One consistent theme over this series has been to keep your eye on the prize. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that saying definitely applies to personal productivity. So much time, effort and money has been spent on productivity systems that don’t go anywhere. Sure, they organize everything beautifully, but they fail to do what they’re supposed to do: help people get things done.
Doing should be the end result of any productivity system. Completing tasks and crossing them off needs no explanation. Doing in the Getting Things Done sense is a little more nuanced. Doing means making the best decision about what to do at a given time, even if that means deciding to do nothing productive. Once you organize everything and review regularly to ensure everything is current, you should be able to make better decisions about what to do when you weigh a few factors.
Context
In GTD, context is the first thing you should consider when deciding what to do. A context is the physical requirements of an action, which can be a tool, person, or a state.1 Law students will have many common contexts. A reading assignment requires that you have the book. Outlining will require that you have a computer. Legal research requires access to the internet. When you take a look at the things you need to do, your options are instantly limited to what you have on hand. No only does this quickly narrow down your options, it’s also why David Allen recommends organizing your next action lists by context.
Time Available
Just like you need certain things in order to get some tasks done, you also need time to complete some tasks. If you arrive at a classroom with 10 minutes before the class, you typically don’t have the time to work on an outline. If you want to get something productive done, you’re better off sending a quick email. That said, remember another basic idea of GTD, which is to divide your projects into next actions, which are the single physical tasks that move the projects forward. Stick to that mentality and you’ll find that time holds your projects back a lot less.
Energy Available
You may have all the time and tools in the world, but it means nothing if you lack energy and motivation. In the face of deadlines, you sometimes have to just soldier on and push through. But when a deadline isn’t looming, it often doesn’t make sense to work on something that requires a great deal of energy when you don’t have it. The end result is often subpar work. So if you don’t have to just suck it up, try working on something that you can do on autopilot.2
Priority
Priority is at the bottom because it’s dependent on everything above. What’s important doesn’t matter if you don’t have the time or tools or if you’re going to half-ass it. The other benefit of putting priority or importance at the bottom is that you end up weighing the relative importance of two or three tasks rather than ten. Your decision in the first situation is much more likely to be the right decision3 than in the first one.
Doing is the output of the whole system. The entire point of having a productivity system is to help you get done what you need to get done. The real measure of personal productivity is not how organized you feel or how complete your to-do lists are. It’s about how much stress you feel and how much you’re getting done. And when the former is low and the latter is high, that’s a job well done.
Next time we’ll get into the nitty gritty and I’ll lay-out some components of what I would call a typical GTD system for a law student.
