Back in the GTD Saddle

The last several months have been a whirlwind, culminating (at least to this point) with the Feb. 10 launch of our member community site for the Social Media Health Network, which is associated with our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

We’ve also now completed our staffing for the Center, and of course that was a major undertaking, as was selecting the new members for our External Advisory Board.

The hectic pace and the need to try to get back on top of it all led me to refocus on more rigorously applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which was among the main topics of this blog in the pre-chancellor years. Here’s a post from 2006 that’s a good jumping-off point for GTD exploration.

So on Saturday, January 15 I decided to head over to the office after our radio show production, and spent about three hours getting to this point:

Of course I didn’t capture the “before” state, but let me assure you it wasn’t pretty.

And as I referenced in the video, neither was my email inbox. I did make a strong effort over the ensuing few weeks, but even as of Feb. 13 I had nearly 2,300 emails that were in various stages of processing:

So last week I made a major push, and by Friday at 3:38 p.m. CST I reached my goal:

As GTDers know, that doesn’t mean that I had nothing left to do with my emails, but it did mean I had processed all of them and had decided whether they were

  • Actionable items to Delegate, Do, or Defer
  • Reference materials that could be valuable at some point, or
  • Items to Delete

As of this evening I have kept my office in the clean and clear mode for 27 work days. I’ve had five straight days of getting to the empty email inbox.

With the explosion of communication, your life is not likely to get less busy any time soon, as the number of potential inputs you get will continue to increase. That’s why it’s important to have a means of handling all that “stuff.”

If you haven’t explored GTD, I highly recommend it.

Top SMUG Book Recommendations

While we have a SMUG book store that I plan to reorganize and upgrade, I wanted to take a moment to highlight three books that most professionals thinking about applying social media will find particularly helpful.

Getting Things Done, by David Allen, is my absolute first recommendation, particularly if you just don’t think you have the time or energy to fit another thing, social media, into your already overcommitted life. This blog started out as a way for me to learn about blogging, and Getting Things Done (or GTD) was a key element of my posts for the first year or so. Just type “GTD” in the search box at right and you’ll see several of those posts. A good way to get an intro to GTD, before you buy the book.

On a similar topic, I recommend The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, particularly for his observations relating to email and meetings. He’s snarky bordering on sarcastic and I don’t buy into his “new rich” goals for life, but he has some excellent and immensely practical observations on how to get the most out of your work time.

Finally, on a more theoretical note, I offer Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. This book won’t help you swim through the torrents of email and other commitments, but it will give you perspective on how and why it makes economic sense for services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to be free to users. And it may help stimulate your thinking about you work or business, and how you can incorporate free into your business model.

I’ve reviewed each of these books in more detail here on SMUG, so look in the book review category for background. If you click the affiliate links above and buy the books, SMUG would get a dollar or two. But if you have an Audible.com account, you can get this last book for free. The other two also are available on Audible.com, which leads to no SMUG kickback. It doesn’t matter to me…get them however you would like, but I really think you’ll find these books helpful.

Yammer 104: Yammer as GTD General Reference File

In this post I wrote about how a blog can be the ultimate personal electronic “general reference” filing system that is consistent with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or GTD, approach to life organization.

I still think a blog can be useful for general reference. I often use the SMUG blog in that way. I vaguely remember that I’ve written about something here, and use the search box at right to find the information, often including links to relevant external Web sites.

But that post was written in the pre-Twitter, pre-Yammer era. I think these micro-blogging tools can be even better for this general reference function than a full-blown blog is.

Continue reading “Yammer 104: Yammer as GTD General Reference File”