Are Your Systems for Tracking Deep Work and GTD Exclusive?

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00:00:04.880 | Our next question comes from Troy.

00:00:06.880 | Troy says, "Tracking deep work projects versus GTD projects, are your systems for tracking deep work,

00:00:16.800 | such as quarterly/weekly planning, and for tracking GTD-style projects, i.e. Trello, exclusive?"

00:00:22.320 | All right, so it's a confusing question. Troy has a long elaboration which I won't read

00:00:28.800 | on air, but if you do read it, it clarifies what he's really asking about here. So what he's asking

00:00:33.440 | about is the connection between, let's say, weekly planning and quarterly planning and task capture

00:00:41.920 | and task organization. That are these completely independent or are they somehow mixed together,

00:00:47.600 | at least in the productivity system I espouse? It's a good question. I see them as relatively

00:00:52.880 | independent. So you should have some sort of system where all of your obligations are written down,

00:01:01.360 | a place where you can clarify them, a place where you can add extra information about them. I'm a

00:01:05.600 | big believer of that concept from David Allen that you should not be keeping track of things just in

00:01:11.280 | your head. I also think, by the way, here is an amendment to that. You should also be not keeping

00:01:16.640 | track of things just in an inbox. Get things as soon as you can out of your inbox into actual

00:01:22.320 | tasks. Because when you're looking at tasks on a task board or a task list, you can make sense of

00:01:27.280 | them, you can organize them, you can see them all at once, you can attach information to them.

00:01:30.960 | It is a much less mentally taxing way of encountering your professional obligation

00:01:37.920 | landscape than looking through an inbox and just noticing old messages and trying to

00:01:41.840 | remember what they imply. However, how you do this, how you organize these tasks, how you capture

00:01:47.120 | them, how you get them out of your head, I'm a little bit agnostic. I like task boards. That's

00:01:53.200 | not a David Allen idea. His idea was list separated by context. So you put work in context. I like

00:01:59.520 | task boards where I have boards per role and columns per different statuses. I also like that

00:02:05.360 | modern task board software allows you to attach a lot of information to these virtual task cards.

00:02:10.400 | But there's other people I know who use bullet journals, and they keep track of all their tasks

00:02:15.280 | in a bullet journal. There was a time when I was a grad student early on at MIT where I had paper

00:02:21.760 | notebooks. So I kept track of all my tasks on legal pads, and it would cross them off. And so

00:02:27.440 | I don't really care. You just need some way to get that out of your head. Then we shift over to the

00:02:32.720 | other part of my productivity system, which is the multi scale planning where you have a quarterly

00:02:37.840 | plan that lays out your vision for the quarter. This quarterly plan usually contains a more stable

00:02:42.800 | vision. So here's my vision. That's pretty stable. Here's how I'm going to make progress on that

00:02:47.120 | vision this quarter. Each week, you used a quarterly plan to make a weekly plan. Each day,

00:02:52.000 | you look at your weekly plan and your calendar to build a reasonable daily plan, preferably

00:02:56.080 | using time blocking. This is, as Troy points out, kind of a separate thing. In theory, you could be

00:03:01.360 | terrible about task and task systems. You could have a vendetta against David Allen. You could

00:03:08.160 | say, I want to keep track of everything in my head, my inboxes, my friend. If someone needs something

00:03:12.240 | for me, they'll bother me enough times on Slack that'll answer them. And you could still run the

00:03:15.520 | other part of my system, you could still run the multi scale planning and get the benefits of it.

00:03:19.520 | So they are pretty independent. I like to combine them because I don't want the stress of keeping

00:03:25.760 | track of task my heads, I don't want to forget things, I don't want to waste time. So in my

00:03:30.560 | implementation, when I'm working on weekly plans, and daily plans, I'm looking at those systems to

00:03:35.840 | see what's on my plate. But yeah, in theory, these are independent entities that exist without each

00:03:40.800 | other, you could, on the other hand, just have a good David Allen task system, but no multi scale

00:03:45.760 | planning. And that's reasonable as well, you're not gonna be making good progress on long term

00:03:50.160 | goals, you're going to be much more haphazard in your work, you're gonna be much more reactive,

00:03:54.320 | but it's logically feasible. So these are two separate things. They both have benefits.

00:04:00.400 | But when you do them both, I think you get a really good productivity consilience.

00:04:06.560 | And what you're able to accomplish becomes a lot better.

Are Your Systems for Tracking Deep Work and GTD Exclusive?

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