Getting Things Done: the Roadmap

Interessante Mitschrift zum Seminar Getting Things Done: the Roadmap auf dem O’Reilly Blog From the Belly of the Beasts [link tot; war: http://blogs.oreillynet.com/beasts/archives/2005/08/getting_things_1.html]. Auszüge:

- Teams always work better together in a crisis. The key is to figure out how to get high-performance behavior without the stress.

- Matrix of self-management: vertical axis is “Vision” – top is the visionary, bottom is the “don’t know what’s going on”. Horizontal axis is “Control” – at left is “out of control”, at right is “in complete control”. Quadrants: lower left: the Victim. Lower right: the Compulsive. Upper left: the Crazy-Maker (implementation is for schmucks!). Upper right: the Commander. Allen works with a lot of Crazy-Makers.

- If you decide you need to clean your garage, but you put it off for six years, there’s a part of your mind that thinks you should have been cleaning your garage 24/7 for six years. If you can park that on a list, it will get out of your “psychic RAM” – your brain can let go of it and more of its resources are available to work on other things.

- “As soon as you know how many agreements you’ve made, you’ll start making fewer!”

- There’s a real psychic “win” that comes from crossing things off a to-do list. Sometimes so much so that people will write down things they’ve already done just so they can check them off!

- “When in doubt, clean up your email.” (sometimes you just need to get active on something instead of wallowing)

- The higher level the view, the less complex your system needs to be. Your purpose/values level is probably just a text paragraph, but your daily emails and to-dos need more structure for tracking.

- Next action: has to be granular enough that the brain stops trying to think about it. You need to finish the thinking process.

- “How can I get my teenager on board with this?” “Tell them they’re not old enough for it.”