Chapters 4 to 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level of productivity. In this chapter, we look more at the vertical level, the digging deep and high-level thinking that draws on your creative brainpower. All of us could do more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative output with minimal effort.
If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you'll resist focused planning. However, as you begin to apply the GTD methods in this book, you will find that they free up capacity for enormously creative and constructive thinking. You can put that energy towards thinking more about two types of projects that deserve more of your attention:
- Projects that still have your attention even after you've determined their next actions: This type will need a more detailed approach than just identifying a next action. What is needed is a more specific application of one or more of the other four phases of the natural planning model: (a) purpose and principles, (b) vision/outcome, (c) brainstorming and/or (d) organising.
- Projects about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up: This type needs to have an appropriate place into which these associated ideas can be captured. Then they can reside there for later use as needed.
- Brainstorming: For example, note down "Draft ideas re X"
- Organising: For example, note down "Organise Project X notes"
- Setting up meetings: Often, progress will be made on project thinking when you set up a meeting with the people you'd like to be involved in the brainstorming.
- Gathering information: Sometimes, the next task on project thinking is to gather more data, so note down e.g. "Call X re her thoughts on next week's meeting"
Don't lose any ideas about project that could potentially be useful. Many times, you'll think of something you don't want to forget when you are in a place that has nothing to do with the project. One useful tip is to then send yourself an email, record a voice note and email it to yourself or record the idea in another place/list that you know you will check regularly. You need to hold all these ideas until you later decide what to do with them.
Other useful tools for these purposes include tools that automatically synchronise across all your devices, such as:
- Google Documents
- Word documents (and others) stored in your Dropbox account. Use different heading in "Outline" view to organise your ideas very quickly and efficiently.
- Time Tree Calendar & Notes App
- Evernote
Keep good writing tools around all the time (e.g. pen and paper, whiteboards at home, smartphone on the go), so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with. It should also be very easy to create a new physical project folder or a new digital folder in your computer, so that there is as little resistance to creative planning as possible. The mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organise random notes and potentially relevant materials provides a tremendously increased sense of control and joy.
Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.211-222.
