My Brain On GTD (C.O.D.A.)
A thing is a pattern of stimulus for which you have a stereotyped response. Things that slip out of your attention aren't gone: your brain retains a tacit map of your environment even when you're not attending to it, which makes navigation of it smoother and recognition of salient changes more abrupt. You can think of this map as "potential" awareness, as opposed to "kinetic" awareness of what you're currently attending to.
Your model of your environment also includes a dynamically updated collection of important things -- things that may soon require your attention. We'll call these objects (as in objectives). Things move into the object array based on their expected adaptive valence relative to what's going on around you, and move out of it based on a probabilistic estimate that they've been neutralized. Absence of signal is the slower way that this happens: forgetting is governed by a decay function, and the more time goes by without the decaying pattern being triggered the stronger a stimulus needs to be to refresh it back up to full power.
But by the same token, the more recently an object entered the model the weaker the environmental cues need to be in order to keep it fresh. The faster route to forgetting is to receive a signal that reliably indicates the absence of an object. Finding and plugging the hole through which mice were getting into your home gives you the expectation that no further action will be required on that front, and this knowledge revises the decay function sharply downward (how far down depends on how strongly felt the knowledge is).
If two or more objects are competing for your attention at the same time, you feel pulled and stretched in different directions. You feel tension, and not the good kind that comes from single-minded pursuit of a particular object but rather the bad kind that's antagonistic to it. When you have this problem, each object you can spike down ameliorates that tension and lets you get on with the business of actually doing stuff.
This is David Allen's core insight: your brain needs some kind of credible signal that something flagged as a problem is nolonger a problem before it'll stop chewing away on it and free up bandwidth for other things. This is a perfectly good mechanism for adaptively responding to environmental challenges -- what's maladaptive is overloading it with an amount of simultaneous challenges it was never designed to handle. Multitasking is largely a myth, and its pursuit consequently delusional. If you don't have a sense of closure before moving on to something else, you'll be tense and distracted and unable to achieve a smooth productive flow. Everything else in GTD is just a set of helpful suggestions for applying this understanding; only satori is necessary, the rest is upaya to be tailored to individual needs.
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Instead of using Allen's particular system, I prefer to use a slightly more elegant scheme devised by John Boyd to classify the steps of a strategic decision cycle: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. But for aesthetic purposes I'll mutate it slightly by changing the first term to Allen's "Collect", which is both a better word and yields the mnemonic acronym CODA. By a happy coincidence, "coda" is derived from the Latin word for "tail", which is a nice metaphor for a method of smoothly seeing things through to their end. Like Allen, I'll emphasize that these four activities are to be kept operationally separate at all costs -- never try to do more than one at the same time.
Collecting is the easy part: I carry a cheap spiral pocket notebook and pen with me everywhere and write down any non-immediate objective as soon as it comes my way. Bam: the thing is externalized from the very first step, and I can go back to being in the moment knowing that I'll deal with whatever's in that notebook later. Of course the items that end up on the list tend to be of diverse shapes and sizes, but rather than try to prematurely horn them into categories I leave that for subsequent steps. Remember, the point is to not think about it -- to get it out of your head as quickly as possible.
Orientation is what to do when I don't know what to do -- when I have to figure out what my attitude should be toward each thing. This step is to run down the collection list one item at a time, and classify it according to two elementary questions: 1) "Is this an asynchronous or temporal activity -- i.e. is there a specific time that this should be done at, or is it better left undetermined?" (A/T), and 2) "Does the thought of doing this make me grin, or cringe?" (C/G). (Fellow biology nerds will spot the mnemonic value.) The resulting tetradic scheme corresponds to four modes of approach:
AsynchronousTemporalGrinPlay (freedom, air)Errand (adaptation, water)CringeBattle (transformation, fire)Chore (endurance, earth)
I've borrowed an classic bit from the Buddha here, again for the purposes of focusing the mind metaphorically on the qualities needed for each kind of object. Don't laugh, it works. (Once an item is in a category it's not there indelibly and can be moved if circumstances change.) Rather than going into what these things mean to me in depth, I'll show what they mean in practice.
Deciding what to do next once each item has been sorted into one of the four conceptual bins is where things risk becoming complicated, which is why each has an automatic, concrete first step associated with it. Play (AG) items get tossed into a simple notepad file that I keep on my desktop and open up whenever I feel like it -- done. I don't usually need to structure these any further since they almost always come naturally when my mind is otherwise undisturbed. Errands (TG) get plonked onto Gcal with an attached SMS notification to jog me at the appropriate time -- done. Chores (TC) also get the Gcal treatment, but with the minor difference that I also set a half-hour aside immediately before them designated "tactical review" -- time to get my game face on and think about what I'll need to do to get through the chore as painlessly as possible. (If I'm really good at it, regular chores sometimes drift gradually into errands, which are fun!)
Battle (AC) items are the tricksy ones. These are things over which I have considerable leeway to determine how they get done, but the fact that I don't intrinsically want to do them at all means I'm apt to shirk thinking about it. I need to think about these ones strategically, with an eye to keeping them from turning into things that will freak me out -- and just flagging them as such helps focus my attention on this fact. As the first step to neutralizing these, I've developed a special template in Notepad, named PANIC_BUTTON.txt. I'll go deeper into what it contains in another post, but the first line is, with thanks to the late Douglas Adams, DON'T PANIC -- followed by a series of general questions designed to automatically parametrize each AC object, get me clearheaded about what I'm up against, and iteratively break a big boulder of a problem into a pile of rocks fit for throwing into oblivion one after another. I then save this file to a desktop folder called "Weeds" with an appropriate project name followed by two numbers -- the number of chunks done and the number of chunks total (e.g. METAPHYSICS_ESSAY_1-20.txt). I check these text files whenever I need a reminder of how I'm doing and modify them as the battle progresses.
There is, of course, a tacit fifth element: the void. Sometimes a bit of sober reflection reveals that something just isn't worth doing after all, and if this is so it gets dumped to /dev/null on the faith that if I discarded it mistakenly the void will surely hurl it back at me again soon enough. As a spiritual matter, I try to make a habit of sacrificing at least one thing to it with every decision cycle. The void is my friend.
Action, at this stage, will ideally come automatically with little extra thought needed. But life isn't ideal, so if there's ambiguity about the next step I drag out the shock stick: off the top of my head I write down the first five processed objects that I could be working on right now in whatever order they come to me (which is a good indication of how much bandwidth they're occupying). If staring them in the face doesn't cause one to immediately jump out at me as the best choice to do immediately, I break out an egg timer and use Merlin Mann's (10+2)*5 algorithm (which I've only just discovered and may yet tweak if I find something that works better). It's simple: using the timer, you spend ten minutes doing nothing but whatever's at the top of the list, then break for two minutes to do whatever you feel like, then ten minutes on the next item, and so on until you've done something with all five items. The idea is to get you over the hump of getting started, after which you'll be more likely to continue unprompted. And even if you don't, you'll at least have something to show for your day and can go to bed a little less burdened.
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I structured this system with an eye to simplicity and concrete actions, so that I could carry it around in my head and use it automatically without needing to refer to "the manual" for guidance. But I haven't yet tested it thoroughly enough to see how robust and effective it is. No doubt it will fail in some ways, and no doubt it will evolve in response to those failures. But just having it there, just having a ready slot for everything is empowering and relieving.