Full-Spectrum Attention Management

Attention, manage

GTD is an attention management system which organizes collecting, processing, and doing the things you need to do in order to accomplish your life goals. I've been following it for about a year and a half, and have managed to get some coworkers and family members to use it as well. It follows a straightforward model, developed by the David Allen Company: Collect, Process, and Act.

The first step in any GTD setup is collecting your "stuff" into the smallest number of manageable piles. These can be physical, such as paper and boxes or digital, such as voicemail, email, RSS, and text files. The next step is always to process, top-down. Pick something up, determine if it's actionable or not. If not, either delete it, archive it, or put it on the "someday / maybe" list. Anything you find which you can do in less than two minutes, do then and there. If it takes more than two minutes, or more than one step, it's time to break it into a project.

Context, project, priority, and effort

GTD-style project management is broken down into four components: context, project, priority, and effort. The two components most applications focus on are context and project. Context refers to a physical, social, or mental state you need to be in to complete a task, such as "home," "internet," or "phone." Projects refer to any group of two or more actions which need to be taken to finish a given task. By sorting tasks into contexts and projects, you'll always know how to finish something, and where you have to be to do so.

For some folks, "domains" are a superset of projects which track the things in your life which you must keep in order. Example domains are "religious," "university," "financial," and "legal." For the most part, domains can correspond to the first-level taxonomy of your reference folder, discussed later in this article.

When I mention priority, I don't by any means insinuate that GTD is a priority-driven system; far from it. Choosing a next action to take involves consideration of four aspects: context, time available, energy available, and priority. If you just found out at two in the morning that you must make a last minute business trip, and must call your bank to let them know, that's high priority, but the wrong context. This would be because you typically can't call a bank at two in the morning. If you've just returned home from a mentally draining day at work, perhaps that's not the best time to review the performance of your financial investments and adjust accordingly. Priority is only one aspect of the system, and generally not the most important one.

Archives and reviews

When you're finished with a project, or when you've come upon something you need to remember, but not act upon, it goes in a reference folder. These can also be physical or digital, and I know many who keep both. Like inboxes, these should be kept to the fewest possible which are useful and mutually distinct. I use an external hard drive, a personal wiki application, and a physical file box.

The last aspect of GTD to get used to is the weekly review. During that, you sort through all projects and make sure things are on track. This is also where you'll process your inboxes and check on your reference materials.

Inboxes, maintain

Inboxes are the source of all GTD activity, and should be kept to the smallest number possible which can collect everything you need to do. I currently use five: a notebook, a box at home, email, RSS, and iGTD.

Notebook and pen

Everywhere I go, I have my Moleskine notebook and Zebra M-301 compact pen with me. The first few pages contain a calendar, personal contact information, and two passages from the Tao Te Ching. Following that is a list of allergies, my blood type, and some emergency contacts including friends, family, doctors, lawyers, employer, and next of kin. The back pocket is also constantly stuffed with blank note cards.

In this notebook is always bookmarked an "inbox" page. Whenever something comes to me which I need to look into or take care of, I write it down. Every evening, I move every item from this inbox into iGTD. When the page fills up, I find the next blank one, and move my bookmark there.

I use this notebook for much more than just inbox tracking, however. These Moleskines, especially the gridded ones, are especially useful for quick diagrams, meeting notes, sketches, journals, shopping lists, and schedules. I also made sure to get a pen which could clip onto the elastic atop the notebook, always there when I need it.

Cardboard box

I've tried a number of sorters, holders, and organizers for physical incoming materials at home, but nothing works quite as well as a small cardboard box sitting right next to my work area. Every day when I come home from work, I empty my pockets into this box. When we get new mail, mine goes in the box. When we go shopping, anything I don't grab out of the bags before sitting down goes in the box. My partner and our frequent house guests know that anything physical which requires my attention goes into the box. Every night, I process this box until it's empty before going to sleep.

Email

I use Google's mail servers with Apple's mail client for email communications. I used to run my own mail servers, spam catchers, SMTP black lists, and the likes, but it all became too time consuming. Gmail stores everything on its servers, and searches like a dream. This allows me, more often than not, to respond to an email when I receive it, and delete it. Anything which requires more thought than a few minutes to respond gets copied into an iGTD item.

RSS feeds

Vienna is probably the best RSS aggregator for the OS X platform. It allows me to subscribe to sites I'm interested in, and notifies me when they post new content. Quickly, each day, I sort through about seventy sites in about thirty minutes or less. Setting my feeds up in a set of five folders (Artwork, Blogs, Comics, Music Reviews, and Personal), I burn through new content with the Enter (Open in Firefox) and Delete keys.

iGTD inbox

The wonderful and talented Bartek wrote iGTD, one of a small handful of GTD programs for the Mac. It's also the only free one that I know of. Other options to look at are Midnight Inbox ($35) and Kinkless GTD. Kinkless requires OmniOutliner Pro ($65) to work its magic, though. Working on a overly modest budget, I use iGTD. The Omni Group is soon coming out with another GTD application, OmniFocus, however, which looks promising. If it's faster than Midnight Inbox (on a G4) and cheaper than Kinkless, I may give it a try. iGTD is going to be hard to beat.

Once I have everything collected into iGTD's inbox, I assign each task three attributes: priority, context, and project. If there's a due date, I list that as well.

Contexts, maintain

Contexts refer to a physical, mental, or social state you need to be in to do something. I keep the fewest mutually distinct contexts I can manage, and thankfully iGTD allows me to view actions from multiple contexts at the same time. If I'm at home in the evening, with my Mac, on the internet, cellphone charged, email available, I can select all five contexts to see what I can do to move my projects forward. If I'm at an all-night diner at 2am, though, I can select only the Mac context and still be productive.

Since I keep my mac with me at all times, I'm always in the Mac context. Consequently, it contains more action than any of the others, save brainstorming.

Inbox

The inbox is a special context in iGTD for those things which haven't been processed yet. Any time I enter something manually, or through Quicksilver, it ends up here to be sorted.

Agendas

Agendas are for anything I need to discuss with a group. They are always namespaced to the group with whom I need to discuss it:

"Camping group - when are we going to buy food?"
"Staff meeting - review advertising campaign plan"

Brainstorm

The brainstorming context holds all the stuff which I identify as a multi-step project, but don't yet know how to break it down. During weekly reviews, if I want to re-think an action, I'll put it in here as well. Many of these tasks will move to my Someday / Maybe list.

"Start blogging about all this music I like"
"Refresh understanding of tensor algebra"

Calls, Email, Errands

The calls and email contexts hold conversations which I need to have or start during the day, or at any time, respectively. The errands context holds things I need to do at places other than home or work. All of these entries are also namespaced, as well. For the most part, actions in these contexts are self-explanatory.

"Home Depot - pick up rosemary seeds"
"Mom - ask about plans for graduation party"

Exploring

Exploring is a special context, related to errands. It contains all of the parks, restaurants, museums, libraries, and such which we want to go and see on a weekend. It also contains geocaches we want to look for. Nothing in this context is time-sensitive or urgent; it's for fun stuff.

"Check music schedule at new public library"
"Eat sometime at Joe's pizza down the street"

Home

Home refers to wherever my wife and I are centered at the moment. Most often, it refers to our apartment. If we're on vacation, though, it refers to the hotel or friend's house. If we're on a road trip, it refers to the car. In general, home is where my partner, external hard drive, clothes, food, and bathroom stuff are. We try to keep the cat here as well.

"Recharge camera battery"
"Take new photos for 'What's in my bag' pool on Flickr"

Internet

The internet context includes any place at which I have internet access which I can personally use. If I'm at the library, and they have a heavily filtered internet connection which only allows me access to a handful of sites, I'm not in the internet context. If I'm at a friend's house, and have permission to use their wireless ethernet, I am in the internet context.

"Order tibetan prayer flags for home stairwell"
"Post current reading list to goodreads.com"

Mac

The Mac context contains anything I need to do with my laptop, assuming I have access to nothing other than it and a power connection. It contains most of my writing, programming, and graphic design tasks.

"Draft essay on Samhain for DP"
"Make Slife.app or something like it work with my screen size"

Office

I keep my home and work lives and GTD systems completely separate. Sometimes, though, I'll think of something at home which I need to do at work. Those things go here.

"Put dates for camping trip on work calendar" "Add parking receipts to expense report"

Printing

The only reason I keep the printing context separate from home or Mac is that our home laser printer can't operate off of the same power circuit as the rest of our stuff. Consequently, it sits unplugged in a corner of our living room until I need it. We we need to print something, it involves me plugging it in, bringing the laptop over there, printing, and unplugging it. Thankfully, we don't have to print things very often.

"Print off references for new yoga asanas"
"Print off tax forms to mail in"

Projects, plan

Overview

When managing my projects, I always first identify two things: What I'm working with, and what I'm doing with it. Each of my project names consists of a noun phrase, a comma, and a verb phrase. The most semantically distinctive noun is always first, to keep sorting usable:

"Emergency preparedness kits, create"
"Wisdom teeth, have removed"

Some projects are continuous, such as "Relationships, maintain," but most projects have a definite end, such as "Novel, write." I don't nest projects within projects -- this only increases the number of places something isn't when I'm looking for it:

Special Projects

I maintain two projects which are otherwise semantically distinct from the rest: "! Single Tasks," and "? Someday / Maybe," "? Someday / Maybe" functions as the project analog to the "Brainstorming" context. When I find a task on which I don't want to take action now, it goes in the "Someday / Maybe" project, the "Brainstorming" context, and gets marked with a "maybe" flag in iGTD to distinguish it from other tasks which I legitimately may need to brainstorm.

"Pare down Flickr groups to those which I can reasonably track"
"Learn Gaelic"

"! Single Tasks" is my default landing-zone for new tasks in the "Inbox" context. It also holds all the actions I need to take which don't include more than one action:

"Read volume 3 of Artzmania magazine"
"Try out "transform again" technique discussed on Veerle's site"

Projects Folder

As mentioned previously, every project I keep in iGTD has a corresponding folder in a folder on my desk. The single exception to this rule is the "Someday / Maybe" project. You'll notice that the verb phrases are missing. This helps to keep archives atomic when a new project is completed. It also enables you to write Xcode applications using these folders without having commas in the path name to the source tree.

When a project is complete, I move all of its data to my archive systems.

Paper folders

For my few projects which still deal with paper, I have an analogous system of manila file folders which I keep in my purse. When projects are completed, I move those folders to my permanent paper file.

Act without doing

Two example projects are fixing my mother's laptop and building a website. Following the steps outlined above, they break down pretty easily into actions, contexts, and priorities.

Mom's laptop, fix

My mother asked me to look at her broken Dell laptop to see if it could be fixed. I booted it up and got a disk failure error. I can probably fix it, but I'd have to replace the hard drive, try to recover my niece's baby photos from the old drive, and rebuild the new one. Consequently, the "Mom's Laptop, fix" project is born:

Some actions need to take place at home, some require internet access, and two require errands. The highest priority of these, according to my mother, is getting the photos off of the old drive. Everything else can happen whenever, so long as she gets her laptop back.

Client's website, create

A second, more involved example is creating a website. Some folks I ran into at a diner wanted a new website for their accountancy business. This is typically a very involved process, spanning a number of contexts. You need time on the Mac, on the internet, and with the customer to get it finished:

Certainly in real life it's never this straightforward, but this is a good place to start planning. Breaking things down in this manner allows you to make progress in each of your projects whenever and wherever possible.

Archives and references, store

When something isn't actionable, or a project is complete, data needs to be moved off of your radar. I use four facilities for this: a personal wiki, a local archive folder, an external drive, and a paper file box.

Personal wiki

I use VoodooPad Professional to store most any text-only reference information. This contains most of my useful code snippets, site notes, review procedures, and checklists. This is also where I keep my GTD areas of responsibility, one to two year goals, three to five year visions, and lifelong contributions. I keep conference and class notes in here as well, and any quotations I'd like to later reference or use. I keep page names short, with the most significant noun first. Again, I don't use folders here -- all four hundred documents are in alphabetical order.

I keep VoodooPad's data file in the "Writing" section of my archive folder.

Local archive folder

I keep all information with me at all times which I may need to be able to reference on short notice, such as my portfolios, codebase, and medical history. This stays in a folder on my Mac's desktop:

• Artwork contains various art and design artifact I've made that I consistently use or reference, and have legal rights. This folder also includes any avatars I use online, paintings I've made, and pencil and paper sketches.
• Business contains all my non-day-job-work related stuff. It contains one folder for each freelance job, each of which contain folders for agreements, contracts, forms, plans, procedures, and schedules.
• Codebase contains every line of code I've ever written that I either open-sourced, or to which I have legal rights. This is my $CVSROOT. My sandboxes go in the projects folder.
• Druidry contains all of my materials for my religious training and research.
• Finances contains personal and household financial records, including accounts, plans, major receipts, and tax returns.
• Gaming contains my Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, quests, and worlds.
• Health contains medical records, preparedness plans, and yoga asana references.
• Infrastructure contains home network architecture, inventories, PGP keys, and server information.
• Legal contains auto, apartment lease, insurance, and warranty information.
• Portfolios contains full professional portfolios and resumes for my design, engineering, music, research, and writing careers.
• Recipes contains things I like to cook.
• Travel contains trips I'm planning, and logs from trips I've taken.
• University contains information on all of my academic pursuits. One folder for each university I've attended contains folders for courses, degree plans, memberships, and transcripts.
• Websites contains full sources, design artifacts, and deployed mirrors for every website I've created.
• Writing - Articles, journals, novels, poetry, prose, and theses I've written, to which I have legal rights.

If you're interested, I've compiled a PDF of the full taxonomy of my archive folder for you to download and reference.

External hard drive

The layout of my external hard drive is far too large to share in the scope of this article, so I've processed it also into a PDF for you to download and reference.

Paper file box

The last of my references consists of a small, personal file box. This contains my and my partner's university, medical, legal, auto, and apartment paperwork. The file folders are once again in alphabetical order, and it's kept at my work area for quick access when needed.

Weekly reviews, keep

The last, and most important step in GTD is the weekly review. I hold weekly reviews every Sunday evening at 8:00pm to keep myself on track with all of my projects. My weekly review consists of the following:

1. Make sure all inboxes are empty. If they're not, process them.
2. Track down and process all loose papers and notes.
3. Review journal entries, projects, actions, calendar, someday / maybe list, and lent / borrowed list.
4. File any remaining reference materials (clear out the "outbox").
5. Sort through sent items in Mail.app, archive.
6. Clear out Firefox bookmarks (trash, process, or post to del.icio.us.)
7. Track and log last week's financial transactions.
8. Review personal areas of responsibility; update if needed.
9. Review list of key relationships; update if needed.

Further reading, explore

More information about Getting Things Done is available at the following sites:

• Getting started with GTD on 43Folders
• GTD Primer on Black Belt Productivity
• The David Allen Company
• The GTD Mastery 100
• GTD on Wikipedia