Mon, 01 May 2006
Collect gets an A
I’ve told myself I’d not get into GTD navel gazing. However, since it seems to be the natural order of things, I’d best get on with it so that I can get into such glories as what I really think about my President and Linux rules, OMG PONIES!!!. Slightly more seriously, it made sense to evaluate my plan every so often; in this case, about 6 months.
Here’s the deal: I rock at the GTD collect step. I am the HPDA master. My email flow is solid. My inboxes are well used. I very well may p0wn the Allen himself at getting my thoughts onto paper and out of my head. I even manage to have my total number of inboxes down to a reasonable number (5).
After the collect step, though, things get worse. Much worse. This isn’t the end of the world; after all, in a linear system you’re better off being better at the earlier parts than the later parts. I think that it’s time to focus some energy of the next part: processing. I suck at it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat down and asked “Is this actionable? What’s the next action?”. I usually dump things onto my project lists and hope that I’ll figure it out later when I review. This is phenomenally stupid; the whole point of processing is to take care of things up front.
I think that part of the problem is that I don’t do processing as a separate task. I should be treating it as a task in its own right to be done mindfully and in isolation. After all, if I don’t have the time to process stuff that I’ve collected, I certainly don’t have time to do anything with the results.