This is great. If you do want to read the original book, my advice is to read the first edition. The second edition adds a lot of fluff but nothing of substance.
I encourage you all, you CAN do the things you set yourself up to do them. Procrastination is just not having all the ingredients in the right place at the right time so you can ACT with what is in front of you.
From TFA in GTD methodology, you have the following lists:
> In
> Next actions (probably several – more on that later)
> Waiting for
> Projects
> Some day/maybe
I've only casually read about GTD methodology but I have been really satisfied with some progress I've made with my programming projects by taking a similar approach. This is my "In" list.
* I journal every thought in a markdown file. (I add it to a list by adding a new heading at the bottom of the file and then writing paragraphs or tables or mspaint drawn graphics :-) or draw.io graphics)
* If I have a "Next action", I add a phone alarm or JUST DO IT immediately.
I think my mind is massively parallel and is always processing things like shower thoughts and sleeping on things but procrastination is being put off by things you can't do immediately, that your mind sees no obvious path to JUST DOING IT. Some work is just automatic, intuitive. Other work requires lots of thought and knowledge.
But most of the time, I'm doing one thing at a time, be it thinking what to do next - by adding to the "in" list and processing. And I'm not spidering endlessly into the distance and then being paralyzed by analysis paralysis. I don't do that! Writing things down is thinking. I am always processing the "in" list.
> Projects
My github repositories often start as a Replit and I use the issue tracker on GitHub to add thoughts and break down problems and solutions in issues. Or I add to the README.md.
My main journal acts as my "someday maybe" list.
I was an evening into some programming project and there was a refactoring that I realised that I had to do, but I didn't feel like doing it. I did it anyway and I pushed through it. Then that was extremely satisfying because I got what I wanted by trading effort/willpower for a profitable result.
I had many attempts to adopt GTD for the personal life and for my job/s.
The main pain point is what there is absolutely no good tech tools to maintain the "next actions" lists, especially for repeatable events.
Eg: 'rotate the backup tapes' for every Tuesday - you can use a calendar for this, but what would happen if you don't rotate the tapes, for whatever reason? The event would happily go to the past day and would be no longer seen in the calendar widget. You wouldn't see what you missed 'the thing' with a calendar.
'To do' lists doesn't do that well either, you can add the 'rotate the tapes' task... and it would be there everyday, Fri-Wed, nagging you and eventually you just adblock it. What would happen on Tue? You would miss the task because you trained yourself to ignore it. And even if you do the rotation for some reason (probably because this is the first two or three weeks of your GTD adoption attempt) what you do with the task itself? One of the benefits of GTD is what you can actually see in the backlog when you actually did the deed. With 'todo' lists (at least for 99% of implementations) you can't do that - if you mark it done it would just vanish in the thin aether. Leave it be? Back to the square one, it's there when you don't need it.
My first exposure to GTD had the most efficient and extremely 20th century method to solve it: have a physical organizer, write things for today, at the evening (or at the morning, but it's mandatory) sit down and write the things what wasn't done to the next day; write 'rotate the tapes' to the next Tue. To some people this works, not for me.
And some offtopic rant:
a) those cutesy, "hand-written" annotations style for diagrams makes me feel like a dyslexic, while I'm not; don't use this style for anything you want the reader to actually read
b) don't use the completely out of this universe examples, like 'e-mail funny cat video to grandma' or 'let's make a car class for OOP'; use the real life examples most of people can relate, eg: 'pay rent for the flat' every 25th
> 'To do' lists doesn't do that well either, you can add the 'rotate the tapes' task... and it would be there everyday, Fri-Wed, nagging you and eventually you just adblock it. What would happen on Tue? You would miss the task because you trained yourself to ignore it.
I use "RememberTheMilk", which supports this sort of task: only show up in my inbox every Tuesday, only disappears once I mark it as done, until next Tuesday.
For different tasks, you can also set it to repeat "X days after done", instead of "every Tuesday".
