“One Month ZTD

A while ago I announced my start into a new productivity age – or so. A rough 4 weeks later, it is time for the first review of what happened – and what not.

I think – and that’s something Leo acknowledges himself – that most of the steps he actually describes in his e-Book Zen to Done is stuff already told before. That’s good news, because getting and staying productive is not Rocket-science but finding out what ways of organizing yourself and your life work best for you. But I’m repeating myself here.

Collect & ProcessAs you may know, Leo describes 10 habits to get more productive. And his advice is to not tackle more than, say, 2-3 at the same time.#

For me, this meant concentrating on collecting and processing. While I actually already had some experience in processing inboxes (especially my E-Mail inboxes, thanks to SpeedFiler), rigorously collecting and processing to zero was (and still is) actually of a challenge.

Collecting offline, on paper and onlineFor collecting stuff that comes to mind when I’m not sitting in front of a computer, I revived my good ole Molesike Notebook.#

Everything I capture there (or on the occasional sheet of paper or notebook page) is eventually transferred to my Remember The Milk Master-List or, if deleted or done, just ticked off. So, what happens quite often is that I note some meta-task like “Note down tasks from last meeting” into my Moleskine, and then put the actual tasks into RTM.

ProcessingProcessing sometimes is hard, especially e-Mail. Too often, I keep an E-Mail as a Reminder in my Inbox or because I am not sure what to do with it. However, with practice comes habit and this is just an area where I will have to improve a bit.#

ToolsAs mentioned above, I mainly use the Moleskine and Remember The Milk for the lists. Although Leo does not recommend RTM for some reasons, I currently stick with it because it is to my knowledge the only simple List-application that’s Google Gears enabled and thus available offline.

Todoist seems to be better in that you can organize tasks in an hierarchy, but unfortunately, it is not (yet) Gears enabled. That might change, though.

ConclusionSo far, I’m fairly happy with the progress I made. My personal setup works quite well and I will next tackle plan and do – things I tried witrh varying success in the past. So, let’s go for the next 30 day challenge: Rewarding myself should be easy, with Christmas luring around. ;)#