McGee muses on Getting Things Done
A while back, Jim McGee said I find friction reducers. In a new post, he quite eloquently expands on what he means when he uses that phrase. Why am I not surprised to learn that Jim, like me, is a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done system for personal productivity?
I've had a link to Allen's book since I launched this blog in my Recommended Reading sidebar and have evangelized this system to hundreds of people since I first discovered it. No other tool has had the same impact on how I do what I do and when I do it.
Jim's post, excerpted below, focuses on one of the core principles in the Getting Things Done methodology: context. Looking at what you need/want to accomplish in the context of where you are (or are about to be) is an utterly clarifying way to focus on what the most important thing you can accomplish next might be.
Allen uses this notion of context as one of the pieces of what he calls the Four Criteria Model. Here's a summary.
Context is the first criteria in this model that you apply to make instant decisions about what to do next. Context is all about where you are and what tools you have at your disposal. The other criteria are Time, Energy, and Priority. Applied in this order, you can very rapidly filter your list of possible actions and make the best decision about the very next thing you can accomplish.
Context: Allen makes the observation in his book and seminars that if the most important thing you have to do is clean your garage, but you're at work, then the importance of that task is really irrelevant at that particular moment in time. Tasks (to do items) should always be labeled with their context to make filtering an instantaneous process. For example, before I leave the office for lunch each day, I scan my task list by filtering on @Errands to see what I can accomplish while I'm out and about. (The "@" symbol forces your context labels to the top of the list in any information management software).
Time: Once the whole list has been filtered for context, the next criteria is available time. If I'm looking at my list of @Office actions and see that the most important thing I can do will take one hour and I only have 30 minutes until my next meeting, I continue on down the list to see what the most important thing I can do is that I can accomplish in 25 minutes or less. This will have critical importance as we move our focus to projects performed by groups of people. Estimating time for tasks is a vital element in making the Time Available criteria effective.
Energy: So far I've taken a look at what I have to do in terms of my context (at the office) and my available time (25 minutes). The next decision is to honestly evaluate my current energy level. There are time during the day when I feel ready to take on the world? I'm so full of creative juice that nothing seems too big to tackle. These are great times to do what I call "blank sheet" tasks. Everyone has them -- the tasks where you are creating something starting from a blank sheet of paper. At other times, I'm felling pretty drained and the best thing for me to do is something mechanical and rote where I don't have to have a lot of mental clarity.
Priority: This is the fuzziest component of the model. There are many things that can determine priority including externally dictated deadlines. In practice, having filtered on the first three criteria, your remaining action choices should (hopefully) be relatively easy to prioritize. As we adapt some of these practices to projects, you will see that dependencies between tasks ("A" must be finished before "B" can begin) help determine priorities for the project team.
Here's Jim McGee's take on context:
McGee's Musings
Software isn't the only way to attack friction in knowledge work (as often as not software solutions add friction). Good ideas by themselves can help. David Allen's Getting Things Done approach is full of ideas that attack friction. One of his ideas I like best is the notion of to do lists that are organized around the context of where they can be used. Instead of a master to do list that you need to review in depth to find useful next steps, Allen convinced me to segregate the lists by where I could use them; such as a call list I can use anytime I have a few minutes free vs. a list of things I can't do unless I'm at my computer. Trade a bit of extra set up time for much less friction in action.