This long, relaxing, commitment-sparse summer is the perfect time to initiate the planning stages of Operation: Win at Law School. It’s clear that with the amount of reading, organizing, and personal responsibility law school will bring, I’ll need a “productivity system” more effective than my current version, which consists of the following steps:

1. Write appointments and due dates in my planner.
2. Do homework assignments when/if I get around to them, unless they’re ungraded or the grading scale is so “curved” that I’m already guaranteed an A.
3. For exams, gather notes the night before. Study notes the morning of, preferably while walking to class.
4. Go to class.

Step 4 is the key to the whole system. This may seem obvious, but it took me about four years to discover it. When I go to class, everything else takes care of itself, and college looks a lot like high school. So, if you’re about to enter college, take it from me: you can skip all the fancy motivational “College for Dummies” books and just GO TO CLASS. I swear, no one should ever put me in charge of an undergrad orientation. It would last about fifteen seconds.

Right, so back to the point. I’ve long admired David Allen‘s much-blogged-about Getting Things Done book/system/lifestyle choice, and over the last few years I’ve read a zillion articles and summaries, listened to Allen chat it up with Merlin Mann on 43 Folders’ GTD podcast series, and dabbled in a few of its techniques and tools, like keeping my email inbox nearly empty and getting as much stuff as possible out of my head.*

The things that have stuck so far are a physical inbox (a big bin that gets a seat at my dining table), a somewhat-haphazard file system, and a ubiquitous capture device (i.e., cheap pocket notebook).

This morning I dropped Sam off at daycare (more on which later) and, seeing several consecutive hours laid out before me, decided to start GTD for real. Biotch.

I started with a mindsweep, which is where you sit down with pencil and paper and write down everything that’s running around in your head in terms of to-dos, long-term projects, goals, ideas, whatever. The initial list took me maybe twenty minutes, though I kept adding to it all day. In the end, I’d pulled 128 129 nagging bits of stuff out of my head. It’s a bit intimidating to see it all in one place, but mmm, it feels good.

At some point along the way I ordered the actual book on Amazon, which is really what you’re supposed to do *first*, but I didn’t want to squander today’s precious, fleeting motivational energy by waiting around all weekend.

Then, after reorganizing my file system a bit, I processed everything in my physical inbox, which took about two hours, much of which involved opening all my mail from the last couple months. (Paper mail is just not my thing.) There was a good deal of shredding and recycling involved.

That was Day One. And yes, it took the better part of a day, what with the breaks for food and daydreaming. Day Two will happen . . . whenever the mood strikes me, which may or may not be tomorrow. The next step is to process all the items I collected in the mindsweep into the various “bins” or “categories” or whatever they’re called.

And then, THEN! Then I will actually start doing the things on all these lists. Because so far, despite my intense focus on Getting Things Done, no thing has actually gotten done.** Things have just been . . . rearranged, really. Accomplishment awaits me, I’m sure.

———
* I would say I’m a productivity geek, but since I’ve mostly only *read* about such geekery, I think I’d have to label myself a wannabe productivity geek, which is . . . more geekish? Less geekish? A bit sad, at any rate, I think.
** Okay, so one thing did get done. I paid my utility bill because I came across it in my inbox and it was due today. But I didn’t mean it!

Tags: GTD

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 12:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.