Kolz Blog

One of the temptations when starting with GTD is to over-engineer it. I see it all of the time. The more creative people are, the more they want to create a sophisticated system for their lists with lots of bells, whistles, cross-referencing, categorization, color-coding, flagging systems, ad nauseam. Believe me, I can go shoulder to shoulder with anyone about all of the cool implementations for GTD. But if you saw my system, most of you would be amazed how simple it is. It's really just a simple set of lists that I can easily get stuff in and out of. That's my primary criteria. The categories are sorted by the primary tools, people and places I need to get stuff done. I don't use reminders, follow-up flags or priority codes. I'm not saying any of that stuff can't work, but often those things slow me down because they make me think more about my stuff than I need to. My guideline is that it should take about 30 seconds or less to get something onto a list. More than that, and my brain starts convincing me it's easier to hold in my head than do the "work" it takes to get it on a list. One of our coaches, Ana Maria, has a great tip for setting up a system: create it based on what would you feel like maintaining if you were sick in bed with the flu. Start there. Think about it. If you create your system based on always being in your "zone" and having the energy and attention span required to use a complex system for your stuff, then you've got a challenge on your hands when you're not in that place. Think of all of the times when your brain is toast and what you felt like doing--as little as possible. That's how my system is setup--to meet me at brain toast, not brain complex. I do lots of GTD classes for high-tech companies. I had an engineer come up to me at the end of my class recently who said he'd been playing around with GTD for 2 years, got lots of good tips out of the class, but was still struggling trying to find the "perfect" software program for managing his lists. He was convinced he would need to build it. My advice is to keep it simple. In my experience, many of the programs out there trying to automate GTD make it too complex and miss the point. A simple system can be profoundly efficient. Progress means simplifying, not complicating. - Bruno Munari