Authors Note: This blog post was imported from substack
In my freshman year of college I wrote the above poem for my Intro to Poetry class. As corny as it was, it really reflected my mental state at the time.
I felt like a rubber duck floating on top of a bathtub with the drain plug pulled below.
I’ve always been one to try new productivity systems as a means to get my life in order and I would always rave about “This new method I found,” only to drop it a month or so later, much to the dismay of my friends.
However, the one thing I gained from all this was a system of tips, tricks, and lessons that helped me figure out my own style of productivity.
I am a firm believer in the fact that there is no such thing as the ultimate productivity system. The Pomodoros, Time Blocking, and Deep Works of the world may work for some, but at the end of the day these work for the average person- and we all tend to deviate a tiny bit.
All this to say, the newest productivity/self-help book I’ve read was David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s something I won’t shut up about, and since my friends are too busy to read it, I’ll give the sparknotes here.
What most of these books teach you is how to manage your time, Pomodoro says use 15 minute blocks, Deep Work says work in long, uninterrupted stretches, and Motion says to schedule every hour and every minute of your time.
But GTD doesn’t focus on that. This book dives deep into what to actually do with your time.
It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect time management system, if you have to complete a task that says “Organize a College Prom,” that would turn away even the most productive of people.
The point of this system is to have 100% trust in your task tracker. And the book dedicates a large portion of itself to helping you build that trust. While that statement does feel colossal, here’s a few pointers and tricks that I’ve found extremely helpful.
The basis, and what I think is the most important thing Getting Things Done discusses, is redefining what a Task is.
In my interpretation of the book there are three types of Tasks:
🔔 Day/Calendar Specific (Reminder) Tasks
These are tasks that you can only do on a certain day. Think of getting money from the bank via a withdrawal slip, since that can only be completed on a weekday.
📅 Waiting For Tasks
These are tasks that you absolutely can’t do until someone else takes action first. Maybe you’re waiting on approval, getting input, or something completed before you start.
➡️ Next Actions
These are the backbone of the Getting Things Done methodology. The book dedicated many pages to this subject, but simply put: If you had all the time in the world, you would do it right now
But before all of this, how do we even figure out what our tasks are in the first place?
📥 Inboxes
Getting Things Done really hammers the point of getting everything out of your head. This includes random thoughts, ideas, but most important: the fleeting tasks and goals you have for yourself.
In order to do this however, you need to make it as easy as possible to mark down what you are thinking.
Personally, in the car I’ll ask Siri to make a reminder. In meetings I’ll scribble it on the agenda. In school I’ll throw something on my Notes app.
What’s important is that you have a list of all the places you store these thoughts (your “Inboxes”), they should consistently be put somewhere easy to find. It doesn’t matter how many inboxes you have, as long as you know where they are.
After a while, you’ll have started to accumulate a list of tasks, thoughts, and other miscellaneous (and maybe even incoherent) things.
Hopefully in the process, you’ve managed to unload all the thoughts scrambling in your head.
Now comes the fun part.
Find a central task tracking app, and this is extremely important: THE TRACKER DOES NOT MATTER. THE SOFTWARE DOES NOT MATTER.
If it can log your tasks, it’s good enough. Hell, you can even use a notebook for this. Just please, do not spend more than 10 minutes picking a software. Just pick one and go.
The most important thing GTD explains is that the methodology is software-independent. Anything and everything works.
Whatever you choose, all you have to do is empty out your various inboxes into a central inbox to be processed. For example, the ones currently in mine are
Reach out to my professor about emails
Figure out how to get a confirmation for my CLEP to hit registrars
When you lend a pen, never expect to get it back
Book tickets for May Trip
It’s natural to have a ton of random things end up here the first time you do this. I personally had about 60-70. But what matters here is that this list should be comprehensive, it should capture every fleeting though you have.
Going back to the poem above, all the stress really comes from holding this shit in your head. Sometimes it really does feel like you’re fighting an invisible Goliath.
All your tasks, all your goals and aspirations, and the feeling you get when someone else accomplishes something you really wanted, meld together into a monster that doesn’t even exist.
Every single task in that poem was a chain holding me down, because I was holding it in my head.
In an effort to have more posts on this blog, I’ll break this up. In the next part, I’ll discuss how to convert your central inbox to your Tasks, the real Two-Minute Rule, and Kidlin’s law on Project Planning.
Let me know if you found something helpful here! It’s nice to know I’m not screaming into the void. I’d love to hear what productivity tricks have worked (or failed) for you!