The GTD System — A framework for CEOs part 1
Figuring out a system for managing your professional or personal life's endeavors can feel daunting. Should you keep track of your tasks? Or is it an unnecessary burden that hinders your bias for action? Depending on your current beliefs around productivity-as well as your personality traits and previous experience-you will come to your own answer to those questions.
Objectively speaking, whether or not you can benefit from a "productivity"/organizational system depends on how many endeavors you are juggling in life; whether you intend to commit to keeping track of those; whether or not your current systems--if any—serve you well in completing all the tasks and goals you set for yourself.
Having structure around your work is generally thought to be a valuable skill. In particular during the 90s, when knowledge work productivity frameworks and optimization processes started to heavily come out of the corporate world. One such system is David Allen's GTD System. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done”. It is an organizational framework empowering individuals to manage their own tasks and commitments effectively.
If I were to present the GTD in one sentence, it would be this: your mind is not made to store ideas. It is made to come up with ideas. It's around this pillar that the GTD framework develops its branches. When employing the GTD system for managing your own tasks and commitments, these are the key heuristics you would use:
- Have a way of capturing your ideas and tasks as they arise. Quick capture means freeing your mind from that idea/task so that you can keep doing the activity you were doing at the moment.
- Categorize tasks for efficiency of execution. Your quick capture inbox is not enough. There needs to be a routine through which you categorize your tasks based on their context (e.g., computer, phone, high energy, low energy) and priority level.
- Move tasks on your pipeline. Assigning a status to your tasks means moving them on a pipeline of sorts. Statuses can include: "To Do", "Doing", "Waiting on", and "Done". The "Waiting on" column is particularly relevant if you often collaborate with others and want to keep track of things you have delegated without forgetting about them.
- If it takes less than 5 minutes, do it now. This is a heuristic to tackle tasks that take less than 5 minutes instantly. The cost of doing them is very low, and you've freed up some mental space by completing your small task.
- Religiously maintain a weekly planning routine. On a weekly basis, review what you did in the past week, and plan for the week ahead. This will increase your mental clarity around the tasks to perform, and it will help you take the guesswork out of the equation during the upcoming week.
The Great CEO Notion system has the GTD framework built into it. You can check out the video below to understand better.