Getting Things Done by David Allen

So this week someone asked me if I somehow have figured out 40 hour days. Ironically, in the same day, I had a hard time getting a certain set of tasks done and I felt frustrated about it.  My life in special education has gone from volunteer where I hold babies with cerebral pasly, read books, and sing with the children,  to student teaching and having my own class of students, to becoming an AT specialist, to teaching teachers, to now working towards a Ph.D. in special education and AAC.  A huge 15 foot swell feels upon me.   With p2g about to be set fully loose into the world, doc level seminars, stats class, and keeping the flames of one to one thousand lit, it is time to get back to basics.

In my initial encounter with GTD, the most influential element I found was Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video from a talk he gave at Google in July of 2007.  Very simply, I understood what he was talking about.  I barely had to watch the video.  I listened and knew.  It felt like a new chapter in my life.  I remember struggling academically at one point in seventh grade and feeling like why am I so disorganized.  What’s wrong?  Now I realize that strategies of this kind are not necessarily intrinsic to everyone.  Truly many people are meticulous in many aspects of their lives, yet for many others getting things done and getting them done efficiently takes strategy building.  In this past year, I have read and listened to Anthony DeMello.  In excellent book, Awareness and only surviving audio recording of one of his retreats, he speaks about listening.  He advocates not just agreeing or listening for what you think you will hear, but simply listening with an aware and open mind.  When I heard Merlin Mann describe inbox zero, I knew that it was something I should try.  Try I did and just like those green eggs and ham, I like it!  Organization and productivity was for me, really I felt it!  Inbox Zero made a simple, yet profound difference in my life.

So I was all amped up at the beginning of last summer and ready to post all about GTD.  Man was I working my system.  We were all set for the big camp I felt so strongly about.  I felt organized, sharp, and alive.  Then slam.. 60 to 80 hour weeks of the most intense teaching, planning, and workin it that I have ever done.  I tried to keep my system working and luckily it had some good bend in it and did not break.  I laugh at how I had planned all these gtd related blog posts.  I laugh because I was planning them when things were humming smoothly.  Today, I write this post to express that our systems are for both when things are clipping along and for when they seem to be stalling out.  So nearly a year later I am posting to share about something that has worked for me, GTD and specifically, the concept of inbox Zero.

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GMAIL for Listservs Part One of Three

By using GMAIL to access your listserv accounts, you can save every email sent, providing you with a keyword searchable help database that lives in your archived email stack.  For example, I have 2342 archived emails from an assistive technology listserv called QIAT.  Yes, I can go to the QIAT archives and search, but having it live in your own account and with a familiar interface really wins out.

Note that with GMAIL, you never have to delete, just archive instead.

So whether you are a teacher, doctor, electrician, animator, photographer, chef, or blogger you can have a searchable help archive from all the lists you belong to.

Here is a video about how to archive:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHl08eNvRU0]

The next installment of this series will cover how to automatically sort your Listserv emails into folders.

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