There are many great resources out there on the holy grail of productivity and time management. One popular method is the Getting Things Done (GTD) method from David Allen.

GTD is a work-life management system and book by David Allen that attempts to free us from a vast workload and instead operate an integrated system of stress-free productivity.

I like GTD but it can be improved. In this post I talk about a new layer to the GTD framework that I believe adds the strength of network collaboration as well; a kind of socialising layer.

I will call this the Open layer thus the methodology is Getting Things Done Open (GTDO).

I don’t think we are there yet with a good alternative to pen and paper. Simplicity is really the key feature I look for and therefore the ancient pen and paper method for keeping a classic, straightforward to-do list has a big lead.

On the other hand, this basic method misses the opportunity in enabling true collaboration to enable the intelligence of many, rather than just one. However, those tools that do have strong collaboration features are lacking the simplicity; a bit of a dilemma.

I like my action list to be accessible to my work colleagues, as the more I share, the more I gain. By opening up and sharing, we have far better organisational transparency that opens up vast opportunities that I will discuss in more detail later in this blog.

On the software side I have been trying out the various tools like Remember The Milk, iGTD, Chandler, OmniFocus, EasyTask and Things - but the interesting tool as of this writing is Evernote. Not because it’s full of fancy features, but because its very good at doing what seems miniature for the more complex apps to do.

Capturing the moment

Evernote is all about capturing notes using various different devices like your PC, iPhone, the Web, etc. This has been very handy for me as many of my notes are being captured from the web, whether it is from an open email in Gmail or a section of an analyst’s report. I can also capture notes from whiteboards or use the voice capturing capability by using Evernote on my iPhone.

With this, Evernote is my collection device where my various stuff gets ready for processing.

Enabling transparency and building a sense of community

However, the central part of Evernote is a web service that handles the synchronisation of all your notes. This small feature opens up interesting opportunities, like the one I like the most – publishing my notes.

I can now publish my different notebooks/lists using RSS so that I can share it with my team of co-workers. These lists are then published within our “corporate memory”, more precisely our wiki-based intranet.

My team members will therefore have visibility on most of my activities and actions. This opens up many opportunities, for example;

• Members get a better sense of the whole output from the team
• Stronger understanding from others on what you actually do in your job
• Members in distant locations get closer
• Group meetings get shorter
• Strong transparency offers better ways to optimize business processes
• Ideas from unexpected members can come up on solving some of your tasks
• The many are smarter than one
• It creates a stronger sense of community within the organization

Sharing the moment is powerful. As value is seen in the physical, open, office space environment and the culture it makes, I see even more benefits with this type of sharing.

Making these steps to using powerful but simple capture tools will become essential for genuine virtual organisations. I do touch upon this in my blog on Capitalizing knowledge.

Organising of the Daily

After capturing, it then becomes time to process and organise the stuff we have collected. Different teams and organisations have their own different flavour of project management frameworks. Different business units can have their own management culture, meaning that sales are very different from engineering. In engineering we may have Agile Planning and Scrum to deal with overall backlog of stuff to be done.

However, we as individuals do always manage our Daily or Next actions, being the list of actions we want to achieve next or just during the day.

I keep track of my own items in the following lists;

• Inbox – this is the default list where everything gets captured from various different sources in an automatic way. The goal is always to keep the Inbox empty. (This is not to be mixed up with the Email Inbox)
• Daily – These are the next actions I want to tackle during the day. It’s a good custom to review the Daily list the night before to program your unconscious mind.
• Weekly – You can’t do everything within a single working day. This is where we organize and plan the week.
• Master – Here I have all my Someday/Maybe actions.
• Waiting for - When an action has been delegated to someone else, or when one is waiting for some external event before a project can be moved forward, this is tracked and periodically checked to see if action is due, or a reminder needs to be sent.

Publishing these lists, like the “Waiting for” is very powerful, as you don’t want to have your name stuck on the company’s intranet for too long!

Furthermore, I have lists for the completed actions and various personal lists. An example of lists I use is a Technology Trend Watch list that I publish into the company wiki, so that my colleagues can keep an eye on what I am following. In fact I can have my various lists published to any system that support RSS including this blog or even my Facebook profile page.

Putting actions in context by tagging

While processing, organising or reviewing your actions you can give any of your action a relevant context.

Context describes the tool, location or person that is required to be able to complete an action. Some tools are very good in this but others are more limited. However, most tools offers tagging like Evernote and that is what I use. This means you can tag your action with context like @Email, @Phone, @Reykjavik Office, @London Office, @CFO, @Board, @Home, @MacBookPro, etc. Just start with few contexts tags to start with and develop it as you get used to handling it.

This becomes very handy when you start grouping actions by context. For example in my next trip to the Reykjavik office I can open up the view with the @Reykjavik Office, where I can learn that I need to sign some papers and other specific tasks relevant to the location or the person.

Getting Things Done Open

We are still early stage with all the various tools. The area where I expect most of the improvements is on the collaborative front. Think presence management connecting like minds with the same immediate challenges. Think how you can leverage the power of your social network on getting your everyday actions executed. Think how the Semantic Web will automate access to knowledge for you. Think how you can pass on your next actions to the network.

The network is your key productivity tool.

More productivity blog from Gudjon