GTD for storytellers

Part of the prob­lem cre­ative types have with David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done method­ol­ogy is that we tend to be “big pic­ture” type peo­ple and GTD focuses on the lit­tle things. Even if we’re method­i­cal in set­ting up our GTD sys­tem, we’re never quite sure we’re focus­ing on the right lit­tle things. Remem­ber, the dif­fer­ence between effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness is that while effi­ciency is doing things right, effec­tive­ness is doing the right things.

This has become more and more appar­ent to me recently. I’m at some­thing of a cross­roads in my life, a reboot where I have the oppor­tu­nity to re-​invent myself and build my life the way I want it. But what do I want? This is where I’ve always run aground with GTD. I’ll do a “core dump”, writ­ing down all my open loops, but still have no idea if clos­ing all of those open loops will get me to where I want to go.

So in addi­tion to all that “in the trenches” stuff, I decided to see if I could deter­mine what my goals (mas­ter projects) should be by doing what I do best: telling a story.

My “reboot” con­cept will take a lit­tle under two years, after which both myself and my par­ents will be finan­cially secure and inde­pen­dent. So I decided to visu­al­ize a nor­mal, typ­i­cal day for myself two years in the future. If I get to where I want to be, what would that look like?

Here’s the start of that day.

The alarm on my Palm Pre goes off, wak­ing me up. Shoo­ing the cats off the futon, I sit up and glance around my Spar­tan bed­room. The walls have framed posters from favorite movies, and there’s a TV stand in the cor­ner with my 24″ tube TV and a small DVD player. I get up, pull my Pre off the Touch­stone induc­tive charger, pick up my clothes from the night before and walk into the liv­ing room.

The liv­ing room is also a wide open space with lit­tle in it. There’s a large cat tree in the far right cor­ner, a futon imme­di­ately to my right, against the wall the bor­ders the bed­room, and a large flatscreen TV mounted to the oppo­site wall. Under the TV is a metal strip run­ning to the car­pet, which both holds three glass shelves and con­ceals the cables from the shelf con­tents. The first shelf holds my Nin­tendo Wii and var­i­ous con­trollers, the sec­ond holds my Xbox 360 and the third my com­bi­na­tion DVD player/​VCR. On the car­pet at the bot­tom is my Wii Fit bal­ance board.

I walk past the liv­ing room and make a right into the laun­dry room. Imme­di­ately to my left is the auto­mated cat box, which doesn’t need chang­ing yet. I drop yesterday’s clothes into the stain­less steel wash­ing machine, which also isn’t full enough to run a load yet, and ignore the boxes of CDs and other media stored in the corner.

As I walk back to the liv­ing room I go past the kitchen and look into the “din­ing room”. I have a L-​shaped glass and steel com­puter desk in the cor­ner, hold­ing my home server/​gaming PC, a mul­ti­func­tion inkjet and paper fil­ing sys­tem. I then walk into the kitchen, start a batch of rice steam­ing and pour myself some hot tea from the timed cof­fee maker.

It’s hardly a riv­et­ing best­seller, but there’s a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion there. Going back over that sec­tion, I can pull out fac­tual, declar­a­tive state­ments that have to be true for this vision of my future to be true.

• I have my own apartment.
• I have a Palm Pre and a Touch­stone charger.
• I have a futon for the bedroom.
• I have a futon for the liv­ing room.
• I have a large cat tree.
• I have a flatscreen TV with a wallmount.
• I have a wall mounted, glass shelf enter­tain­ment system.
• I have a Nin­tendo Wii and a Wii Fit.
• I have an Xbox 360.
• I have a stain­less steel washer/​dryer set.
• I have all my CDs and DVDs ripped to a home server (since the media is in storage).
• I have a home server.
• I have an L-​shaped glass and steel com­puter desk.
• I have a mul­ti­func­tion inkjet printer.
• I have a paper GTD system.

Now, admit­tedly a lot of this is going to turn out to be shop­ping list. But as I go on writ­ing about my day, it turns out I use the Wii Fit every morn­ing for aer­o­bics, strength train­ing, yoga and med­i­ta­tion. I stream all my TV through my Xbox 360. So I go over my list of state­ments and see some obvi­ous group­ings, which in turn imply other goals. All the shop­ping list stuff goes under “My apart­ment is fur­nished to my tastes.” but that implies “I can afford to fur­nish my apart­ment to my tastes.” The bit about the paper GTD sys­tem ended up mor­ph­ing to using a scan­ner to scan all my paper data into OneNote, where it can be man­aged by Out­look. The home server/​media cen­ter thing even­tu­ally led to plan­ning on buy­ing a few 1TB USB dri­ves to hold video content.

When I’m done with this con­sol­i­da­tion, I have the fol­low­ing top-​level goals for two years from now.

• I’m as close to 100% dig­i­tal as possible.
• My liv­ing space is clean and organized.
• I take good care of myself.
• I have my own apartment.

Under each of these I have sub-​goals (both “I drive a Honda Civic hybrid” and “I play LOTRO with my friends reg­u­larly” go under “I take good care of myself”) and each of those in turn has projects and next actions under it. But in the process of doing this lit­tle exer­cise, I’m con­vinced I have the “big rocks” cov­ered and I’m on track to achieve the impor­tant things in my life.