Getting Things Done... Done... Again

08/05/14

I am done with Getting Things Done again. As I've mentioned previously, I had already read the book back in October 2013. It was recommended to me at the end of September and I bought it and read it pretty much right away.

Though, I did put off reading it a bit to finish reading So Good They Can't Ignore You, so I didn't get right to it. It's funny the author of SGTCIY had some criticisms of GTD which I found interesting (though, I I remember your note of how his criticisms seemed rather anecdotal, Stephan).

But anyways, at the end of GTD there is a recommendation to reread the book in 3-6 months, because of course you'll miss some stuff the first time through for various reasons. "It'll be like reading a whole new book," was basically what the end of the book said.

So, almost a year later I managed to read through it again, and I have to say it was a worthwhile action. The first time through, I set up the basic day-to-day stuff like a tickler and boiling things down into the next actionable item, which were incredible boons to my productivity. And then I organized those things further with time-blocking and stuff like that.

While I built up the line-of-sight infrastructure, I tried and failed to setup bigger-picture orgranizational stuffs. Eventually, I just stopped thinking about the bigger picture stuff, and without it I didn't have a well of well-defined actions to regularly pull from. I had such a large well of things to do during my first read through that its inability to replenish itself properly did not reveal itself for months.

But on the second read through, the basic fundamentals for line-of-sight were already in place. It was actually humerous, at one point in particular it told me to think of the very next physical action and note how much it improves my motivation. It didn't affect me at all, as the habit had been ingrained.

With basic fundamentals, now the parts on project tracking and the like jumped out as more doable. And now I'm refactoring my whole organizational setup to integrate this next level of planning.

Which feels right.

When I first read GTD back in October, it wasn't until Febuary of this year that things really clicked and that month or so was super amazing. I wonder if I can expect a similar experience with this second iteration.

Maybe not, there was a lot of things that started going right then, and I can't credit just my personal organization as the main cause.

We'll see.

Anyways, if you have trouble getting things done, I quite recommend reading Getting Things Done. I even recommend reading it more than once. I'll probably read it again sometime next year.

Next up: A Pattern Language. I'm only 60 pages in or so (it's a bit over a thousand pages long), but I'm already enjoying it immensely.

It makes sense to read, I swear! Building code is kinda like building cities.

I think I'll attempt to blog through this one a bit at a time while reading it.