View From the Bushes

I'm once again trying to get more organized. I think it was brought on when I was deluged by the CMS project at work. My bible for this excercise has been "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. Apparently I'm not alone: many people have noted the book's amazing popularity with geeks. This is not the first time I've tried the system described in the book, but it's not surprising that it might take a few tries to get it right. So far I've noticed some positives and negatives to the system.

On the positive side, I do feel a lot more in control and a lot more productive. Obviously these two things are very important. Of course, you would hope that there would be some positive benefits to the system; it's the negatives that worry me more. One negative is it seems that the system ends up pushing you to get more little things done, and I find that I sometimes end up focusing on staying on top of little things as they come up that you never really get a block of time for the big things. This comes from two things. First, his rule that you track everything that still needs to be done, and that if it's going to take less than 2 minutes to do you should do it immediately. So this ends up creating a strong prejudice towards doing lots of little things all the time. I think what I need to do is not check my e-mail so often, but then people e-mail you and then 10 minutes later call you and ask you if you got their e-mail...

The other big weakness I see with the system is how it handles multiple step projects. The big key of the system is determing the "Next Action" of anything you're working on, the very next physical step you should take. So let's say I have some big programming project I'm working on, I add it to the list, and for the "Next Action" I put, "Open up text editor and start coding." As I write that down, it occurs to me that I need to make sure that at the end of the project I need to configure the caching file. If I don't it will still run -- just not as well. If you're using his system, there doesn't seem to be a logical place to put that step. I guess you could make it into its own project, but that seems at best counterintuitive and at worst a horrible kludge. Most of the things he recommends are really useful, but these two things still bug me.

Until the weekend saves me
Ross