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Getting Productive in 2009 - Spending a Year with GTD

When I first started my career about 17 years ago, I had a mentor of mine give me Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. It was a book that transformed my life and the way I balanced it and and accomplished things on a weekly basis. Yes, I had a “Daily Planner” that was a 7 ring binder which eventually was replaced by a Palm Pilot in the late 90’s and eventually a Palm Treo Smart Phone in the early part of this decade. I loved ‘7 Habits’ but I still felt overwhelmed.

In 2007 someone gave me David Allen’s Getting Things Done book as a present. Everyone I knew that read it, loved it. So I gave it a read but I didn’t really get it. I had been doing the stuff I needed to do for years so why was this so revolutionary?

Toward the end of 2008 with my life getting busier on the personal side and the demands of work still increasing with responsibility, I needed to get this under control. So a few weeks ago I sat down with a good friend of mine who really explained GTD to me in a way I could understand and with some software tools I could work with.

I finally got the point and the core of GTD - When something comes in, do it, file it or toss it. Just get it out of your brain so you can focus on the task at hand. WOW. For someone that feels ADD but has never been diagnosed it fed my control freak nature while allowing me to process everything as it came in and handle it properly in its own due time.

As we approach the end of 2008 I am looking at 2009 as a really busy and exciting year. I’m not usually a fan of the typical New Year’s resolution but I actually just did one for the entire year (read the entire bible over 365 days) so I know I can do something if I focus and am committed.

So since I am just starting with GTD and learning as I go, I would like to share my experiences, lessons learned and hacks I learn along the way.

I will be sharing this journey over on our sister site, MySolutionSpot.com, and cross-posting here. I will be writing once a month on this in a sort of “month in retrospective”. Who knows, maybe you will be inspired and take the journey with me or at the very least learn something new about organizing your life that will make you more productive.

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