Net Money Journal

In the last couple of months, my workload as a freelance online worker has increased and gotten more complex. I have had more things to keep track of and more projects to juggle. I bought a copy of David Allen’s bestselling paperback, Getting Things Done (GTD for short), to see if that would help me become more productive. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve implemented the principles in Allen’s book and it has made a remarkable difference in my work. Here are some specific ways GTD has helped me.

I’m more organized. Following the methods of GTD allowed me to organize my whole life - from my goals of creating multiple passive income streams to the minor details of remembering to get an oil change. In GTD, Allen talks about the extremely useful habit of capturing your thoughts - whether on a notebook, computer, or PDA. As you capture your thoughts, you can then take those thoughts and organize them. Without this habit, you will continually have a disorganized mind because your mind was not made to be a virtual file cabinet.

Once I captured my thoughts, I followed GTD’s principles for organizing those thoughts. GTD gives great tips and principles for using calendars, to do lists, and filing cabinets. As I organized my thoughts, I was able to see an accurate landscape of my life. This information has helped me make better decisions on how to spend my time.

Having an organized life is like working in a clean, non-cluttered environment. I do more effective work when all the “loose ends” in my psyche is organized.

I’m coming up with more good ideas. Productivity is not just about working harder. It also includes working smarter. And to work smarter, I needed better ideas than my previous ones. GTD has helped me come up with quality, creative ideas for my projects.

Much of the inspiration for my new ideas came from Allen’s encouragement to brainstorm. I never really brainstormed before, but GTD showed me that brainstorming was part of the brain’s natural method to come up with good ideas. On page 73, Allen has 3 great principles for having an effective brainstorming session:

1. Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize.
2. Go for quantity, not quality.
3. Put analysis and organization in the background.

Yes, after your brainstorming session, I have to filter out the good ideas from the bad ones. However, by filtering the ideas after the brainstorming session instead of during the session, I come up with good ideas I would’ve never thought of had I been in filtering mode. Prematurely filtering ideas stifles creativity.

I’m more focused. One of my biggest time management mistakes was multitasking. Contrary to what many people believe, multitasking actually lowers productivity. Studies (New York Times and CNN) have shown that doing one activity at a time is more efficient than multitasking.

Much of my multitasking was worrying about other things while working. By capturing all my thoughts on a notebook and organizing those thoughts, I was better able to focus on one activity at a time.

GTD has an excellent tactic called Next Action. This means figuring out the actual concrete activity you need to do next for each project you have. For example, instead of just writing down a general project like “Start a new blog”, I would also write down the Next Action. This could be “Install Wordpress” or “Think of 10 possible domain names”.

The simple Next Action tactic has allowed me to focus on doing instead of constantly rethinking about my projects. I now spend more time actually making progress on my projects instead of succumbing to analysis paralysis.

I use my time more wisely. GTD bases its to do lists on context. This means I’ve put all the phone calls I need to make on the same list. So, when I’m around the phone, I can check the list and knock out a couple phone calls in the same time period.I’ve made to do lists for each of my clients. So, whenever I work with those clients, I pull out their to do list to make sure I’m covering everything I need to cover.

My Errands to do list is filled with Next Actions that I do in one car trip.

Conclusion

I would recommend Getting Things Done to anyone regardless of their career. Allen’s methods will take some discipline but they work. If you apply them to your work and life, you’ll experience greater productivity.