Getting Some Things Done

If you’ve spent any time in the productivity space, you’ve probably come across David Allen’s Getting Things Done. In it he describes the pinnacle of focus and productivity - a “mind like water”. That is, a mind that is still, uncluttered & ready to receive anything that comes its way. It can focus completely on the task at hand.

I’m still working through his book myself, but I can tell you that so far - it seems like it could really work. It works by resolving what is called the [[Zeigarnik Effect]]. The open loops that you have going on in your head.

According to Zeigarnik, we have these thought loops in our heads that will continue to re-occur until we get closure on them. As human beings our capacity to keep a few things in our head is surprisingly limited with some estimates as low as 3 items before we begin to have a significant slow down in our cognitive capacity. To put this in perspective, the average computer these days has 8 GB of working memory - or can store up to 4 Billion variables (though it is less than this in practice).

Interestingly, in order to get closure on these thought loops - things like ‘I need to pick up milk today’, or ‘I need to remember to call Joseph’, we don’t actually need to go and do those things. Our brains are satisfied as long as we do something as simple as write them down - as long as our brain is confident that we’ll come back to them. And this is the genius of the Getting Things Done system, having a reliable system that our brains are confident in so that when we do write them down, we will come back to them.

I won’t go into the full details of the system, but a really easy lightweight version I’ve implemented looks like this: I’ll call it *Getting Some Things Done*

• A ‘next actions’ list, this has a list of all possible actions I can do

  • If the list for a particular project is quite large, I’ll store it in it’s own list & link to it from my main list.
• A ‘waiting for’ list, this is a list of people, under each person is a list of what I’m waiting for from them.
• Anything that is urgent, or needs to get done on a specific day or time, I’ll either put it in my calendar under a generic ‘Priorities’ day event, or at a specific time that day.
• Whenever I feel too overwhelmed by how large my ‘next actions’ list has gotten, I spend some time looking through my list and remove anything that isn’t relevant and move the most important tasks to the top.

That’s it. It’s not perfect, but it’s lightweight enough that you can implement it about 15 minutes and start to get immediate benefit from some of the ideas in the Getting Things Done framework. It’s usually not all or nothing with productivity, and there is some benefit to partially adopting something, at the end of the day you have to do what works for you - but it might help if you understand why something works the way it does.

Hi, I'm Derrick Persson - I write about mindfulness, productivity, software development and creative writing.