Ambient Awareness

I recently started one of my New Year’s resolutions early, which is to embrace the Getting Things Done® methodology, as written about in David Allen’s best selling book “Getting Things Done”. For the last year or so, I’ve been loosely using the Getting Things Done approach or GTD. However it wasn’t until recently that I started to fully understand it’s potential. 

I first learned about GTD from Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders website. Merlin is a big Mac evangelist and a bit of a personal productivity guru himself. I took an interest in 43 Folders because I’m always trying to increase my own personnel productivity skills. It was Merlin’s concept of a “Zero Inbox” which caught my interest. Zero Inbox promotes the concept of reducing your email inbox to nothing, or zero messages. I have been using email as part of work for over 15 years now and it’s always been a struggle to respond to every message. I honestly couldn’t imagine a “zero” inbox. It just seemed impossible to me. At the time, I had at least gotten to a point of using my inbox as an extension of my “to do” list - in the sense that anything within it required some sort of action, and thus was a collection of “to do” items. Any message within the inbox was clearing something I had to act on, delete or file it away. However this proved to be a very limited because it created yet another “to do” list, and thus yet another list to maintain. The Zero Inbox concept, which is based on the GTD methodology, really take managing one’s email inbox to a new level. It applies the GTD concepts of “processing” to every email message that comes into your inbox. “Processing” has four clear actions - respond (if it takes less than 2 minutes), delegate to someone else, file or delete. Pretty simple, right? It’s actually amazingly simple. And if consistently applied, you can actually get a “zero inbox”. 

Since getting back in-touch with GTD, I’ve tried to move beyond just the Zero Inbox and to fully embrace GTD throughout my personal and professional life. While the concept of GTD is “tool neutral”, I have found two tools of particular importance to how I working with it now - my iPhone and an application called OmniFocus. OmniFocus was written with GTD in mind and runs as an application on my iPhone. Because my iPhone tends to never be far from me (for good or bad!), I use it as my primary “capture” device. Since one of the premises of GTD is to “capture” any thoughts or tasks you have in your mind and off-load it to your “inbox”, the iPhone and OmniFocus work perfectly for me. When a thought comes into my mind - I reach for my iPhone, launch OmniFocus and quickly capture it and free my mind for the task. It seems a little odd, but if you have faith, it’s a element of the system that really does work. 

As I practice GTD more, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a missing tool of sorts for today’s “digital natives”. The average young person is so dramatically exposed to ever increasing amounts of information - to the point of information overload. Additionally, the constant “multi-tasking” behavior raises serious time management concerns - and heathy “on-task” behavior. Compared to a generation ago, today’s digital natives are faced with “processing problems” which couldn’t even begin to be imagined ten years ago. Yet, most educational institutions are slow to provide any sort of cognitive tool, such as GTD, to help kids these days to cope with the realities of today’s digital world. Is GTD not a model to be taught to all of today’s digital natives? The information technology sector within the United States (and abroad) has long championed GTD because of the over-processing  issues it faced (i.e. some of the first knowledge workers of our time), yet just about every student is a knowledge worker and faced with those same information overload issues that the IT sector first experience.d It’s the norm for today’s digital natives - and increasingly so for the digital immigrants as well. GTD isn’t right for every digital immigrant (because adults for far less likely to want to change there own cognitive systems), however isn’t every digital native a perfect match for GTD?

I’ve just begun this GTD journey, and it’s intersection with the digital native population, so I hope this is an on-going conversation. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Tags: Digital Natives, Getting Things Done (GTD)