Good Will Blogging
How do you like them apples...

Phase 1. Use a GTD system. It works well. Things are getting done, nothing is being forgotten, and you’re feeling less stress. Life is good in Phase 1.

Phase 2. You grow confidence in your system. So much confidence that you throw new tasks into it with giddy abandon. Adding tasks to the system starts to give you the same feeling of accomplishment as actually completing the task. (This is obviously wrong, and the first warning sign.)

Phase 3. Tasks are going into the system much faster than they’re coming out. It starts to grow out of control. The number of tasks becomes overwhelming, and you resist looking at them.

Phase 4. You try to regain control by “organising” the system. You make categories and special lists. You associate actions to projects. You invent new disciplines for yourself to “keep things organised”.

Phase 5. The work required to keep the system up-to-date starts to exceed the time spent on the actual tasks it tracks. Now you feel it’s not working. Something has to change.

Phase 6. You notice an article or an ad for a “simple”, “clean”, and/or “powerful” to-do manager. You think, “That’s what I need! This system I have now is too complicated, too hard to use.” And you switch. Maybe you figure out a way to export all your projects and actions from the old system and import them to the new. Or maybe you decide to “start fresh.”

Repeat from Phase 1.

I’ve personally been through about 7 or 8 different GTD systems. That’s 7 or 8 times through the cycle above. I know it well. And I just completed Phase 6 again this week.

As a future reference for myself, more than anything else, here are some thoughts on what makes GTD tick — what makes a “good” GTD system.

First, and most important, GTD is a process of thinking, not a system or a tool.

A couple of years ago, I heard an interview with one of the “coaches” from the David Allen company, talking about her experiences teaching GTD. She said that often people will ask what’s the best tool to keep GTD lists, or complain that they really like their Filofax, or their Outlook, or their Post-it notes. She would say, “That’s fine! I can teach you how to do GTD on Post-it notes.” Her point being that GTD is about thinking what is the next action, and relieving your brain of the burden of having to remember so much stuff.

So it really doesn’t matter what your tools are. In fact, I’ve found that the tools can actually get in the way, because they distract me from the really important job of thinking.

Second, don’t invent parts of GTD that aren’t really there.

A classic and very common example is association between projects and actions. It’s so common for GTD tools to offer a way to link projects to actions, that many people I know think that it’s part of GTD. It is not. This is like that Real Monopoly meme. Go back and read the GTD book again — it’s not in there. There is even specific advice not to try to link projects and actions. You just need a Next Actions list, a Projects list, and that’s it.

The rationale for this is that if the project is current, the action real, and you are doing your Weekly Review, you will know which actions relate to which project.

Having learned this lesson once already, I again fell into this trap while using Flow. I am now convinced that trying to link projects and actions is death to a GTD system. Having actions tucked away in project lists just keeps them out of sight, out of mind. And it hides the true size of your system. Keeping your lists short should be part of the motivation to get things done, and to not over-commit yourself.

Third, use the Someday/Maybe list aggressively.

When you find yourself with a bit of time, scanning your actions list to find something you can get done, you should be able to complete any action on the list. If you look at an action, there can only be three possible reasons why you can’t do it right now:

1. It needs a context, either a place or a person, to get done. If this is the case, you should really annotate the action with that context right away, so you don’t go through this again next time.
2. It’s not really a next action, i.e. you haven’t done enough thinking to boil down the next “physical, visible thing needed to move the situation forward.” If this is the case, do that thinking now, and replace this action with the real next action. Then do it.
3. You don’t want to do it. If you don’t feel motivated to complete the action, and it’s not because of the two reasons above, then either delete it and forget about it, or move it to Someday/Maybe. (This also applies to projects.)

The goal here is to keep your Projects list and your Next Actions list as short as possible. They should be a list of things that you are really motivated to complete. Looking at these lists should get you excited, not make you groan.

Moving something to Someday/Maybe is not throwing it away, so long as you commit yourself to reviewing the Someday/Maybe list regularly, about twice per month or so. Of course, when you do, delete things that you recognise will never happen — you don’t want that list to become overgrown and full of useless crap, either.

Fourth, no metadata, no notes, just things on lists.

Another bad habit encouraged by all these GTD tools (especially electronic) is adding all sorts of tags, due dates, priorities, notes, etc. The best GTD system I ever had was paper-based. I really encourage people to try running a non-electronic GTD system for a few months. The nice thing about paper-based systems is they resist a lot of metadata cruft. You can write down due dates, tags, priorities, etc., but it’s a lot more effort, so you don’t so much.

This is how it should be, even when using an electronic tool. The occasional due date or priority highlight is fine, but over-reliance on them dilutes their meaning, to the point of becoming a waste of time.

Fifth, don’t get too hung up on contexts.

I’ve never found it helpful to keep separate lists for each context, mostly because there would just be too many of them, and again, having a lot of lists means actions are hidden and easily forgotten.

It’s best to just keep one big list of all actions (or two, if you use “the line”), and note your contexts at the beginning of the action, e.g. “@Dad — ask about ideas for Mum’s birthday present”. It works well for both paper and electronic systems, because you either scan down the list visually, or just search for “Dad”.

And anyway, what are those contexts? For me at least, there’s @Home and @Office, and maybe @Shops, and the rest are people. And since most actions in “people” contexts can be accomplished by phone, email, or text, they can actually be done anywhere, anytime. So don’t spend a lot of time adding contexts. Add them only when not being in a context prevents you from completing an action here and now.

Finally, GTD is about getting things done.

Any time spent fiddling with the system is time not spent completing actions. Behind every minute spent “organising” the system, is a reason why you’re not motivated to complete the actions in there. Find that reason. Figure it out. Move forward.

I’m trying a variant of the 30/30 Work Cycle for days when I work by myself, without the distractions of meetings and random interruptions. So far, it seems to work fairly well, especially when motivation is a bit low and the work takes a lot of concentration.

My variant goes like this:

1. Set a timer (on iPhone, in my case) for 25 minutes.
2. Work on something hard until the timer goes off.
3. Take a minute to jot down notes on whatever thought you were in the middle of.
4. Stand up out of your seat, walk around, stretch, jump, whatever. Just get the blood flowing and the heart rate up.
5. Repeat from 1, choosing a very different task to the previous one.

I have noticed a few nice benefits to working like this.

First, getting up and moving my body about twice per hour seems to help a lot with the lethargy that usually comes from working at a desk all day.

Second, the context shifts keep everything feeling fresh. Motivation is a lot easier when I know I only have to concentrate on this task for 25 minutes, especially for tasks I’ve been avoiding. And, it’s amazing what can be achieved in only 25 minutes.

Third, it stops the opposite problem, where I get too engrossed in a task that is easy and/or fun, but ultimately not very important.

Fourth, when I have something I want to do, and something I know I should do, I don’t have to choose. I can do both! (Pro tip: always do the “should” task in the first 25-minute session.)

I’ve found that with this method, I can work for many hours (my record so far is 12!), without falling into lethargy or fatigue, with 50 out of every 60 minutes spent in concentrated, productive work.

After Metalab made collaboration with non-members free, it suddenly became feasible to use Flow as both my main GTD system in anger, and as a team management tool. I signed up for $10/month and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

All I can say is “wow.” I never expected it to be so good. It’s very subtle, but there is something about Flow that makes it the first really successful GTD system I’ve ever had.

I have used many many GTD apps in the past, with varying degrees of success, but the most important thing about maintaining a GTD system is to keep it up-to-date and fresh. The problem with all the iPhone apps I have used until now is the lack of a strong desktop solution.

It doesn’t matter how good the iPhone app is, when I’m at my desk processing email, stopping to capture an action in my iPhone is too disruptive to the workflow, so it doesn’t happen.

I’ve tried apps that also have a desktop companion product, like Things and OmniFocus, but they are Mac-only which means I can’t use them at work. And to be honest, both are pretty terrible desktop apps.

So the first and biggest benefit of Flow is that the web app looks and feels like a desktop app, but I can use it exactly the same way on Mac or Windows.

I don’t know what is taking the Cultured Code guys so long to implement cloud sync for Things — judging from their blog they seem to be really over-thinking and over- engineering it. OmniFocus had a reasonably good cloud sync over 2 years ago, and Metalab seem to have perfected it in Flow.

Flow’s sync has all the properties you would want in a cloud-based sync solution: it’s fast, automatic, and reliable.

And man is it fast! It happens in the background in the iPhone app, so you probably wouldn’t even notice if it was slow, but it is usually finished in a few seconds.

I don’t know for sure, but it seems they have achieved this by making the sync incremental in such a way that it doesn’t need to sync its entire database every time, just the particular list or task that you are viewing.

I have sat in meetings with people in my team, and assigned a task to them on my iPhone, and a few seconds later it shows up on their iPhone. There is a palpable sense of transfer of responsibility when I do that, which has made a noticeable difference to productivity.

Flow has a very simple, bare-bones approach to GTD — in fact, it is not specific to GTD at all. They even renamed “projects” to “lists” to erase any trace of the app imposing a particular methodology on the user. I am a GTD guy, and it works perfectly as a GTD app.

I think the only “pure” GTD feature missing is the “tickler”, which was implemented in Things as “scheduled tasks.” But, to be honest, even as a GTD purist, the tickler is too often an invitation to procrastinate. I don’t miss it.

As I’ve noted before, sometimes just changing my GTD system is enough to motivate a period of great effectiveness, so I must acknowledge that this could be just another case of “a change is as good as a holiday.” We’ll see.

So Metalab, the people behind Flow, have just announced free collaboration with non-members.

Metalab:

Today, we’re making it even easier to collaborate with anyone in your life. From now on, when you delegate a task to someone who hasn’t signed up, they’ll receive a personalized link to the task instead of a generic invitation to Flow. They can respond to comments, complete tasks, and view all of the tasks they’ve been assigned—all without signing up. And best of all, it’s totally free.

This is the key change that makes is possible to seriously consider moving to Flow permanently. Now, I don’t have to worry about the huge cost to have my whole team on Flow. Even if I am the only paying member, I can still use it to delegate tasks to them and get their updates. (That’s all I really need for my own purposes.)

In fact, it might even be better. I’ve found that Flow can be a little too promiscuous when it comes to sharing lists with collaborators. If you add a person (who is fully signed up) as a collaborator to a list/project, tasks you add for yourself appear to the collaborator as a task for them. Effectively, they are everyone’s tasks. A couple of times already, someone else has marked as completed a task that I was planning to work on myself. It seems that when you have others collaborating on a list/project, you have to explicitly delegate to yourself if you don’t want them to work on it.

Although they are still ahead in terms of some features, I think Things has some catching up to do here. They have a Mac version, but Flow has the edge in that their desktop (web) app works anywhere. That is a huge advantage if you want to access your task lists from home and work, especially if you are forced to use Windows at work. To be honest, although it is a little slow, the Flow web app is actually ahead of Things for Mac in terms of UI & UX in my opinion.

As soon as I went back to Things I immediately noticed probably the most compelling thing about Flow as a personal GTD system: the ability to use it on the desktop (via the web UI) at work (Windows). It was jarring to have to suddenly go back to picking up my iPhone while processing email in the morning just to enter an action item.

I realised that with Flow, I’ve got a desktop app on both Windows and Mac, an iPhone app, and I can also use it on iPad if I want, all cloud-synced, and I don’t have to worry about the company firewall. That’s actually pretty compelling.

So this morning I decided to just sign up for myself, on the month-by-month plan, to evaluate it for a few months as my personal GTD system. I’ll also tell my teammates that if they choose to join me, to let me add them to my account so we get the volume discount if enough do.

This is an experiment, which is why this post is titled “Update 1” — I’ll be back with the results in a few months.