Tomorrow I’m going to make the first big push to start using the GTD system. I’ll be doing the “mind sweep”, gathering all the various detritus of my life into the inbox (which will really be the “in corner of the room” because there will be so much of it) and doing the initial processing of it. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and now I’m really looking forward to the whole thing.
As a preparation for that, I actually got my email inbox down to zero tonight. At this point, my “Next Action” mailbox has 20 mails in it that need time to respond or are something I need to take action on. I have a “Someday” mailbox with another 200 mails in it which I’ll be sorting through as part of my periodic re-evaluations. So, it’s not like I have actually handled everything that was in the inbox but I’m part of the way there. From now on, my email inbox follows the same rules as my GTD inbox – it gets processed and the things that take 2 minutes or less get immediate replies, the things that need action get moved to the appropriate box and those that need no action get filed or deleted. The days of the 300+ mails in the inbox should be over, as should the days of having things of various levels of importance and commitment scattered throughout my house and my life.
Good luck with mind sweep and organisation. After your post the other day about the hipster PDA I’ve been doing a lot of reading on GTD and similar things (lifehacker.com, instructables.com, 43folders, etc) and have been really impressed with what I’ve been reading.
I feel like this is a really good thing and I think the uplifter way of life is a good one, and if more people adopted it, then some things would really improve in the world.
I’ve considered adopting some of these things myself but I don’t feel like my life is so chaotic that I will benefit from half of it. I do like some of the DIY projects and ideas I’ve discovered (such as the use of a plastic overdoor shoe rack as storage for gadgets and cables for all sorts of tech stuff) and really wanna try implementing some of them in my day to day life. Also, the idea of not opening your inbox till you’ve been at work for like an hour is a particularly good idea.
Anyway, good luck with everything. I look forward to hearing how things have changed in the short term and long term on the clambake, which seem to be a bit thin on the ground at the moment. Hope you find the time around your new job to keep up the ECG’s as you’ve quickly found yourself into my daily rotation of podcasts.