Time is scarce today. It’s an oft repeated statistics that the information we deal on one single day, is equal to the information one person used to deal with in a lifetime in the sixth century. We are constantly juggling multiple tasks at any one given point of time. No wonder we are constantly in stress. The ability to allocate time to all the things calling our attention – time management – has become an art today. Are we able to get things done? In short, are we productive? Over the course of the last decade many theories have been proposed to answer this burning question. Some stood the test of time, some didn’t. One such theory, which I feel is genuinely beneficial to all is GTD system – ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. According to him, it is not just a time management philosophy but a life management one. It has a cult following across the globe. I’ve been practicing GTD over the last 5 years, and though it is tool agnostic, I’ve always gravitated towards the high tech side looking for a one stop solution – the one app wto solve my task management woes. But, slowly I realized that, there is no such solution. We can only find a good app and make it work for us.
Evernote
I love taking notes and ‘ve always used them as ‘spark files’ – to capture inspiration. To borrow Georg Christoph’s words, as ‘waste books’. Over time, I’ve accumulated quite a number of them. And, as they grew in number, finding what I needed in them became difficult. And, as we moved digital, I started looking out for a good application that would scale up to meet my growing needs; an application to which I could throw anything that caught my attention – web-clippings, images, notes, pdfs, scans, etc. and which makes it easy to organize, find and search what I put in there. I googled and found one application solved this need for many – Evernote: a ubiquitous digital notebook syncing to the web and across devices.
Insights on Becoming a Better Writer
“You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.” says William Zinsser. These quotes re-emphasize the same, giving us an insight into what can we do to improve our craft.
- On Writing
GTD – Tips to Capture
One of the tenets of GTD is to write everything down, capture all your thoughts on a paper or in some trusted system, and not leave any thoughts/ideas in your mind. This first step in GTD eliminates a lot of stress, because your psyche no more requires energy and attention to track and maintain them in your mind. Below are a few tips on ubiquitous capture:
My GTD workflow
I’m a strong advocate of GTD. I like its bottom-up approach of starting where we are, instead of where we want to be. There’s so much distraction in everyday life, that reverse engineering from ‘where we want to be’ and organizing daily activities around these priorities (like Stephen Covery’s method) is impractical and near impossible. Starting with where we are, handling all the various stimuli, life throws at us every day, organizing, clarifying and doing it appropriately helps us to get control of our life and only then, we can ask ourselves what we want to do in life, break them into do-able action items and fit them in our schedule. This way, we are in control of the daily activities and also moving towards where we want to be.
And this is the way I do it: