An easily noticed change is the dramatic reduction in the number of possible contexts for my actions.  As a student, I usefully distinguished in my to-do list between actions “on my PC”, “on the internet anywhere”, “in my room, but not at the PC”, “in college”, “in my department”, “in the town centre”, “at the ADC”, “in Devon”… a rather long list.  This helped me prioritise based on where I was, and make efficient trips away from where I was currently to do a number of things at once, rather than, e.g. having to go to the town centre and back more than once in a day.  It also meant I could avoid leaving my PC on for extended periods – I could go through the list of “at PC” and “at internet” things, switch it off, and then look at things to do at home that didn’t require a PC (like reading for essays…).

Now, although I could potentially still make a lot of these distinctions, I find I don’t need to.  Since I’ve spent the summer being poor, my primary collection bucket is a simple hPDA, with lots of yellow cards for collection of “stuff”, a pink card for listing of non-work projects, and two blue cards: one for all non-work actions, and one for any work-actions that I need to process when I’m next at work.  Stuff comes in to the yellow cards, and then I occasionally sit down, identify the actions, and move them to the relevant blue card or do them right away.  When I’m next at work, the work-actions get copied into Outlook, and crossed off immediately.  The non-work actions are never so numerable that subdividing them is worthwhile – two sides of A6 can easily be scanned for things I can do right now.

The really major difference between student and adult life is that of work/home divide.  As a student, it simply doesn’t exist: my bedroom was my study and primary workplace, and all possible actions (things to be done) could be easily lumped under the single meta-category of “life”, whether they were university, social-life, or something else.  Now, I have a clear distinction: when I’m at work, I want to think only about work-related actions, and when I’m not, I don’t.  This isn’t easy, especially since my job demands long hours of me.  I do unavoidably think of personal things whilst at work, which need to be recorded appropriately so I can deal with them in my free time; I also do think of work-related ideas/projects/actions in my free time, and need to be able to record and postpone these until I go back to work.  The hPDA allows me to do this but because I’m transferring work things to Outlook, I find I don’t really, truly trust my system – a necessity in the GTD paradigm. It means I sometimes re-think up a work action in the middle of the night, that I later discover was already in Outlook – but since I’ve then lost sleep over it, this is a blatent Fail.

Returning to using a digital PDA would solve the problem, as I could easily track work and non-work actions in one place (syncing it to Outlook if I wished) and view only the ones appropriate to where I am.  But I don’t want to do that! I’m currently holding out for the release of the Google Android, so I can compare to the iPhone and buy one or other of those.  Then I’ll probably move to a web-based action-tracking system, which I’ll be able to access from my office PC or from the phone, whichever is more convenient.  This example of GTD gone wrong is a pretty clear proof of why David Allen insists that you need to have one single trusted system for all your actions, and be able to get at it at any time.  

The third real difference between student and adult life is simply one of available time: after day-to-day existence, the time I have left for persuing non-work projects is pretty slim.  As a student I had enough time for non-academic projects that I wasn’t forced to refine my action-picking system too much – a few wasted seconds didn’t matter.  Now, I really try to squeeze things in in the 5-minute gaps in life – so being able to track every last thing and effectively pick the best to do right now is so much more important.  I think changing to a web-based to-do list, with the ability to check it anywhere, will probably make this better, but for now I’m just limping along with the hPDA and a slightly less-than-total coverage of open loops in my personal life.

In terms of my more general organisation, I still use a variety of “buckets” (Allen’s term) to collect stuff prior to putting it into my PDA. The PDA is generally handy, but I still make use of paper notes in very-obvious places, especially at night, and I have a handful of computer docs and of course emails that have stuff in. I’m in the process of refining the system so that everything actionable gets into the PDA, EXCEPT someday/maybe ideas (in GTD, any project that you’d like to do but can’t commit to right away gets put into this category). I put them in as a PDA memo when I think of them, but keep them as text document lists on my PC longer-term. When I review (theoretically weekly) I can move things back into the active projects list if appropriate.

Reference material is stored mostly as documents in a ‘ref’ hierarchy on my PC – some stuff is obviously in Gmail but I generally “print” a PDF of it (using CutePDF) and save it locally. Out-and-about reference gets jotted in the PDA and transferred when I can. I also have a two-tray desk tidy that I use one tray of for reference paperwork – there’s never that much for me at the moment – and the other tray is a bucket for bits of paper, receipts, and so on. A lot of it finds its way into the bin eventually: for stuff I do need to keep (payslips, for example) I’ve bought one of these which is like a mini filing cabinet! (Additionally, much cheaper – I have no need for anything like the quantity of dead-tree reference storage that a proper metal cabinet merits.) Stuff that is specifically reference for one project goes into a separate ‘projects’ hierarchy, in a subfolder with the same or similar name to the project.

Something that I haven’t seen covered in GTD yet (I’m only on chapter 2!) is long-term archival of “stuff I’d like to keep for nostalgic reasons but will never need to look at again”. Mostly the digital sort, for me, though at home I have plenty of the paper sort. For now I have an ‘archive’ hierarchy on the PC, but within that, everything is a bit higgledy-piggledy. I want some means of storing it all, such that I can easily make incremental, not-too-frequent backups to optical media – which suggests in folders by year. I have things that span multiple years, though (e.g. documents from my GCSEs and A-Levels, and even Keystage 3) as well as things that really feel better organised topically, like sound effects from various ADC shows I sound-designed for, and photos from family holidays.

(Yes, I’ve completely stopped having a “My Pictures” folder like Windows wants you to. Picture folders from specific trips that fit the description “only for nostalgia, I’ll never *need* to look at these” go under “archive”, whilst random images that might be needed go, unsorted, under “ref”. Images that relate directly to a project (either a current or someday one) go inside that project’s folder.)

There are a few minor problems I’ve encountered in implementing GTD as a student. First, Allen’s “two-minute rule” (If you can do something in two minutes or less, just do it, right now) doesn’t really work for me. Sometimes I’m working on, e.g., an essay, and I need to totally concentrate, so if another action comes in, I have to add it to the PDA system no matter what. At other times, I’m not particularly doing anything, just generally absorbing information or mulling something over, and I can easily drop it to just-do a 10-minute or even 30-minute long task, without entering it into the system. I’m not sure if this element will go away when I stop being a student – I suspect not – so I need to work out whether I really should be doing it differently, or what.

Related to this is the fact that, as a student, I have some very long-duration actionable items, by GTD standards. If I’m set an essay to do, it’s a project: but eventually there will be a single action item which is “sit down and write the damn thing”, and that can take a while if it’s a tricky topic and not meant to be under exam conditions. An even better example is revision: that’s a project, but the individual actions are all things that have to happen again and again, over the course of a few weeks, with the only end-point being “having actually sat the exam”. GTD, being more intended for office/corporate executives, doesn’t seem to really explain how to deal with such things. It tends to cause me (if I don’t actively monitor myself for it) to ignore these really long, hard-to-tick-off actions in favour of doing a lot of shorter but less crucial actions. I haven’t found an answer, either: I’m just getting on with the revision as best I can. Perhaps there’s an answer somewhere in the rest of the book!

I’ve stopped using Gmail specifically as a GTD tool, and rely solely on my PDA as “trusted system”. I am just starting to star emails that contain action items, mainly things that would just get an @email context anyway, so I can look through my emails without getting out the PDA, and still accomplish things. This kinda-sorta goes against the bucket-philosophy of GTD, but it works for me. I have really gotten on top of the InboxZero strategy: once I’ve got used to starring, I will always be able to process my inbox to empty every time I check. As it is, I normally leave one or two emails in the inbox that don’t fit into one of my vaguely project-esque labels, but they never stay there for more than a few days.

An interesting development that the geekier among my readers will have heard of is that Gmail has now released IMAP support on all accounts, including Apps. I debated for a while switching back to Thunderbird, which can be customised into a very nice Gmail client; I initially moved to Gmail because I needed a long-term email solution, and because of that, I waved goodbye (with a tear in my eye) to TB. However, now I’ve got used to The Gmail Way, and their web interface, I can’t see any reason to bother with TB: it’s just another application to have open, and my desktop only has so much RAM (even more of a concern on my ancient ubuntu/fluxbox-based laptop, which I struggled to read mail on via TB all summer). I don’t want to know every 5 seconds if I have a new message or not, so having to consciously browse to my Apps account is a good thing; and I get the exact-same interface here (my room) or on one of the departmental computers, or indeed anywhere else, which means I can productively check email away from my desk. This helps in many other ways – on a shared computer I have much fewer distractions, so concentrate on processing all my mail, and then actually getting on with tasks.