Learning how to get things done

After struggling to conquer the paper and digital clutter that was weighing down on my life, my next challenge has been how to organize my tasks such that I know how to handle them as the work-day moves on. My startup recipe was simple: have some goals in mind and then handle whatever task caught my attention at the moment.

Now that as you may have realized, is a Sure Recipe for Disaster. I ended up fighting fires everywhere and the upshot of it was frustration. I felt lost. Nothing got really done. The unbeatable foe started to look more unbeatable and stars looked more unreachable every day. Would the Couch Kamote survive the year without getting fried?

My journey to conquer clutter started through reading. I got First Things First and studied time management. These gave me some guideposts, but I still plodded along. The breakthrough came when I saw Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book is popular among geeks -- and it's no wonder. Geeks love systems and GTD is a system. But being a system, it takes some practice and discipline to implement and maintain.

You can't drive a manual-shift car effectively if you don't go through the difficulties of learning to drive a stick-shift. In the same way, in my opinion, you can't learn GTD without going through the pain of learning and practicing it.

How I learned and practiced, and how I maintain and continue to try improving will be the subject of upcoming blog posts. Abangan!

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If you're interested on receiving mentoring about how to organize, send me an email through alibata(at)gmail(dot)com. Make sure you include in your email Subject the keyword "GTD".