Ari Oskarsson - Litt om alt…

If you are new to the term GTD (Getting Things Done), it is bascically a time and commitment management system, and here is a an excerpt from Wikipedia which really captures what GTD is all about:

“GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks. “

I got started with GTD through using Mind Jet Mind Manager, and then finding the add-inn Result Manager. I have since then read 3 books on GTD, and I have now implemented in my way of working.  I’ve tried the new tool GyroQ from Gyronix, makers of ResultManager, and that applications makes it even easier to GTD with mind maps. I’ll post more on my experiences with GyroQ soon.

Nick Dulfill who works at the firm Gyronix, creator of the add-in for Mind Jet Mind Manager has a written a post on his blog “Beyond Crayons” which I found very interesting simply because it explained so easily my view of GTD.

One of the problems I have when I try to explain colleagues and friends why I use GTD as a method is that they do not understand the power of the decission i have made not to prioritize certain items. My productivity has increased, but not as much as I had antipated, but slowly I’ve realized that when I’m not in the work zone I am a lot more relaxed.

Here is an excerpt from Nicks post:

Since adopting GTD, I have learned to live with a to-do list that could keep me occupied for the next two to five years. I luxuriate in thinking that this is a bad thing and that I am failing to make significant progress each week, but in reality it’s not like that. By taking action, I am taking decisions - deciding to do one task in a hundred and leave the other 99 unattended. Instead of beating myself up for failing to also complete the other 99 actions, I can tell myself that I chose not to do them. If they were truly important, I would have done them. Actions speak louder than words.

The existence of the list gives you a baseline to evaluate whether it was better to do that one thing than to not do 99 others. Without the list as an anchor, you will just go wherever the wind takes you.

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Be sure to subscribe to his feed if your into GTD and mind mapping, he has some really interesting posts!

I use Mindjet’s Mind Manager for mind mapping. It’s kind of pricey, but the program is excellent and highly recomendable. I’ll post more about Mind Manager in the future. This post is about an add in to Mind Manager, called ResultManager. RM runs through every map I have (based on a map centrals or multimap) and shows outstanding tasks based on the GTD principle. GTD is simply put a set of rules that you have to apply every time you create a task. By using these rules ResultManager helps you to see which tasks i have to perform now, today and so on.

Patrick Rhone has a great post in his blog or journal as he calls it in regards to implementing GTD in Basecamp. To assign contexts he set up people, with context names like @office, @call and so on. He then goes on to assign tasks to people, ie contexts! Brilliant IMHO! Since Basecamp is free when you have just one project and it’s free to add unlimited users, you can set this up for FREE !  You can read the post here. Patrick has a similar post on how to implement GTD in Backpack.