Div: September 2004 Archives
Each morning before I leave home to go to the office, I take some time to see what is happening in the world. A few years ago, I used newspapers, radio or television for that, but nowadays we have internet. While eating a sandwich and drinking my coffee, I check my e-mail and scan the headlines of about 200 web sites. If I see something interesting, I read it or bookmark it to be read later.
This whole process takes me 20 minutes, thanks to my newsreader which fetches all information from those 200 sites and presents it to me in an easy digestible way. However, this list of sites I want to keep up with is growing steadily; each week I discover new interesting sites, and add them to my list. When I finished browsing to my list today, I had to run to the office. I guess I'll have to adjust my alarm with 10 minutes to give me the time to read my news.
Just before starting to write all this down, I read that Robert Scoble has exactly the same problem, but worse. He currently checks 915 feeds, and in his entry Dealing with the information flow he wonders how scalable feed are, as more and more resources use them. What happens if the number of feeds grows up to 10.000?
I guess what is going to happen is the same as happened to the web. Ten years ago I scanned the NCSA What is new? list. First I looked at this list every week, but soon new sites appeared by thousands, and I left this method to keep up with new sites. Nowadays I use search engines. They are not the same, and don't give met the same feeling, but they scale better. With feeds the same thing is happening: at this moment I follow everything published on some sites, but soon I will have to fall back on PubSub to find what I want. I propose they will build some randomness in their queries, so I can still discover some unknown sites, and don't have the feeling that I am reading the same as everybody else.
Besides collecting spam, I can also use my GMail account to invite others to use this service. If anybody still doesn't have a GMail account and wished to have one, leave your full name and current e-mail address --which won't be shown-- in a comment.
Many people starting to implement the Getting Things Done methodology start process their inboxes full of energy. The first result is usually obtained within a few days: an empty inbox! Everything has been evaluated, using the well know flow chart, and stored in reference files, someday/maybe actions, next actions... Small tasks (2--minute rule!) have been finished immediately, and a lot of junk has been thrown away. Great!
Once the big mess is out of the way, you only need to maintain it. Process arriving items as soon as possible, and start working your way through the Next Action list. You even do your first weekly review, to see whether there are any open loops left. You feel that you are getting grip on your workflow.
But usually after two or three weeks, the doubts come up. The processing goes all right, but you have the feeling that actions come in faster than you can finish them. Your N/A list is growing and growing, and looking at your N/A list gives you the same feeling you had before when you opened your inbox. You don't know where to start or how you can set your priorities. You've lost control.
At this point many people throw GTD out of the window, reasoning that if they spend less time organizing their time, they will have more time for actually doing things. This might be true for some people, but in many cases you simply need to adjust your system to fix the problem. If I have a question about GTD, I always first go to the source. The problem I described here appears on David Allen's site in the FAQ section. David's answer is: If it's 'too long' either you need to get used to a big list of still-undone things [...] or you need to make fewer commitments.
Of course this is very true if you implemented the system correctly. But in many cases, the problem is not the amount of commitments, but rather the way these commitments have been entered into the system. Before starting to use GTD, most people work with some kind of to-do list. New GTD users treat their N/A list in exactly the same way as their old list, only now they specify the context of the action. This is wrong, since a task is not the same as a Next Action. Anne Gennett explained it in an excellent way in The power of the real next action. In her example, the client needs new glasses. So he creates a N/A 'Get new glasses'. But getting new glasses is not an action! Getting glasses is something you can't do. The real N/A is to email someone for the name of an optometrist, so this is what he should have put in his list.
If you look at a long list that contains items like 'Get new glasses', you get the feeling that you will never be able to finish the list. But if you put real next actions, your list contains easy to perform steps, and you will see that you can process your next actions more efficiently. The next action is the very first thing you need to do to move on that item.
