Neural Interface

I have recently started to implement GTD. There are millions and millions of setups out there and I certainly am not interested in boring you too much. I rather want to give you an idea of what I find important in an GTD implementation and where I see problems. I would be really interested in hearing about our setups and how ou solved certain things.

What is GTD?

First of all, I want to give you a short intro to GTD. This is intended for people who have never heard of it. So if you know about lists, inbox and general reference filing systems, you should skip this.

GTD stands for Getting Things Done and is an organization method popularized in a book by the same name from David Allen. Some people see him as an total hero, others see him critical. I pretty much agree with this article, which claims that people went farther then he did.

Central idea of GTD is, that you should always know what to do next. If you don’t, you will have more stretches of time where you are under stress and try to get an overview. This will not work. Also, if you don’t keep track of all the things the need your attention, you will forget about them. Especially if you don’t like them.

For that he proposes to have one Inbox to collect everything that might need attention. This includes ideas, project drafts, files, lists, items or objects. Then, whenever there is time, you should skim through it and decide what to do next on any give item.

Second, you decide whether you can act on anything right away, later or if it is part of a bigger project. If the action takes less than 2 minutes, do it now. If you need to do it later, put it in a calendar. If it is part of bigger project, put all the things belonging to it in a certain space. Projects are basically everything that needs more then one step.

In his book, he explains very detailed how every step can be done etc. But I rather refer to the following graphic.

Other setups

As said there are a lot f different setups out there. Communities have build, ideas have prospered and certain “standards” emerged. I draw from a lot of sources and it would be unfair not name them:

• 43folders
• LifeHacker
• GTD-Times
• Geek Guide to GTD

My important requirements

Now, why didn’t I take one of the ideas over completely? I think, an very important point that needs to be stressed it, that setups need to work for you! The most sophisticated setup can be overwhelming for some, others don’t feel tickled enough by a plain paper and pen like implementation. My parameters are pretty much given by my work and my hardware:

OS independent

I work on Mac, iPhone, Linux and Windows (in this order). I want to be able to switch from one OS to the other without having to get used to a different way of doing thinks. Everything should be as similar as possible.

Computer independent

I work on any given day on three to 7 different computers. I need to be able to port my system quickly on any new computer in the matter of minutes, no hours! My current setup allows me set everything up within 20 minutes.

Mobile

My jobs demands that I switch places often. I have days where I run fMRI scans for 4.5 hours. This shows my need for being able to work not only on computers but laptops and especially mobile phones as well.

I’ll finish here for today. Tomorrow, I’ll walk you through the precise setup. It’s already late and I am bit to tired to spell all of that out :)