GTD Training

Taking Control is training that includes Getting Things Done. This was developed by David Allen (www.davidco.com) as a way for busy people to regain control of their lifes and be productive without being stressed. It brings in other elements of self organisation such as work place set up, meeting management and the Zero Inbox theory - click here for more.

My work with entrepreneurs and others allows them to understand the theory of Getting Things Done (GTD) and also work through a practical implementation of it during the workshops.
You will leave the training being able to immediately implement GTD and you will immediately notice an improvement in your ability to work through your projects and tasks - and an enhanced ability to relax when you want to.

Be Clear:
Keith Bohanna is not licensed, certified, approved, or endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with David Allen or the David Allen Company which is the creator of the Getting Things Done® system for personal productivity. GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. For more information on the David Allen Company's products, please visit their website: www.davidco.com.


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Taking Control Blog New Entry  

Taking Control: Tackling an email backlog after holidays
by Keith Bohanna on 

The theory of a zero inbox (briefly this says that you need to process your email and get it the hell out of your inbox to a system somewhere else - resulting in a strong mental boost to see it at zero) can go by the wayside for good after a break of a week or two.


The cumulative backlog may need some more brutal hacking through to regain control - otherwise it will suck the will to live from you!


Sucked in

A great post on this was done by Gina Trapani in her Work Smart series. You can see the full post here - it is entitled How to Power Through a Mountain of Email and the key messages are:


  • You may well need to work in bulk - imposing straightforward deletions based on criteria like sender or lenght of time since received.
  • Give yourself permission for short responses - clearing your decks in a much more concise way than normal.


The sooner you do this the sooner you will regain control and lessen your stress. Check out the full post.


keith
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Taking Control: Things you may need to refer to sometime
by Keith Bohanna on 

When working your way through the stuff that clogs up your inbox each day it is really helpful to have a well organised and accessible place to put reference materials.


How to


For physical stuff that place should be to hand - making the filing away really quick and easy.


For digital stuff it can be tricky depending on what devices you use and what the policies are whereever you work.


Whatever you use should fulfil the following, or as many of them as possible:

  • Capable of taking information orginating in multiple formats (ie html for webpages, pdf's etc)
  • Be instantly searchable across both titles and content for all parts of it
  • Be usable on as many devices as is practical


There are an increasing number of services which allow for the above - my working one is Evernote. This is around since June 2008 and has been developed and improved constantly since then.


For me it allows me to take either a whole document or a clip of one (a copy and paste) really easily - and it preserves the formatting when you do so.

Sorting can be done on a number of levels - Notebooks, Places or tags and you also have a kickass search function.


Sync is instant - so as I drop information into it on my main computer it is copied into "the cloud" and then instantly available on my other computer, my laptop and my iPad.


It does not matter what you use - it just needs to do the job for you. What is your favorite tool for digital reference holding?


keith

Thanks to MrBill for the photo
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Taking Control: Avoiding the mental head wreck of endless to-do lists
by Keith Bohanna on 

I have rarely met anyone who can deal with to-do lists that are hundreds of items long - there is a serious mental challenge to scanning something that long without pulling away and finding something less painful to do.

That is where projects come in. In Getting Things Done terms a project is anything which will take more than one action (remembering that an action is something discrete as opposed to a large and sweeping aspiration statement!).


So for me almost everything falls into the category of projects. And inevitabley some projects are more pressing or more important than others. So the actions contained within those projects are ususally the only ones I consider when deciding what to do on any particular day.


A level above that I group projects into discrete sections - usually operational. So either a larger project which contains several elements (a complex website build for example) or an operational area.


What do you do to make sense of your list?


keith
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Taking Control - why your email software may not be the best place to run your to-do list
by Keith Bohanna on 

'Bull - it has to be. Its where I spend the most time. And where most of my actions come from."


All that is true. However it takes a lot of work to make the structure of a piece of software designed to manage email into a system which is flexible enough to help you control all of your stuff.


A key issue is the actions which arise outside of your email - voice mails, twitter messages, physical paper stuff (remember that?), texts, messaging from online collaboration systems, whereever.


All of those items need to be incorporated into your system. And the emails which are non-action items (for review, for reference, for delegation or just to be deleted) need to be cleared out of it.

As  you move from a basic email client or service (ie Mail on the Mac) to a more featured offering like Outlook then the task becomes easier with discrete areas for tasks and calendar items which are nicely integrated. Addons such as the GTD® Outlook® Add-In by Netcentrics or the Jello dashboard for Outlook.


Ultimately you have to balance the friction which comes from using multiple pieces of software with the compromises around implemention of your system using software not designed for that purpose.


keith
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Slide summary from Waterford IT GTD Training
by buildyourown on 

I delivered a 4 hour workshop in Waterford Institute of Technology recently to a combination of staff and entrepreneurs in the Carrignore Business Park.

This is a summary of the slides which I delivered:

Gtd training waterford institute of technology


Keith
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