Dear diary,

”If could just spend more time doing stuff instead of worrying about it …” (Me, at several points over the years.)

I started this notebook in spring last year and recently filled it up. It contains my first implementation of the system called ”Getting Things Done” (see the book by David Allen with the same name). Let me tell you a little about how it’s going.

The way I organised my work, with to-do lists, calendar, work journal, and routines for dealing with email had pretty much grown organically up until the beginning of this year. I’d gotten some advice, I’d read the odd blog post and column about email and calendar blocking, but beyond some courses in project management (which are a topic for another day), I’d gotten myself very little instruction on how to do any of this. How does one actually keep a good to-do list? Are there principles and best practices? I was aware that Getting Things Done was a thing, and last spring, a mention in passing on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast prompted me to give it a try.

I read up a little. The book was right there in the university library, unsurprisingly. I also used a blog post by Alberto Taiuti about doing Getting Things Done in a notebook, and read some other writing by researchers about how they use the method (Robert Talbert and Veronika Cheplygina).

There is enough out there about this already that I won’t make my own attempt to explain the method in full, but here are some of the interesting particulars:

You are supposed to be careful about how you organise your to-do lists. You’re supposed to make sure everything on the list is a clear, unambiguous next action that you can start doing when you see it. Everything else that needs thinking, deciding, mulling over, reflecting etc, goes somewhere else, not on your list of thing to do. This means that you can easily pick something off your list and start work on it.

You are supposed to be careful about your calendar. You’re supposed to only put things in there that have a fixed date and time attached, not random reminders or aspirational scheduling of things you would like to do. This means that you can easily look at your calendar and know what your day, week and month look like.

You are supposed to be careful to record everything you think about that matters. You’re supposed to take a note as soon as you have a potentially important thought and put it in a dedicated place that you will check and go through regularly. This means that you don’t have to keep things in your head.

This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, despite having to-do lists, calendars and a habit of note-taking for years, I’ve not been very disciplined about any of this before. My to-do list items have often been vague, too big tasks that are hard to get started on. My calendar has often contained aspirational planning entries that didn’t survive contact with the realities of the workday. I often delude myself that I’ll remember an idea or a decision, to have quietly it slip out of my mind.

Have I become more productive, or less stressed? The honest answer is that I don’t know. I don’t have a reliable way to track either productivity or stress levels, and even if I did: the last year has not really been comparable to the year before, for several reasons. However, I feel like thinking more about how I organise my work makes a difference, and I’ve felt a certain joy working on the process, as well as a certain dread when looking at it all organised in one place. Let’s keep going and see where this takes us.