performance on the job and that is something that really needs to get fixed.
Here’s hoping this goes well!