GnTD: the flow January 29, 2008

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Some people are obsessed with getting things done, but we all know that work is over rated: we would rather just slob out and do nothing. One of the best ways to achieve this is to employ our Get noThing Done™ (GnTD) methodology. By employing this technique you can bring chaos to both your personal and work life, so ensuring nobody ever really expects you to do anything useful ever again. The essence of this methodology is to just “go with the Flow”. Here are the essential steps in the GnTD Flow:

Collect

Collect anything and everything. You never know what might be useful, so keep everything just in case. Examples include anything paper, useful tools, old packing materials, books, anything cheap in the sale, the latest gadgets, the latest fashions, etc.

The best place to keep things is where you’ll see them when you need them. Make use of all available surfaces as reminders of actions you might need to take. Cover desks with paperwork, fridges with post-it notes, floors with more paperwork, sideboards with old newspapers, tables with broken things that need mending etc. People often overlook potential storage spaces when tackling this exercise, but a certain amount of creative thinking may be useful. A simple pack of blu-tak will enable you to cover walls and even the ceiling with paperwork. A few hooks and the backs of your doors become ideal places for hanging old clothes and carrier bags of books.

Interestingly, we don’t advocate any particular collection method, so you too should strive to be non-methodical in your collection habits.

Procrastinate

There are lots of ways to deal with this phase, but I’ll provide detailed instructions another day. For now, consider the following tips:

• Find something at random amongst your collection, anything that piques your interest, particularly anything associated with a big, complicated project.
• Try to deal with several things at once.
• Give the impression of business by moving things around as often as possible.

If an item requires action:

1. Make a detailed plan of how to do it.
2. Ask someone else how they dealt with it, and make copious notes. Blog the notes and answer the feedback. Print it all out in case the blog-server fails.
3. Add any plans or notes to the collection, to be dealt with later.

If an item does not require action:

1. Put it back on the heap for later.
2. Never, never, throw anything away (see Collect, above).

Actions that take less than two minutes are probably not worth doing anyway, so don’t let them bother you.

Better still, get involved with a thorough analysis of someone else’s collection. Perhaps they’ll have paperwork you can photocopy, or gadgets you need too? Other people’s jobs are always so much more interesting than your own, aren’t they?

Disorganize

There are so many different ways to organise your stuff. I strongly suggest that you pick one and apply it immediately. Then pick another one, and apply it simultaneously. Then another, and another. The more systems you have going on at once, the better organised you’ll be. And it is probably a lot more fun cataloging things than it is actually dealing with them. Don’t worry if you give up half way through organising your stuff – the next round of organising things will come around soon enough.

For example, books must be organised by all the following categories at the same time (you may need more than one copy of each book):

• size (because tall books don’t fit on the small bookshelves)
• thickness (because pamphlets easily get lost amongst thick books)
• colour (to look nice)
• genre
• alphabetically by title
• alphabetically by author
• into read / unread / partly read / recommended reads / currently reading
• by subject matter
• by interest level
• in different rooms (bathroom book / bedside book etc)

An essential tool is a simple calendar. People will often forgive you for missing appointments if you can honestly say you made a supreme effort to check your calendar, but you had written the appointment on the wrong day / double booked / forgot to put it in.

Review

The purpose of this phase is to try to remember where everything is so that you can find it when you need it (or loose it when you don’t). At the same time, read as much of your collected paperwork as often as possible, so that you’ll know what it says if you can’t find it when you need it. Ideally, you should write a summary (a review) of each item so that you have the information in at least two different places.

Avoid

This is the phase where you actually avoid taking actions on the stuff you’ve collected.

One of the best ways to do this is to go out to collect more things that you’re bound to need, or to replace the things that you can’t find amongst the things you’re ‘in the process of organising’.

Alternatively, you could just watch a bit of TV, couldn’t you?