(Note that this post was originally posted on my Personal Blog, and has been cross-posted here due to it being relevant to my coding projects/general work)

I (like most of you, I’d wager) have numerous projects going on at any given time (last count was about 7 different programming projects alone) not to mention other ‘stuff’ that I either need, or want to get done. This became a problem shortly after I finished uni, not being used to the vast amount of free time I now had, nor the lack of deadlines made it difficult for me to get anything productive done.

Getting fed up with this situation, I decided to turn to the internet to help me find ways to make myself more productive, and (mainly through Lifehacker) I found out about the system called Getting Things Done (GTD).

Now, I haven’t read the GTD books, or attended the seminars, but I have read enough posts on the topic to grasp the basic system, which allowed me to modify it for my needs.

GTD

The basic principals of GTD that I use are the concept of ‘projects’, now these do not have to be programming projects or anything like, this blog is a project, LibCT is/was a project, getting things ready for that party is a project, basically anything you want to get done that can be broken up into more than one task is a project. So, for each project you want to get done, you create a list, of all (or at-least the first 10/20) things you need to do to get that task done. You can use anything to create this list (I personally use RememberTheMilk) but most todo-list programs/apps/systems have provisions for multiple lists.

Now you have every project as a list and all tasked out, it is time to go through each list and tag the tasks, if you need to be at a particular place to do the task (say at a shop/in town) tag it with ‘town’, if you can’t do that task because you’re waiting on someone else tag it with ‘wait’ and one task, you tag with ‘na’ (Remember The Milk is good here as it supports ‘locations’ and tags, and then allows you to create ‘smart lists’ of all tasks from all lists that are tagged in certain ways, allowing you to create a ‘town’ list that is automatically populated). The task you tagged with ‘na’ is special, because that is the task you have decided you’ll do next for that project (‘na’ stands for Next Action) this is very important, as it allows you to not have to waste time thinking about what task to do every time you start work on a project (that can really eat into your ‘productive’ time if you’re not careful).

Now you create one more list, usually this list is called ‘daily’, this list is for all the things that need to be done, but don’t belong to a project (e.g. buy some flowers, repair that shelf). Usually these tasks are fairly small, this is the list you turn to when you have a spare 10 minuets to get something done.

My System

Ok so now that you know (the very basics) of the GTD system that I worked from it’s time for some specific examples, pulling up my task-list I currently have, well, not many, this is because all my task-lists for any programming project I am working on has been moved to Redmine, so it can be better integrated with the SVN, however, I do have a ‘blog’ list, for which the task of writing this post is tagged as ‘na’, I have a ‘read’ list, which has all the books I want to read (currently on The Wheel of Time, book 8), I have a ‘download’ list for things I need to download (next action: WP7 SDK updates) and my ‘daily’ list, which reminds me that at some point I need to buy some keyboard wipes.

Now, the key to this system is the tasks tagged ‘na’, I have a smart-list set-up so I can see all the tasks I have said I’ll do next, and when I have some spare time, I consult this list and see what I feel like doing, for example, this morning I felt like writing, so I wrote this, this afternoon I’ll most likely want to code so I’ll (switch to Redmine) and see which project I want to work on (my projects are spread over different languages to 1) help my coding ability and 2) give me a break from some of the harder languages when I feel like it).

Once you have completed a task, tag another one as ‘na’ and work on that, always make sure you have a task tagged as ‘na’ as you may have to stop that task half-way through for some reason and it could be a while before you come back to it so it’s important to know what you should be doing so you can get started quickly.

Make use of your down-time

This is very important if you want to get things done, manage to do this effectively and people will think you worked some form of black-magic to be able to achieve all that you do.

Hunt down and remove any down-time. Say you’re at work, you go for your lunch but have a spare 10/20 minuets at the end of your break, now most people would idle on Twitter or Facebook or the like, me, I fire up my to-do list and get a task done. Real-life example: Every Monday through Thursday I drive to work and back, each one-way trip takes 35/40 minuets depending on the traffic. Now for most people, that’s down-time, it’s difficult (and possibly dangerous) to get things done while you’re driving, but it’s not impossible.

To get rid of this ‘down-time’ (any time I’m not working on something from my list it’s down-time) I simply got the book from my reading list (tagged with ‘na’) as an audio-book, and listen to that while I’m driving, meaning that now I am being productive for an hour and twenty minuets more than most people.

This is the real secret: You use the time that others don’t think to. It takes a while to get used to examining how you spend your time and working out ways to make it more efficient but once you get the hang of it you can easily start to rack up the productive hours, giving you an advantage over others and (because they don’t reflect on how they spend their time as much) mystify people as to just how you manage to be so productive when ‘there just isn’t enough hours in the day’

This brings us to the end of me sharing my secrets, as it were, this system I have refined over the course of more than a year to fit me and my lifestyle and what I want to do, prior to this I have tried many others (the amount of different ‘todo’ systems I have tried is vast) and I’m not saying it’ll work perfectly for you (in-fact, if you try it there are bound to be some things that annoy you) but of all the systems I have tried, GTD provided the best base from me to work from.

Good luck with making your lives more productive, if you have any tips or questions, let me know in the comments.