GTD Practitioners: How do you prioritize daily tasks?

November 14, 2015 4:44 PM

I've read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" for the second time and gone all in on implementing the system. The only area I feel the system and guidance are a bit weak on is planning your day-to-day and moment-to-moment choices for next actions.

I'm really struggling not pre-planning a to-do list on my calendar (which he discourages) and the best guidance in the book seems to be to "trust your gut" and using his defined metrics of time, energy and deadlines. When I've tried to operate this way what happens is I usually end up defaulting to the "easiest" (or most clearly defined) next task on my list and knocking it off and I can often make progress on many projects, but then realize the most important project is left untouched because that particular "next task" is rather unappealing to me.

However, the opposite approach to task management such as Brian Tracy's "Eat that Frog" or "The One Thing" also has shortcomings. I used to focus more on what was obviously important but then a lot of "unimportant" tasks would fall through the cracks as I was focused on my one important task for an extended period and the all of a sudden those unimportant tasks became important due to neglect and would bite me. This is what brought me to GTD.

David Allen's "Mind Like Water" concept, where you have confidence that you are working on the most appropriate thing for that moment seems like an ideal state to me, but I've yet to reach it. Any tips on how to really get there?

posted by the foreground to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Best answer: This question of scheduling has been a recurring theme on the official GTD forum - with David Allen himself jumping in occasionally. The consensus view seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with scheduling tasks on your calendar so long as you’re able to treat that commitment like you would a meeting with anyone else.

Related to this, my confidence that i’m working on the right thing seems to increase when i know that i’ve spent an adequate amount of time defining my work: i.e., determining what “done” will look like and listing the next visible, physical action to move things forward. For those times when i’m concerned that things are slipping through the cracks i’ve found that increasing the frequency of my reviews seems to help.
posted by mechrisd at 5:58 PM on November 14, 2015

Best answer: It's a bit anti-canonical GTD, but one thing that has helped me is a sort of "dashboard" perspective of "stuff I want to get done this week" (adjust the timeframe for what works for you). I don't consider this the same as a todo list on the calendar, because I know it's fine if it doesn't get done that day, and I don't have to keep moving it forward if I don't get it done.

Ideally, during my weekly review, I'll be thinking about if I need to be accomplishing a specific project (or moving it forward) in the next week. If so, I'll flag it (I use Omnifocus). I have a perspective that shows me all the stuff that's available that I've flagged, which is what I work from on a daily basis.

This lets me thoughtfully consider not just what I "feel like" doing, but what I actually need to be doing, and because A) I've agreed with myself that the dashboard is The List Of This Week's Stuff and B) It's not exceedingly long, I'm pretty good about focusing on it to pick stuff off.

If you also use Omnifocus, Kourosh Dini did a webinar where I learned about the idea.
posted by brentajones at 6:08 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I've always done a similar thing to brentajones above, where some tasks are "today" and some are "this week" and the rest of the list is "whenever". This focuses on urgency rather than importance, but every now and then I move some important things onto the daily or weekly list.

I like this better than high/medium/low priorities because those just leads me to think "I have ten high-priority things on my list, which one should I do?" and wonder if the low-priority things should be on the list at all.
posted by mmoncur at 6:14 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I do daily and weekly plans, blocking out time for different tasks, as outlined by Cal Newport on his blog. I follow GTD in terms of the way I manage my "inbox" of things, but planning is how I orient myself to say "what should I be doing right now?"

Unimportant small tasks are how I get rolling in the morning at work before I move on to bigger, harder things, and that's how I blend the two.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:37 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I use a hybrid of GTD and Kanban and I LOVE Workflowy as my task list. Like the other commenters, my tasks are seperated into Today, This Week and Future. The reason I like to use Workflowy is that you can break large tasks up into their many small componants. So for me, working on a large task might be knocking off one small componant each day, instead of trying to do the whole thing in one fell swoop.

This write-up (and it's follow-up) are a bit more complicated than my system, but will give you an idea.
posted by Brittanie at 2:57 AM on November 15, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses. Seems like I need to get a little tighter on identifying deadlines for each task and that will be a better source of focus.
posted by the foreground at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2015

Best answer: Canonical GTD never quite worked for me because I needed a little more organization in my task list as well. Here's what I did:

• Create a Trello board for TODOs
• Create lists for DONE, one for every work day, one called WEEKEND, one called NEXT WEEK, and one called SOMEDAY
• Monday mornings, I move everything from NEXT WEEK (and some things from SOMEDAY) into a day of the week. I do this very quickly and impulsively. (Trello also allows you to assign a due date to a card, which helps.)
• When the task is done, I move the card to DONE.

This is extremely flexible, easy to maintain, and easy to switch up, but it allows me to prioritize on the fly. Before this, I've never kept a to-do system for longer than a few weeks, but this has lasted both me and my husband over a year. Good luck gettin' stuff done!
posted by nosila at 7:49 AM on November 15, 2015 [2 favorites]