GTD for Academics?

Over the last few months, I have been doing some serious thinking about how to structure my life and work on my own since the major source of externally-imposed structure, my full-time job, is going to be going away. Here and there, I have seen references on computer-geek type web sites and blogs referring to this productivity system called Getting Things Done, or GTD for short, outlined in a book by a guy named David Allen. When I read the Wikipedia article about this system initially, I found it a little overwhelming, but a lot of it seemed to make some intuitive sense. I also did some looking at a really great blog called 43 Folders that has a lot of information on GTD and how to implement it, especially an eminently digestible series, Getting Started With "Getting Things Done." I could figure out enough from these websites to convince me that it was worthwhile to get a copy of Allen's book and explore further.

I have quite a few unused credits on my Audible account, so I decided to download a copy of the book rather than buy a physical copy when I'm about to move anyway. I didn't have to listen that long to realize that he really made sense... Allen talks a lot about the nature of work in the information economy, and academics are, after all, another form of knowledge worker. He talked about how whatever system we use to manage our work life needs to be applicable to our entire lives because the boundaries between work and leisure, office and home, are a whole lot more permeable than they used to be. Again, that sounds exactly like the life of a graduate student or a university professor.

I think I was really sold on giving GTD a serious try after listening to Allen explain the first step, which he calls "capturing all your open loops." What he means by "open loops" are all those incomplete projects, errands you need to run, bills you need to pay, unread journals, unreturned phone calls, and so on that are consuming mental energy. I could completely identify with this concept, since I have ADD and tend to have a lot of anxiety about what I am forgetting. Allen's solution to this problem has a few different parts, but the most important and most immediately helpful for me was to write everything down. Everything. Allen claims that one reason making to-do lists and using planners are not always as helpful as they could be is that we tend to write down only things we've decided are "important." This made sense to me because for years I have been the kind of person who would lie down to sleep at night and suddenly experience a flood of recollection about all the things I ought to have done and forgotten or that I needed to remember for the next day. Others who have this problem can attest to the cycle of anxiety this problem often leads to. The next thing you know, you're anxious about not getting to sleep and being tired the next day, which makes it even harder to get to sleep!

I found another really great blog post from Zen Habits with some tips on developing the habit of capturing all your open loops consistently. I realized that what Allen is really talking about here is creating a new habit, an undertaking that requires some fairly significant consistency and commitment for success. For that reason, I'm actually departing significantly from the way Allen suggests doing a clean sweep and changing a lot of things in just a few days. I decided to focus first and foremost on ubiquitous capture. My tools of choice for this job are a little notepad and pen, along with Remember the Milk. I write down everything as soon as it occurs to me, from "pay rent today" to "write a dissertation." The key, as Allen explains it, is to get all the stuff you're trying to remember and plan out of your head and someplace where you can trust that it's all recorded safely. The specific tools used for this are a matter of personal choice and irrelevant to the principle. This step does not address what one actually does with all these items, it just gets them out of your head. The first night I was on this system, I was up until 3 a.m. because every time I turned out the light, something else occurred to me so I had to turn the light back on and write it down. After that initial flood of stuff (most of which I later entered as items into Remember the Milk), the number of things that occurred to me slowed to a trickle and for almost two weeks now I have not had one single night of difficulty sleeping because of anxiety about things that I had forgotten to do or could potentially forget to do. I keep the notepad with me as much as possible, and find myself writing stuff down at red lights or while sitting in waiting rooms and so on.

I am slowly implementing various other elements of the GTD system, such as gathering together all the paper that was scattered across my life (car, purse, office, home office, neglected filing pile) and actually dealing with it. I also implemented the 43 Folders blog suggestion of imposing an e-mail DMZ and then keeping your e-mail inbox(es) at zero. The 43 Folders blogger, Merlin Mann, suggests that if you have an enormous mountain of e-mail in your inbox(es), as I do, you make a folder called "DMZ" and drop all your e-mail in it so you can start from a clean inbox. Mann says, "Before you can get good, you have to stop sucking." So, so true. Some people apparently regard this as a cop-out, but it has enabled me to devise a system for assigning my e-mails to folders and dealing with them so I can find stuff and immediately identify important things. I had FIVE e-mail accounts to deal with, and at this current moment, one has six items in the inbox I have not yet read, and the others all have empty inboxes. Only one, my massive old Yahoo account, still has a DMZ folder because I already processed all the other ones. The DMZ on Yahoo has shrunk from about 3500 to about 2700 messages as I am working my way through it. Merlin Mann has some suggestions of how to implement a system for keeping on top of your e-mail in his Inbox Zero series of posts.

Feeling more in control of all the things I have to keep track of for moving and starting graduate school is a very, very good thing that reduces my stress and anxiety tremendously. I am also hoping that developing these good habits will help me to self-manage my graduate school career responsibly. It seems to me that GTD is extremely well suited to academic types, but I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who has tried it whether you are an academic or not.