Wednesday, September 26, 2007

GTD way of writing ..

I was thinking I would start writing first experiences with GTD. But there are many things flashing my mind currently that I am getting distracted with those thoughts. I will put down what is in mind currently before venturing to my past days.
Today Morning, as I was walking I was thinking of a problem I am facing with GTD with the delegated tasks. This is a very tricky one to me. I am interested how others handle this.
To start with you have a task to Delegate. You don't want to define the next actions for that. In this case; ideal thing would be delegate this task and set a follow up date and forget it. But what if you want to track the progress. You have to create a next action just for follow up. This could be a meeting or a mail sent for update. I feel the overhead for this is little high. Your system is getting clogged with lot of small tasks. Is there a better way?
I started thinking how I am handling now. This is surely a hole in my system. Remember, when it comes to delegated tasks I am not at my best. Here is the step by step things I do today.
1. Create a desired outcome for the delegated task, and set context as "review".
2. Set a due date I would like to follow up.
There is big problem with this. I am trying to define a next action for a delegated task. This is not good.
I tried another workaround.
1. Create a delegated task.
2. Set a follow up date.
3. In the notes field (I am using Thinking Rock) I would put the desired outcome for that follow update. The desired out come will be a obvious one to the concerned parties or it is mutually agreed.
This approach seems to be fine. I could look at the notes and see that things are on track. Does anybody has a better approach ?

Also, I have come across yet another issue with my GTD implementation. This esp with "mail context" task. I would have a next action to mail somebody. After mailing I would expect I could mark the action done. But very often the mail is some clarification I require. The other person may not be in a position to clarify my question. My task gets into a idle state. I cannot proceed. If it is on the same day; I could remember. But usually such things gets spilled to the next days. For tracking such tasks; a "@ followup" tasks has to be created . This is a overhead of maintaing a GTD system (with any other system per se). I haven't got a break through in this. Currenly I create a follow up task. One idea could be change the context, after you send the mail. Example, after mailing, the context will change from "mail" to "waiting" or "followup".

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