GTD can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it. GTD has so many awesome techniques to make sure you get your stuff done. Over the years I’ve learned, it’s not about the way to get things done, it’s about getting things done. So with that, I’m all about finding the best method that suits you. It took a long time for me to get to a point where GTD was comfortable for me. I needed a way that didn’t interrupt me, so I just altered things that I use on a daily basis in order to streamline my workflow. Aspects of GTD that I use are:
1. Inbox
2. Context (to an extent)
3. Archive
4. Inbox Zero (a weekly goal of mine I read about a long time ago on 43folders.com)

There are countless posts out there that explain each of these, but instead of doing that, I’ll just show you what I do with each of them. Inbox is, of course, my email’s Inbox. Everything I do starts there. Even if it’s me sending myself an email for something I need to do. When I get an email I asked myself: “Can I take care of this now?” If the answer is “Yes,” then I do whatever I need to do then go back to the email and click the Archive button, and that email is removed from my Inbox. If the answer is “No,” then it’s a matter of why I can’t. Is it a project based email? Am I not able to do what the email says because of where I am? Or simply, do I not have the time right at the moment to do it? Now comes the interesting part, what happens with that email?

This is where Context comes into play. If I get an email that’s a notification of a new follower on Twitter, but I happen to be reading it on my phone, I will just leave it in my Inbox until I get home, so I can properly follow back and send a personal DM to them. If it’s an email about coding up a piece of a project, I’ll place a label on it (if it’s not already on it) and leave it in my Inbox for when I can get to it. If it’s something that I can’t get to for a day or two, I’ll Archive it, but then have it Boomerang back into my Inbox then. Boomerang is a great GMail plugin that allows for scheduling of emails.

I mentioned adding labels to an email. What I will do is utilize the very powerful GMail Labels to organize my emails that are archived so that it’s easy to find an email based on a project, person and a keyword in the content. 9 times out of 10, the first time I run a search, I will find the exact email I’m looking for. I will set my labels up with the name formatted like ‘P/‘. This way it’s not only a unique string, but also a quick way to see that it’s a Project because of the ‘P/’ and then what project it is. Once I create a Label, I will also set up a filter as well, this way an email will get tagged with the label as it comes into my inbox. Most times, the filter will be based on who it’s from and some keyword in the email body, such as the project name for an obvious keyword.

Of course, this can be just the tip of the iceberg for you. There are things in my workflow that I didn’t go into here because it may not apply to you. I just wanted to give you a glimpse into another way of doing GTD, maybe even a simpler way as well. You have to find what’s right for you and what works for you. If you have to work hard to make GTD a part of your day, then you aren’t doing it right. It should be almost natural.

I took a screencast of a quick glimpse into how I go about my reading my email. Please feel free to leave a comment or questions about it below. As a GTD freak, I’d love to hear how others spin it.

*edit*
I couldn’t figure out how to get Vimeo to have my video as an HD video, so I apologize for the low quality of the video. But it’s still visible. If anyone knows how to do this, or a good process to have these screencasts, please feel free to let me know, thanks. I’ll use it for future posts.

One of the main ideas behind GTD is that you have a place where you put all your thoughts and tasks into and then based on where you are and who you are with, it’s easy to pull them out of and check them off as done. I tried OmniFocus, ToodleDo, Things, Remember The Milk, and a few other applications, web based and desktop alike. All served the purpose very well, but I just wasn’t comfortable with them. When someone asks me about how I do GTD or what application is best, I always say “whatever works for you.” If it’s something that doesn’t just slide into your life and you have to shoehorn it in, you’ll never use it. It has to be something that’s automatic for you.

For me, there’s nothing that’s more automatic than the countless number of emails I get on a daily basis. Also, my calendar goes everywhere with me. It’s on my desk, phone, and of course laptop. I do use Google Apps in order to make sure that everything stays together. When I receive an email, I pretty much know exactly what that email will trigger as far as a task goes for me based on the person who sent it and the content of that email. I will go into this in more detail in a later post, but for the purpose of this post, emails come regardless of whether I want them or not, so I don’t have to do anything else other than read them to slide them into my GTD. If a date is involved either by talking with someone or in an email, it triggers me to open my calendar immediately (on my phone or laptop) and put it right in.

What becomes a little more complex is my daily tasks on the projects I’m working on. This is where my whiteboard comes into play. I actually have 2 of them, one in the kitchen and one above my desk. The one in the kitchen is more of a dumping ground for random thoughts that come to me at odd times. The one above my desk is tasks broken out into projects.

Between my email, calendar, and whiteboards, GTD is automatic for me. It’s not something I have to think about, it’s just what I do. The tools I use are nothing that I have to shoehorn into my life, they are just there, hence automatic. I can’t stop people from sending me emails (no matter how hard I try ), I can’t stop people from using dates, so why try? The projects are a little more involved, but again, not really. You should not be wasting cycles on figuring out how to do GTD. Just let your brain work on the tasks themselves. Think about how you get “things” coming into your life, then think about the easiest way to process them at that moment to getting it done, and you’ll find your GTD.

I’ve been told on many occasions over the years that I work too hard. Well, when I was a kid, I knew that if I wanted something, I had to work for it, whether it was to be better at a sport, beat a friend at the arcade version of Street Fighter, aggressive inline skating, school, etc. For as long as I can remember, and my Mom can attest to this, I wanted to retire at the age of 35 and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do that by just doing the 9 to 5. Well in order to achieve that goal, I’m pretty sure at this point, I would either need to win the lottery or the number of hours in a day need to be doubled to 48.

August 6th marked the year anniversary of me going out totally on my own. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on that year and see where I sit. Well, I’ve had a gained a great deal of experience in sorting through workloads, projects, and people. Sure, I’ve been doing freelance for a long time prior to this past year, but I always had that full time gig to fall back on. Now, I have to do the sales, administrative, billing, marketing, on top of the development, at a full time+ level. But now it’s just me. When I’m working, I’m working for me and my goals. If I know I need a little extra next month, I can push the pedal to the floor a little more this month in the “sales dept.” If I am swamped, I know to pull off on that pedal and coast a bit. Sure I’m working very hard and 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours a day to make money. But I’m also working hard to live life the way I want to as well.

Over the last year, I’ve seen my work and personal life achieve more of a balance. Parts of this balance I pushed for, and other parts just fell into place. Doing what I do as a profession allows me certain “luxuries” that others don’t. For example, sometimes I need to watch my 2 year old nephew during the day, so I will work either late into the night or wake up extremely early (such as 3AM) to get the work done for the day, so I can have a blast watching my nephew. Also, being able to spend time with my girlfriend when she’s not working, I can juggle my workload around so I can make sure to be with her.

Do I work alot? Sure I do. Do I like what I do? Sure I do. Do I get to do the fun things I want to do? I most certainly do, otherwise, what’s the point?! So when people say to me that I “work too hard” I tend to smile and just think, “yup, I sure do, and can’t be any happier!”

Courtesy of Dustin Curtis

Overview
I’ve always been fascinated by sleep and what happens to us while we are sleeping, but that’s for a later day. I came across this post one day and thought that I’d like to try this – Polyphasic Sleep – out for a little while and see what happens. Polyphasic Sleep is the idea of distributed sleep over a 24 hour period, usually with naps. Most people sleep in one clip over several hours (generally at night for at least 6-8 hours). Polyphasic Sleep has several different methods with the extreme called Uberman, which is six 20 minute naps over the course of 24 hours. I’m going to scale that back a bit to the Everyman (shown above), which is two 20 minute naps and 4.5 hours of core sleep.

Theory
Basically the idea here is that REM sleep, which is the phase of sleep where dreams occur, is the most beneficial to us. Now, I’m not sure that’s the case, but at least for this experiment, we’ll take it as fact. Everyone that’s been overworked and hasn’t had sleep in a long time, such as 24 hours or more, has experienced waking dreams. This is when you find yourself having a dream when you are awake, duh . This is your body’s self-defense mechanism to try and recover itself, despite you. So it stands to make sense that REM sleep is the phase of sleep that is most crucial.

Objective
As many of you know I’m big into productivity, but at the same time like my sleep as well. Lately I’ve been finding myself setting my alarm at weird hours, such as 2:30am, 4am, etc just so I can get up and get some work done. After doing it about 15-20 times, I would say that on average, I’ve been successful with it about half the time. Why? Well because I was exhausted and wound up hitting the snooze button until it was the normal time to get up, 6:30am. So because of my workload, I’d like to try and see how well this works out and if I can get extra hours back in my day (one of the things I’m aiming for this year), that would be golden.

Results
I will be posting my results on here and via Twitter as well. I figure by showing my results not only will it be documented, others curious to this form of sleeping can see the results of such an experiment.

I personally hate it. But it does serve a good time to listen to some tunes and plan out the day. GTD happens anywhere and when practiced, everywhere.

I try to think about the next tasks that will take my morning so I can get right to it when I get in. I also use this opportunity to listen back on my Evernote voice recordings and even brainstorm ideas on projects.

Bottomline here is we all are busy and get pulled in a hundred different ways all day, cease those times during the day when it’s just you with little or no distractions to get things done.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

Zero Inbox — one of the great accomplishments of any productive day. I’m a big fan of the Zero Inbox methodology. The theory in a nutshell is when you process your email, read the email and think of “what do I need to do with this email?” If it’s something that can be answered right away (less than 2 minutes), then reply directly and then archive the email. If it’s something that I need to look something up, talk to someone else about it, or would just take too long to reply back, then I mark it with a date to process later and archive it. If it’s something like a response to a question that I had for someone, an advertisement, or just something that I don’t need to deal with, then I just mark it with a keyword and archive it.

The idea here is to clean out your inbox, and then when you come to your review of your tasks for the day, you will be able to see what emails need addressing at that time. Before I adopted this method, I found that there would be a few emails that would slip through the cracks. Someone would inevitably call me asking about something that was referred to in an email 2 weeks ago. Then I’d be stuck, because I knew I read it, just forgot about it because something else came up. With this method, each and every email gets dealt with in its own way.

I will go into this with more detail later, but if anyone has any questions on this, feel free to ask. It’s something that has totally changed the way I handle my email and just makes things SO much easier.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

As you can see in the picture, my desk is pretty clean with some exceptions.  You can see my flightdesk off to the left inside the desk.  But for the most part my desk here is clean and I’ve been getting tons of work done lately sitting in that chair.  Today, after lunch I cleaned up my desk at work and the afternoon was a productive one.  So my advice to you, and you can take if you want to (this is my blog, so I’m going to say it anyway ) is if you are having a tough time getting started with a project or task, take a look around you and see if you can straighten up the place a little, you’d be surprised how well less clutter will work.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

1. 

   OmniFocus - The Must Have App for GTD

   Understand GTD and Use OmniFocus to Make It Happen
   Reading up on Getting Things Done (aka GTD) and learning what that methodology speaks to.  Along with my must have tool, OmniFocus by OmniGroup, I figured out a way to trap all that I need to get done.  Without OmniFocus, I don’t know where I would be right now.  This application is my lifeline to all the tasks and projects that I have to do.  I use it each and everyday, all day long.  Every thought, email that requires more than a quick reply, notion, comment, speaking point I have gets put into OmniFocus so that I can take care of it or review it at some later date.  Even if I’m dreaming of some idea that I may ever do in my lifetime, like make a TV show, will go into OmniFocus.

2. What To Do When Out and About
   I have the OmniFocus iPhone app, which helps me remain organized when I’m not sitting in front of my computer.  What is a really nice feature that I use all the time is the Geocoding for Contexts.  This is basically marking a specific location to where you can accomplish your tasks.  For example, I have a context called Grocery Store and I’ve set that to my local Stop and Shop.  Whenever I know I need to buy something, I put it into OmniFocus as an action and assign it to my Grocery Store context.  Then when I make it to Stop and Shop, I bring it up on my iPhone, hit the location button, and that context and all my items that I need to purchase appear right on my phone.
3. GTD in the car
   What I found to be the toughest situation are those where you aren’t in front of a computer or can’t type a task into the iPhone, but have a thought that I need to get down.  An example of this is like when I’m in the car and I get an idea for a project I’m working on.  This is where Evernote has come into play.  If you haven’t checked it out, do so – Evernote!  They too have an iPhone app, but what it can do is be able to take a voice recording and then once I get to my computer, I’ll sync up my Evernote Desktop App and then process those “Untitled” notes into OmniFocus.
   

   My Flightdeck

4. The Flightdeck
   This is not an original idea of mine.  I heard about this first on Paul Boag’s Posterous microblog.  The idea is called “flightdeck” and made perfect sense for me.  When I come home from wherever I may have been, I always walk past my desk.  I empty my pockets of my essentials.  This consists of my wallet, keys, iPhone, sunglasses, and my card pass for work.  These will always be at the front part of my desk where I know that they will be at all times and I will not forget any one particular item.

So there are a few of my tips on having a productive day.  I know that I’ve tried a few different methods over a year now and this is what works for me.  Hopefully you can take something away from this and maybe use it in your day as well.  I know that I’ll be talking more about this topic as we grow, but I figured this post would be a good introduction to it.