Getting on the Runway

Starting Getting Things Done may not be as important a decision as getting married or joining the priesthood but I think it still requires a good deal of preperation and thought. All too often in the past I have made grandiose plans to make my life and the whole world much, much better. These rarely happen.

The things that make a real difference are the habits you learn. Changing a small thing that you do everyday can change your whole life. I want to make GTD a habit. Not a big bang that ends in a few weeks time in a whimper.

So I will prepare myself even before I get on the GTD wagon. I want to develop the habits I need before I go fully GTD so that there will be less slips and less chance of letting the whole things slide because it appears to be too much.

Firstly, I am trying to develop the collection habit. I intend to write things down when I think of them, not later. Otherwise they don’t get written down at all. I intend to do simple tasks as they appear – not put them off for no reason. Complex tasks will be captured.

Coming up: Setting up a capture system.

To begin at the beginning

Or rather before the beginning…

For those of you who don’t already know Getting Things Done is a system developed by David Allan for tracking, managing and DOING all of the things that we have to do. The basic idea is that when capture all “Open Loops” in a secure external system we will be stress-free enough to actually do some work

For those of you lucky enough not to know any actuaries – actuaries value long term liabilities – we do the maths behind pensions and insurance. So that people will believe that we can do the maths we do a lot of exams. I mean a LOT.

So I have a lot of open loops. I’m determined to stop forgetting appointments, waking up in a panic over jobs I need to do, discovering I have let yet another deadline slip.

In other words I am going to start Getting Things Done.