Getting Sorted 1: New stuff with me
I’ve switched over to a new domain and am in the process of sorting a website or something for it. Henceforth, this site will do bugger all, except act as a place for me to jot down my ideas and progress with…
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Sorting my Shit Out
After reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done for the second time (the first was three years ago), I was inspired to get on with sorting things out with me. Perhaps it went the other way around - I re-read GTD because I wanted to sort things out. Either way, I’m feeling inspired.
My intention is to go through the following steps, roughly speaking:
- Sort my organizational stuff out
- Do less stuff I dislike and more stuff I like. See less people I dislike and see more people I like
- Get my Being Healthy thing on.
- Start building a bit of a brand
So, the other day I started with the first bit, sorting my organizational stuff, all GTD inspired. I bought a nice Brother Labeler from Amazon and set off on a Collection & Organization Binge.
1. Collection
I gathered up all the things that were dotted all over my computer, at home, at work and at cadets and dumped them on my mattress or in my INBOX folder. After that I wrote down everything I could think of that was bugging me, big and small and piled them on top. That’s about it for collection.
2. Organization
Yesterday Morning I went through all of the items in my Inbox, creating project files for any defined projects with paper-materials and adding those projects to OmniFocus .
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Any small Projects which won’t need support material and should have only a few actions went into an OmniFocus folder called “Small Projects”, and paper for them went in a file folder with a shiny new label “Small Projects Support Stuff”.
For the rest, the projects were split into three Categories: Cadets, University, Others. You can see my Projects list in the screenshot on the left.
One of the issues I had with using OmniFocus in the past was the enormous number of projects I racked up. Anything that required more than one action step was made a project, and this quickly cluttered up both OmniFocus and my brain. This time around I’ve decided to put any small, two-or-three-step ‘things’ into the Miscellaneous Project (shown below).
After this almighty great job I set up a bunch of contexts and a definite next action for each project. Then I had a cup of tea.
It feels pretty good to get all of my stuff out of my head, it’s already allowing me to focus more on what I’m doing and less on what I have to do. What’s the next step? More Organization, with a sprinkle of brainstorming thrown in and of course, more labeling. Cool.
[Image of misc list was not archived]