What to do with all that daily email, voice mail, snail mail, new ideas, delegations, meetings, stuff to read, stuff to file tha

I don’t know about you, but I can get overwhelmed with stuff that comes my way each day. I put in a full day’s work, plus come in on Saturdays, and each week I seem more behind then the last. My Inbox is overflowing. My desk is a mess. I haven’t looked at my snail mail in a week. Factor in my many weekly meetings, my personal and civic responsibilities and hobbies, and it is easy to feel stressed and out of control.

Over the past several months I have immersed myself in David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) approach to “stuff management”.

I have read his two books, listen to the tapes of those books on my way into work, and attended one of his live seminars. Slowly, with the help of some desktop softwaren and my Pocket PC, I feel the ship is turning, and I am getting my stuff under control.

Allen says it could take a busy person as long as two years to totally master his system. However, the good news is the effects of implementing GTD are cumulative and immediate. The goal of GTD is an uncluttered “clear” mind present on the task at hand, with no content in “psychic RAM”. Stuff is either dealt with immediately or placed in a trusted system that is reviewed as often as necessary.

If you’ve followed these blogs, you may have noticed posts by Bruce Keener, Al Harrington, and me about the “GTD” system. We have been actively emailing each other describing our progress implementing Allen’s system. All three of us have a significant exposure to Steven Covey’s methods, and want to see how his ideas fit in. However, our focus now is GTD.

Where does the Smartphone or Pocket PC fit in with GTD?

A PDA device, since it is almost always available, can play a central role in the GTD system. As Allen says, ideas as well as stuff still in “psychic RAM” can come at you any time. A PDA lets you take projects and next actions out of your mind and placed into your trusted system. In addition, with a Pocket PC, you could review that trusted system anywhere, or check for “next actions” related to your current location (to make calls or run errands, etc). Check out my initial articles on GTD starting here to see some possible Pocket PC and desktop software solutions.

Al, Bruce, and I each have slightly different approaches to implementing GTD using electronic tools on our desktop. We all will probably end up using Pocket Informant on the Pocket PC, although there are certainly other solutions. (I was actually quite surprised at Allen’s seminar, how many folks in the hi-tech industry still preferred paper implementations of GTD).

Most of my time at work is spent doing E-mail in Outlook and attending meetings making use of notes in my Outlook calendar. Therefore, I quickly gravitated to the GTD add-in from NetCentrics recommended by Allen’s company. Although a bit clumsy (due mostly to the nature of Outlook), I found the add-in an excellent way to “learn by doing” Allen’s system. Using the add-in I process each E-mail: deleting, delegating, deferring, and creating an Outlook task or calendar item. I sync with my Pocket PC and Pocket Informant captures most of the task and calendar information created by the GTD add-in. A few weeks ago, I put the folks at Pocket Informant and Netcentrics in touch, and hope for a better integration sometime in 2007.

Bruce is also using the add-in, while experimenting around with Vista and even considering a Mac. Al, for a number of reasons, is using Mindjet mindmapping software (along with Pocket Mindmap for the Pocket PC) as his central GTD tool. I too am a huge fan of Mindjet mindmapping software for brainstorming. Allen specifically discusses mindmapping as recommended planning methodology.

Both Al and I are anxious to try a GTD Mindjet add-in ResultsManager from Gyronix. Fortunately, the RM people are already in touch with Netcentrics. I look forward to seeing how well their two products work together – particularly how well tasks (GTD “Projects”, “Waiting for” items, “Someday” items, “Deferred” items and “Next Actions”) sync between the two programs.

In future blogs and in the magazine Al, Bruce, and I will discuss specific GTD principles that you can adopt, whether or not your buy into the entire GTD approach. We will discuss how we make those GTD principles work using our desktop and Pocket PCs.