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On time management and GTD

photo cred­it: jazz­mas­ter­son Lately I’ve been work­ing with a few tools that help me stream­line my vari­ous tasks and work­flows. Over the next few posts, I’ll dive into them and my reas­ons for using them. First off, the Two Minute Timer. If you’ve been been under a rock for the last few years then this ref­er­ence…

Moleskine Concept Diagram 1
Creative Commons License photo cred­it: jazz­mas­ter­son

Lately I’ve been work­ing with a few tools that help me stream­line my vari­ous tasks and work­flows. Over the next few posts, I’ll dive into them and my reas­ons for using them.

First off, the Two Minute Timer.
If you’ve been been under a rock for the last few years then this ref­er­ence to Dav­id Alan’s book, Get­ting Things Done and the Two Minute Rule applied to Pro­cessing will be mean­ing­less. The fol­low­ing is for you (via Wiki­pe­dia):

Process

When pro­cessing a buck­et, a strict work­flow is followed:

  • Start at the top.
  • Deal with one item at a time.
  • Nev­er put any­thing back into ‘in’.
  • If an item requires action:
  • Do it (if it takes less than two minutes), OR
  • Del­eg­ate it, OR
  • Defer it.
  • If an item does not require action:
  • File it for ref­er­ence, OR
  • Throw it away, OR
  • Incub­ate it for pos­sible action later.

If it takes under two minutes to do some­thing, just do it imme­di­ately. The two-minute rule is a guideline, encom­passing roughly the time it would take to defer the action formally.

The Two Minute timer in actionAll right then, you’re up to speed on the Two Minute Rule. The tool I’ve been using to help me keep track of two minutes isn’t the ‘offi­cial’ two minute timer, rather an un-offi­cial one cre­ated with .NET.

Eleg­ant in its sim­pli­city, the Two Minute Timer works. Plain and simple. Easy to read, and easy to use. Not much more to say but that’s part of beauty. It simply works.

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5 responses to “On time management and GTD”

  1. DanGTD Avatar
    DanGTD

    For imple­ment­ing GTD you might try out this web-based application:

    Gtdagenda.com

    You can use it to man­age your goals, pro­jects and tasks, set next actions and con­texts, use check­lists, sched­ules and a calendar.
    A mobile ver­sion is avail­able too.

    As with the last update, now Gtda­genda has full Someday/Maybe func­tion­al­ity, you can eas­ily move your tasks and pro­jects between “Act­ive”, “Someday/Maybe” and “Archive”. This will clear your mind, and will boost your productivity.

    Hope you like it.

    Reply
  2. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    Hi DanGTD,

    That looks inter­est­ing, I’ll have to take a closer look at it…thanks for let­ting me know!

    Reply
  3. Journeyer Avatar
    Journeyer

    I love the 2 minute rule. I get so many things out of the way when I use it. A timer is a great idea, oth­er­wise it’s easy to get side­tracked from pro­cessing. This one looks the goods.

    Reply
  4. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    Hi Jour­ney­er,

    When I do my morn­ing scan and pro­cessing, I find it invalu­able to start a timer. As you said, it’s too easy to get side­tracked. It also forces me into a sense of determination…‘Must get this dealt with inside of two minutes!’

    Reply
  5. brad grier blog: GTD and the two-minute timer « Bladewriter Blog

    […] brad gri­er blog: GTD and the two-minute timer Lately I’ve been work­ing with a few tools that help me stream­line my vari­ous tasks and work­flows   blog here […]

    Reply

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