Capture Devices

One of the fundamental concepts in Getting Things Done is capturing whatever is in your head – all the to-dos and brilliant creative ideas that are clogging up your mental machine. Get them out. Get them down. Put them in a trusted system.

This is fine when I am sitting at the computer with Vitalist up in a browser or FusionDesk. Sending an email to myself works just as well. But when I’m not at my desk?

I have index cards clipped together to make a notebook. A poor man’s Hipster PDA. This goes everywhere my bag goes. Unfortunately my bag doesn’t go everywhere.

It may be time to buy a filofax. It’s a terrible admission I know. I could make a capture device at home for next to nothing. But I can’t make one that I would be happy to carry everywhere in a pocket and pull out and use any time, any place. The mini format is so compact it can go in any pocket and…

Basically they just look good.

Actuary, actually.

Actuaries don’t have a reputation for an easygoing lighthearted approach to life. This is not necessarily a bad thing. No one wants a slapdash “it’ll be all right… probably” kind of actuary but it doesn’t help conversations at parties.

If, like me, you have gone in search of the actuarial sense of humour you will inevitably come across Actuarial Jokes. Many of the jokes are old, many are simply the same old joke you have heard a hundred times before told about accountants or lawyers, most are not really funny. But all this only makes it that much more appropriate.

And just occasionally it gets it right:

123. The classic party misunderstanding:

• “What do you do for a living?”
• “I’m an actor”
• “Really!! Have you valued any pension funds that I may have heard of?” (submitted by David Harrup)

 

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.

Blogging Actuaries

There don’t seem to be very many Actuaries in the Blogosphere. Is that because we are all working studying and playing too hard? Or is it because we are as anti social as they say we are?

If you come across any blogging actuaries, or even better if you are one, do drop a comment in the box.

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.