Kitchen Sinks and Tickler Files

So, flylady has this thing about clean kitchen sinks. The first step in her “get control of your house and home” system is to clean your kitchen sink and keep it clean.

I’ve never gotten into flylady but I thought of it this morning.

You see, my inbasket has been piling up lately. And piling up and piling up. To the point where last night when I couldn’t sleep I thought, I’d better dig through it because there’s probably stuff in it that has to be done immediately and I’ve forgotten about it. And (okay, I know you’re tired of reading this if you’ve been reading me for awhile but I have to repeat it in case somebody new stops by) since I’ve been doing the GTD thing, I’ve actually got a system that works, even if by letting my inbasket pile up this way, I’m totally NOT working the system.

But the thing is, I do know I can get control of it again easily, so last night with Letterman in the background, I did. I wish I had a before picture but last night I wasn’t thinking about documentation.

It wasn’t until this morning when I woke up and my inbasket was totally empty and I had work waiting for me to do it that I thought, I want to blog this.

When I woke up this is what awaited me:

That is my tickler file in the foreground, in green. It has 43 folders — 31 green folders for days of the month, and twelve blue folders for months of the year.

When I went to bed last night, the 5 folder was in front, because the next morning would be the December 5. (You can see December, the blue folder, sticking out a little above the others. All the other months are tucked back in there behind.)

Behind my desk files, a little out of focus, are my black wire mesh desk tray thingies. The top one (with the P-touch labeler on it) is the Out tray. The middle is my TBR tray — scripts waiting for me to read them. the bottom (the empty one) is my In tray, which was empty because I’d just emptied it.

How did I empty it quickly? Easy, I started with the top paper and looked at it, and realized it needed to be filed away. Made a label (P-touch) and filed it.

Next paper? Something I really need to take care of asap. I put it in the 5 folder so that I would do it on the 5th, today. As I worked down the stack, several things ended up with it, stuff that really needs to get signed, registered, mailed, whatevered before today is over.

Other stuff either got trashed or filed or –

Tucked ahead into other folders. 9 (stuff that I can’t do without the Resident Storm Chaser so won’t be handled until Saturday) or 28 (something to be considered before the end of the year but no need to worry about it until after Christmas, and 6 (some stuff that needs to be done quickly, but not quite as urgent as the stuff I’m doing today).

Note from the future (well, an hour later): One thing that went out in the mail — a rebate receipt for $110 which they warn may take up to 8 weeks to process. So I put my copy of it in the February folder. When I pull that one out I’ll see the receipt and if I haven’t already received my rebate, I can follow up on it. The tickler works up to a year in advance.

It’s this easy. I clear the inbasket by giving it just a little thought and figuring out when I will most likely be able to actually DO it, and put it in my tickler file for that day.

This morning I took out my 5 folder:

Dumped that stuff in the inbasket. And now have this:

6 folder at the front of the tickler, waiting for tomorrow. (It can also serve as inbasket, collecting stuff that comes in today. At the end of today or first thing tomorrow I then process that stuff into the appropriate places, and “do” the stuff that is waiting to be done.)

I have important stuff in front of me, already “thought” about, just waiting for me to “do.” I know I’m not missing anything (at least not anything that was in my inbasket!) and when this stuff is done, my inbasket is empty again until tomorrow.

I think tickler files are amazing beasts. I know a lot of people at 43 folders rave about GTD but don’t actually use the 43-Folder/Tickler File.

But, as I was thinking this morning … for me the tickler file is a little like flylady’s clean kitchen sink, only better. When I use the system (which I usualy do) I feel like I have control of some tiny corner of my life. Important stuff that was piled and taunting me is now processed and waiting its turn to be handled. Really important stuff went out in the mail today. Whatever else is going on, this corner of my desk and my life is in control, and that’s saying something.

Just don’t ask for a picture of my sink.

————–
Huh. I’ve talked about this before.

Shout Out to my Morning Class –

Okay, so this morning was an upside down morning in every way I can imagine leading to me being 20 minutes late to class but that’s okay because I walked in and said, “Let’s move class to Starbucks!” and everyone agreed (but only because the bars weren’t open yet) and so a few followups.

First of all, Bobbie Faye’s myspace page is here and her bad advice column is here.

Second of all, here is the origin and explanation of the Hipster PDA and here are some fun pictures of hPDAs. (If that link doesn’t work, go to flickr and search on “hipsterpda” and “hpda.”)

Third of all, here are the diyplanner site and the templates for their version of hpda (some of which I gave you today).

Fourth of all, I forgot to say one important part of GTD and that’s that David Allen says your system should be fun. Whether it’s your “capture device” or whatever, you should choose things that bring you pleasure to use them. I’ve experimented with different stuff but keep coming back to my moleskine and its pocket, but there are a lot of cool ways to put together a system.

Fifth of all, I’ll let you know what Doris says about the hickey!

ACK! I forgot something!

Okay, and these are the two web designers I told you about who are both fabulous.

My own fabulous “official web site” was done by fourfourzero and I’m allowed to say my site is fabulous because I had nothing to do with making it so.

And honu web creations is terrific and a friend and you can’t go wrong with her, either!

There. Did I forget anything?

Black Belt

Hi, I’m Pooks and I have GTD.

This is a good thing, honest. I wish I had a stronger dose of it, but I’m hoping it will creep its way under my skin and into the kind of addiction that will further counteract those other initials that define me: ADD & ENFP.

ADD. I’m impulsive, and have trouble focusing, for starters.

ENFP. Myers-Briggs. I speak without thinking and never use logic or thought because emotion and instinct have elbowed their way to the front of the line and don’t play well with others.

To finish, the left side of my brain is as smooth as a baby’s bum.

All of which explains:

MY LIFE BEFORE GTD

Simply put? It was chaotic. I think I have 7 or 8 sets of scissors that I’ve bought to wrap Christmas packages through the years, and then could never find them again. In fact, we’ve lived here over 20 years? There are more scissors hiding here than I thought!

Fifteen years ago I discovered Sidetracked Home Executives with their 3×5s filed somewhat like the GTD “tickler file.” That helped a lot during the time I used it, but I backslid.

Over the past ten years I’ve been in and out of my Franklin Planner. It saved me numerous times and then my life would grow less demanding, I’d find myself not carrying it any more — until something new popped up that demanded better organization and information control. I always carried the largest (and least popular) planner, the size of a high school notebook, because there was plenty of room to keep notes, record information, etc. I learned to have it open beside me on my desk when I was working so I could keep ongoing notes.

I also am prone to huge shoulder bags that hold (in a pinch) that big planner, a laptop, books, and who knows what else. So carrying my world with me can be the norm rather than the exception.

None of this changed the fact that my life was chaos. But it made the chaos more manageable — when I bothered to use it.

Back before Christmas I decided to face the facts that I really wasn’t carrying my planner any more, and no matter how much I claimed to love it, if I wasn’t carrying it, it wasn’t working for me. So I decided to downsize and I bought a cute little purse with the small Franklin Planner built in.

I really hadn’t given any thought to doing anything else in the “get organized” column, and was much more concerned with (drum roll, please)….

The office.

You see, when I got a laptop a few years ago, I started working/writing in a comfy chair in the living room. It generally had a pile of papers, books, fast food wrappers around it (hush) and became my “office.” In the meantime, my real office started collecting. If I didn’t know what to do with stuff, I tossed the stuff on the desk, until landslides dumped stuff on the floor. The floor itself was stacked with bags, boxes, piles and stacks of stuff that had no place to call their own. Or if they had a place, it was too much trouble to put it there “right now.”

The office because a storeroom of stuff with a floor you couldn’t walk across.

So Christmas of ‘05 I was much more concerned with, “What do I do with all this stuff?”

Enter GTD.

HOW I DISCOVERED GTD

I started a blog. I wrote about my storyboarding process for screenwriting and somebody responded in comments about it being an interesting “analog” approach.

What does analog mean? I didn’t know so he explained, one thing led to another and his mention of GTD.

At the same time a friend mentioned reading the 43 Folders boards.

I started asking anybody I could find to ask, “Does this help me get rid of ’stuff’ and can I still use my Franklin Planner?” I wasn’t getting definitive answers but my interest was piqued and I had all that “stuff” to get rid of, and the book said it helped you handle “stuff” so I ordered it, and started hanging out at 43 Folders.

Little did I know that the ’stuff’ was more about mental stuff than physical stuff, but fortunately, the book worked both ways.

IMPLEMENTING GTD

I’ve learned the hard way that if I’m going to read a book and do something, I have to do it while I’m reading the book.

If I read the whole book first, whatever enthusiasm I have going in will fade by the end, and I won’t do it. Or, I start taking shortcuts and cherry-picking what I want to do and what I don’t want to do, and end up with a half-baked process that most likely results in an unfinished process.

So I simply started reading GTD chapter by chapter, and doing what it said to do in each chapter before moving on. If I recall correctly, this first involved a visit to the office supply store to pick up more “stuff.” Yikes! More stuff I’ll add to the pile and never use? What am I thinking? And there’s “stuff” on this list I never ever use. I never use rubber bands, for example — but they were on David Allen’s list, so I figured I’d get them. I chose a package of multi-colored bands because they’re pretty, and later realized that they’re also easier to deal with — it’s easy to tell the different sizes apart when they’re different colors. But mainly I got them because the inside of my desk drawer looks prettier when the rubber bands are all different colors. (I have now used most of them and need more. Who knew?) I also bought the labeler — something I’d always kind of wanted but feared would end up being just one more piece of “stuff” I didn’t use.

That was the easy part, buying a few things.

Then I started emptying my office and watching a mountain in the living room grow and grow and grow as I piled everything in there. Mind you, not everybody has to literally empty his or her office. Some people don’t have a mountain of “stuff” to deal with; they have a box of stuff, or a stack of stuff. Me? Mountain.

Frankly, I got my desk emptied and wanted to quit there and just clean it up and call it a day. I was afraid to keep emptying my office for fear I’d have a mess so big I would never ever get to the bottom of it, I would have not one disaster-room but two, and the panic was building….

But the tyrants — I mean, kind, encouraging people at 43 Folders encouraged me to stick with the program and keep going, that I would finish and come out the other side into the light ….

So by the end of the day I’d emptied my entire office into the living room (and threatened my entire family that if anybody showed up at my front door they would be turned away).

The next morning I gritted my teeth and went farther — I emptied my desk drawers, too.

All that was left in my office was the furniture, the bookcases (still with books), the equipment, and the things hanging on the walls. I vacuumed, cleaned all the surfaces, sat down and drank a venti latte and was agog at all the space!

I braced myself, and fully fortified with caffeine I read the next chapter and worked my way through the mountain just the way it said to, one piece at a time, two-minute rule, etc. If I’d pushed myself I could have done it in one day, but I didn’t push it, and it took two days, maybe a little more.

And suddenly, there I was! With bags of “stuff” going out the door, and other “stuff” in places where it actually belonged! One thing that was counter to all that we’ve been told before had to do with the two-minute rule. The first time I picked up something from the “mountain” that belonged in the car, I almost set it aside, knowing that several items would end up going to the car and I should collect them and take them all at once. (Isn’t that what all the cleaning gurus tell you?)

But then I realized I’d just be rearranging the pile and besides, I could put it where it belonged in less than two minutes — and so I took the ice scraper to the car. Every time I ran across something that went in the car, I made another trip out the front door. No big deal? Maybe, but it was embedding in me the idea that “do it now” works, and that if I’d allowed myself to start smaller piles — oy, I don’t even want to go there. Been there, done that, wore out the t-shirt.

Finally. The room was empty.

The secret (as Allen tells us) is that once you empty the room you do not want to fill it back up again. Believe me, that is the greatest incentive to let things go. My trash bags filled; boxes of stuff to give away filled.

I finally confronted the decision-making processes that I’d been pushing to the back of my mind for (in some cases) years.

MY CURRENT TOOLS FOR GTD

Decision-making is difficult for me. And the wide-open “do whatever works for you” approach boggled my mind. I wished that David Allen had given some concrete examples. “This is how so-and-so implemented it using his Palm, his computer and his cell phone.” “This is how so-and-so implemented it using a stack of index cards and a pencil.” “This is how so-and-so implemented it using a ouija board, black candles and chicken blood….” Oh, um. Sorry.

But he didn’t. He left that part rather vague, saying to use your own system.

So I kept reading 43 Folders and I kept trying little computer tricks which I thought should help me a lot, because I can only write/compose on a computer, I always have my laptop with me, my life is tied up with it, so why wouldn’t I want a laptop-based system?

Except it didn’t work. Hmmm. What next?

That was when I was led to a yahoo group (AnalogGTD-subscribe@yahoogroups.com) that specializes in analog implementations of GTD — and even then, I was lost in all the possibilities of 3×5 systems and Moleskines and Hermes date books and … you get the picture. But at least the tools were things that excited me, tools that I’d used before in some cases. Reading about them intrigued me in ways that reading about software hacks didn’t.

So I finally decided, “Start with what I know works, add something to it and dive in.” It didn’t matter what the “something” was; I could adjust later as I figured out what was working for me and what wasn’t.

I was already using my purse-sized Franklin Planner primarily as a hard calendar, for my contacts and a capture device. So okay, I know that has worked for me and I just bought this cute little purse/planner that I like a lot, so why not start there?

When several people mentioned using pocket Moleskines as capture devices, I decided to try that, too, since I’d wanted to use a Moleskine but had never come up with a use for one. It fit into the pocket of my purse/planner.

And those 3×5s — I liked them before, so I decided to use 3×5s for “@ contexts/next actions,” “projects,” “@ shopping,” etc. because they fit in the back pocket of the Moleskine. I first just scribbled lists on blank cards, but eventually started printing out the templates I wanted from the DIYplanner site and using brightly colored card stock cut into 3×5s, because I like color and things that look prettier than my scribbled blank cards did.

What started as a preliminary trial under the assumption that I’d be making changes as I went along ended up working. It’s still my system.

Each day I pull out the hPDA (3×5s) and choose the day’s NAs, and list them in my planner. Throughout the day I take ongoing notes in my Moleskine (or occasionally in the planner). And I use my Lamy Safari fountain pen and Spearmint green ink because it’s fun.

And that’s the key thing I took away from this, as far as a “a system.” David Allen is right — you have to want to use it, thus it must be truly “yours.” Would I have been able to come up with a system that worked without reading all the experiences of people at 43 Folders and AnalogGTD? Nope. That kind of creating doesn’t fall within my short list of strengths. I probably would have slipped back to the Franklin Planner by itself, which might have been “adequate” — but not as effective as the system I’ve put together with the help of internet communications!

MY STATE OF AFFAIRS POST-GTD

I’m not post-GTD, yet. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do for me, and I have a long list of projects I need to get to. I’m certainly no black belt, though I appreciate the honor bestowed upon me!

My state at this time is — I’m able to focus better, and that aids my creativity, which is of primary importance to me.

Secondarily, I now know where four sets of my scissors are!