GTD Mastery 100: Step 16

Jan 08

GTD By Chris Yeung

To read my complete journey to GTD Mastery see the main post.

I haven’t decided on a paper filing system yet, but your comments have been insightful. If you haven’t already, feel free to share your paper filing system here. You are on my waiting for list =D. Nevertheless, the journey continues.

Step 16 to GTD Mastery is: I only have physical actions on my Next Actions lists—no multi-step projects.

I used to struggle with this until I made pruning my next actions part of my weekly review. This prevents the “amorphous blob of stuff” that one of David Allen’s seminar attendees coined. Looking at my next actions list doesn’t make me cringe anymore.

Here are the posts that have helped me create effective to-do lists.

Merlin Mann on Building a Smarter To-Do List: Part 1 and Part 2
Gina Trapani on “The art of the doable to-do list“.

2 Comments so far »

Kyle W. said

am January 12 2008 @ 7:58 pm

This is a very important step in the GTD process because if you don’t just have physical actions on your Next Actions list you will get bogged down. Those are excellent resources also in managing you next actions list. These sites were also helpful to me in guiding what should go on my Next Action list and what shouldn’t.

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/10/02/task-list-antipatterns/
http://www.productivity501.com/habit-list/308/

The second link I just used for reference to and not actually making the habit list. Hopefully those links provide more assistance for Step 16.
Chris Y. said

am January 13 2008 @ 7:59 am

Thanks for the links. I actually signed up for Productivity501’s habit list testing. Looking forward to your blog.

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Gearfire was created in January of 2007 by Geoff R and Jordan S. Gearfire deals with personal productivity, organization, and Getting Things done from a student's perspective. Gearfire is written entirely by students, and is written towards students, but is usually applicable to a general audience. Our other writers are Daniel and Chris, whom have joined us over the past year.