The Art of GTD – Introduction
Welcome to the third tool in the approach toolkit – The Art of Getting Things Done. This tool dove tails perfectly with the two that proceed (Getting to the Root and Visualisation), and what is to come (Planning for Incremental Success).
Are you ready to supercharge your focus?
What is it?
The art of getting things done (GTD) is a skill that can be honed over time enabling you to become more efficient and laser focussed when it comes to taking action.
In a professional context, I pride myself on my ability to take action and push forward. This is something that is widely recognised as one of my key skills and my whole personal brand and reputation carries this at its heart. So really, out of all of the tools in The Mountain Pathway, this is probably the one I am most qualified to talk about.
Here is a little secret though… I love being lazy. Well, you could call it lazy, but I have rebranded this disposition as being efficient. The act of achieving the maximum possible output with the minimum strain and stress.
There are two aspects to this approach; one focusses on optimising how we do things so that waste is avoided, the other is about reducing our cognitive load by developing habits which are executed unconsciously yet are exactly the behaviours required to take action quickly and efficiently.
This tool covers both aspects of this approach with the insights covering a range of different tactics, tools, and tips to enable you to get your house in order and focus on the most important things right now.
This tool compliments all the other tools in the approach toolkit. Take for example the getting to the root tool; that tool is designed to uncover great knowledge of the actions required to achieve your goals; this tool is all about taking that knowledge and managing it in such a way that you are clear about what you need to do now, and what will then come next.
“The aim of knowledge management is not knowledge. It is action based on knowledge.“
– Laurence Prusak
“Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is only potential power. Action is power.”
– Tony Robbins
How Did it Start?
During my teens and twenties, to keep a bit of cash coming so I could have some fun without relying on the bank of mum and dad too much, I always had some sort of job on the go in the background to my college and university studies. I would turn my hand to anything from bar work, to landscape gardening, to stacking shelves in a supermarket. I wasn’t fussed really provided the hours fit with my study and the pay was ok. I did find however that physical labour had a real grounded honesty to it that kept me level headed as an ego driven young man though.
Anyway, this tool is not about managing our Egos, it is about personal organisation! What all these early jobs had in common was how you were required to focus; they were all very much point and shoot. There was a clear single task to complete or a line of customers to be served, so the work came to me and I didn’t really need to think about it, just tackle what was in front of me.
Fast forward a little to my first office-based role and I found myself working on an insurance software technical support help desk. In terms of workload management, this was much the same as working at a bar. A customer calls up and you need to deal with their query, if you can’t sort it on the spot, then a ticket gets logged to process later. If the phone is not ringing, you process the tickets. The workload management is simply baked in to the job.
After a couple of years in this role, I moved in to quality engineering. This was more of a behind the scenes role where you worked with the system developers to test new software with a view to finding defects so they could be fixed before shipping to customers. No more phone ringing and lists of tickets to work through. I had to talk to developers, business analysts, and project managers to work out what my work was, and then devise my own way of tracking and keeping a log of what I was up to.
Having been used to my work been spoon fed, a few months in to my new role I found the mental load of all this tracking starting to make my head hurt. I spoke to my dad and his advice was to get a book and simply write everything down. Use the paper to store the information rather than my head… And the rest was history…
Over time I refined my approach to personal organisation and that is exactly what I will share with you in this tool.
Clarity Before Focus
Our ability to focus sits at the core of achieving a flow state where time flies by as we zone in on the present moment and the task at hand. Focus is not possible though unless we first know what to focus on. That is where clarity comes in.
Clarity rarely comes from adding more.
It is revealed as things are removed.
The act of curating our action list and then stripping it back to only what matters most right now helps achieve this clarity. Even then we may be left with three to five things spread across different areas of our lives; so, we must decide what is really the single most important thing to focus on right now.
Remove first. Decide second.
When we don’t first refine our action list (this could mean simply committing it to paper) this leads to confusion, and confusion is tantamount to carrying too much mental load. Life becomes hard as our mind flits around between all the plates we need to keep spinning. This is exhausting.
Decide to decide more, and learn to carry less.
Remember though, this act of refinement requires mental effort, and we can be tricked in to thinking that the more we think about something, the better our decisions will be. This is a trap that can lead to inaction. The measure of clear thinking is not how much thought has gone in to each decision, but how quickly a decision has been reached. Balancing decision speed and quality is a skill that you can refine over time. Do this though by anchoring to speed as the slight priority over quality.
Thinking isn’t progress.
Deciding is.
“Nothing destroys a person as much as prolonged inaction.”
– Aristotle
What’s Next?
Next, we will dive in to the mechanics of GTD. I’ll share my personal journey and uncover how the methodology evolved over time to become what it is today.
Enjoy, for now.