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I enter the way-back machine, and go to the day I started my latest job. August 7, 2016, and I was determined that this time I would adopt the Getting Things Done(R)
as it was a clean slate, the perfect time to manage my tasks, and duties, to properly categorize and dispatch with extreme prejudice.I set up my mailbox with the right folders and began processing all my in-bound emails accordingly.
I ought to add that my first flirtation with GTD was in the mid-aughts, when I was absolutely buried in the minutia of product management, someone that I looked to as a guiding star mentioned in a blog post how it changed their life. I bought the book, read it a couple of times, and began arranging my workflow.
And it worked. My inbox was quickly a place of action. Things I could do immediately, got done and archived. Things that needed longer, but were important went into the “Today” folder, dealt with by the end of the day. A few trickled into the “This Week” folder, to be dispatched before I logged out on Friday, and ever fewer into the “Long Term” folder.
For a few weeks, this seemed to work.
Then the first day I failed to clear my “Today” folder happened. I wasn’t too worried. It was just a couple of items. No big deal.
Then the carryover grew to a dozen, then a few dozen items. I got the brainstorm to move them to the “This Week” folder.
Soon, I was spending 6 hours on Fridays trying to clear that folder, and soon - you guessed it - I was building a backlog there.
I fixed that by moving them en masse to the “Long Term” folder.
That was the end of GTD for me.
Plenty of reasons.
Product management has a lot of input threads that can’t be quickly dispatched or ignored
Whenever I traveled (something I did about 6 weeks out of every quarter) my inbox was wedged. Too many new mail items and not enough time to work on them.
The realization that if I processed every email I got, I would spend about 6 hours a day in my Outlook. And frankly, that isn’t what I am paid for.
Needless to say, for me at least, GTD is a nice idea that fails in execution.
Back to the present
As I mentioned above, when I began this current job, I once again had the fantasy that I could actually do the GTD method. Apart from setting up the mailboxes, I added a 15 minute “meeting” to recur on Fridays at 4:00PM Pacific time. It says: “Clear Email Backlog”
Alas, I currently have 2,362 unread emails in my inbox.
I keep the reminder there to guilt myself for my moral failings in the Getting Things Done methodology.
So, when a colleague tells me they practice “Inbox Zero” I just nod and smile.
Ctrl-A; Del and empty trash, and I too can be “Inbox Zero”.
Getting Things Done - David Allen