Re-discovering the freedom of pure ASCII [terrence randell]

I am fed-up with all my GTD system tweaking (a.k.a. Acute Systemitis) and decided to go back to good old ASCII. I have wasted nearly three full days of work flip-flopping between paper, standalone software and online software thinking “if I just had a better system…”. That’s just plain stupid. The problem is me. Not the system.

I’ve been messing with my system since learning GTD in 2002 in search of “perfection”. It’s high time I stop fooling myself and es it for what it is. PROCRASTIONATION! So, I decided to cut the crap and get back to basics. I am committing to making this the only system I use for the next six months. Then I’ll evaluate and make decisions on real data.

I played with todo.sh (get it at todotxt.com, learn it at Lifehacker) and found data entry and review to be lightning fast. Duh! It’s just a few friggin’ text files! Coupled with my ability to chain commands and pipes like nobody’s business, this should be the right “platform” to develop my system on. The best thing is there is very little development and tweaking because everything is in ASCII and there are no priority sliders or little calendars to aggravate my Acute Systemitis. You can look for things to fool with and waste time and you won’t find anything. Perfect for me.

Here’s how I’m starting all over again.

1. Yell, scream and berate myself to get all the anger out of my system for pulling such a rookie move and letting procrastination get the better of me.
2. Deep breath…aaaaand smile again.
3. Grab the latest code for todo.sh from todotxt.com and setup on my Linux workstation. This is one nifty set of scripts. So simple yet so powerful. All hail grep, sed and awk!
4. Cruise through my current system and e-mail and list out all known and possible projects on paper
5. Create all those projects in my ~todo/project hierarchy.
6. Settle on a small number of contexts to keep things smooth. I do not treat contexts in the pure GTD sense of them. I use them to capture my state of mind or type of work I am doing. For example, I have lot assigned to @work, because I am almost always at a computer, have a phone, Blackberry, printer and paper. I distinguish e-mail from reading from research by using those trigger words as the first word of the NA. This is just my way. YMMV.
7. Transfer all SSNAs (single-step next actions) from my current system and a few floating in e-mail to ~/todo/todo.txt.
8. Transfer all next actions associated with projects to the proper projects files in ~/todo/projects.
9. Conduct a full review to make sure every project either has an next action or an “@waiting Further instructions” so there are no open loops on projects.
10. Blast through some easy wins and mark them off as done.
11. Feeling better already and can’t wait to start tomorrow.

My next step is working in a night-before or morning-of daily review to prep for the day ahead. I know this is a good practice and now it’s time to get serious and see how much good this can do for me.

1. Review my calendar last thing the night before or first thing the morning of a new day to surface any “oh yeahs” that need to go on my list.
2. Review my lists and identify the “The Golden Three”. These are the three next actions that I absolutely must do that day. The only rule I have in picking is at least one NA must be from an active project.
3. Review my lists and identify the “The Fruitful Five”. These are five more next actions that I really should do that day and must do this week.
4. Mark them up in ~/todo/todo.txt to make them stand out or just slap ‘em on an index card. I haven’t decided yet.
5. Go forth and conquer.

My mini-motivators are helping me stay on focus so far and entering a new day with three must-dos and five should-dos will give me good material to focus on. As with my early rising challenge, I need to stick with this and make it a permanent part of me.

Here are some must-read resources for anyone new to this or in need of a kick-in-the-pants refresher

1. The todo.txt series at Lifehacker.
2. The Building a Smarter To-Do List series at 43 Folders.
3. The Back To Basics series at FlippingHeck.

I’ll post more this weekend. Hopefully I’ll be reporting on a successful weekly review and some lessons learned.

Original post here: Terrence

7 August 2007 | GTD, Getting Things Done, Productivity, effectiveness | Comments