Etikettarkiv: getting things done

The next notebook of work

Publicerat i dear diary, english, the practice of science av

Dear diary,

The last post was about my attempt to use the Getting Things Done method to bring some more order to research, work, and everything. This post will contain some more details about my system, at a little less than a year into the process, on the off chance that anyone wants to know. This post will use some Getting Things Done jargon without explaining it. There are many useful guides online, plus of course the book itself.

Medium

Most of my system lives in paper notebooks. The main notebook contains my action list, projects list, waiting for list and agendas plus a section for notes. I quickly learned that the someday/maybe lists won’t fit, so I now have a separate (bigger) notebook for those. My calendar is digital. I also use a note taking app for project support material, and as an extra inbox for notes I jot down on my phone. Thus, I guess it’s a paper/digital hybrid.

Contexts

I have five contexts: email/messaging, work computer, writing, office and home. There were more in the beginning, but I gradually took out the ones I didn’t use. They need to be few enough and map cleanly to situations, so that I remember to look at them. I added the writing context because I tend to treat, and schedule, writing tasks separately from other work tasks. The writing context also includes writing-adjacent support tasks such as updating figures, going through reviewer comments or searching for references.

Inboxes

I have a total of nine inboxes, if you include all the email accounts and messenger services where people might contact me about things I need to do. That sounds excessive, but only three of those are where I put things for myself (physical inbox, notes section of notebook, and notes app), and so far they’re all getting checked regularly.

Capture

I do most of my capture in the notes app on my phone (when not at a desk) or on piece of paper (when at my desk). When I get back to having in-person meetings, I assume more notes are going to end up in the physical notebook, because it’s nicer to take meeting notes on paper than on a phone.

Agendas

The biggest thing I changed in the new notebook was to dedicate much more space to agendas, but it’s already almost full! It turns out there are lots of things ”I should talk to X about the next time we’re speaking”, rather than send X an email immediately. Who knew?

Waiting for

This is probably my favourite. It is useful to have a list of who have said they will get back to me, when, and about what. That little date next to their name helps me not feel like a nag when I ask them again after a reasonable time, and makes me appreciate them more when they respond quickly.

Weekly review

I already had the habit of scheduling an appointment with myself on Fridays (or otherwise towards the end of the week) to go over some recurring items. I’ve expanded this appointment to do a weekly review of the notebook, calendar, someday/maybe list, and some other bespoke checklist items. I bribe myself with sweets to support this habit.

Things I’d like to improve

Here are some of the things I want to improve:

  • The project list. A project sensu Getting Things Done can be anything from purchase new shoes to taking over the world. The project list is supposed to keep track of what you’ve undertaken to do, and make sure you have come up with actions that progress them. My project list isn’t very complete, and doesn’t spark new actions very often.
  • Project backlogs. On the other hand, I have some things on the project list that are projects in a greater sense, and will have literally thousands of actions, both from me and others. These obviously need planning ahead beyond the next thing to do. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to keep a backlog of future things to do in a project, potentially with dependencies, and feed them into my list of things to do when they become current.
  • Notes. I have a strong note taking habit, but a weak note reading habit. Essentially, many of my notes are write-only; this feels like a waste. I’ve started my attempts to improve the situation with meeting notes: trying to take five minutes right after a meeting (if possible) to go over the notes, extract any calendar items, actions and waiting-fors, and decide whether I need to save the note or if I can throw it away. What to do about research notes from reading and from seminars is another matter.

One notebook’s worth of work

Publicerat i dear diary, english, the practice of science av

Image: an Aviagen sponsored notebook from the 100 Years of Genetics meeting in Edinburgh, with post-its sticking out, next to a blue Ballograf pen

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.