Getting Things Done (GTD) is a clever system for organizing your life. Its guiding principle is to make you have full confidence in a system for collecting personal goals, dreams, tasks, ideas, and projects. I’ve been studying the secrets of this method for the last couple of months and it inspired me to design a digital planner based on this effective productivity system (GTD).
I can say after that my life has changed 180 degrees. Here is what happened after I’ve re-thought and redeployed my personal organization system.
David Allen, the author of the Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity book, guides you step by step and explains complicated things in practical everyday terms. He recommends sacrificing a couple of days of your life to apply the GTD system into your life. I’ve gone through that process and after that, I was totally exhausted. But later a felt surprisingly calm and a lot more in control of my life. Obviously, I needed some time to get used to new planning habits. But now I can honestly tell that GTD has introduced a completely new quality to my life.
It is very encouraging to know that you have a trustworthy personal time management system. It gives me the ability to find any information I want in a quick and easy way. Like I said earlier, I needed to sacrifice a week of my life to build that system. However, I’m really glad I put effort into that process!
And I stopped constantly rescheduling tasks. That was my biggest nightmare in my time management routine. I had a habit of planning too many tasks for one day. Obviously, I was unable to accomplish 100% of my plan. As a result, I was unsatisfied at the end of most of my days.
After having the GTD system adopted and implemented I felt a big relief. The biggest change is that instead of making daily TO-DO lists, I create the Next Actions lists. These are all the tasks I have to complete ASAP. I divide them into sections (contexts) based on where the activity can be done, or what equipment I need to fulfill it.
Maybe you’d like to try this out? I made some lists named by most popular contexts:
You can download these lists here, print them and apply them to your own organization system! 🙂
Thanks to that brilliant David Allen’s method I organized not only my short-term tasks and goals but moreover, I defined my life purpose more clearly than before. Consequently, I feel that I am more able to set the course for the rest of my life properly.
Have you heard about the GTD method? Tell me something about your plans and goals in the comment section below If you want 🙂 I really hope you will learn how to work with the GTD system quickly and it will become a useful tool for you!
Love, M.
