More time management

This weekend, I started reading David Allen's Getting Things Done again, and ended up re-reading the whole book in a weekend. I reviewed it when I originally read it, but I wholeheartedly recommend it again. Even though the tone is more for marketing executives and CEOs, once I managed to analyze what it was saying and apply it to my job, I've found it endlessly useful. And reading it twice, separated by some months of trying techniques, helped a lot.

Now I think I have more of a grasp on why my next action lists were getting out of control (not enough willingness to shunt projects to the "Maybe Later" pile and out of the active set). I was making insufficient use of the concept of a project to group things together, and I needed a few more location categories for tasks than I had. In particular, I need separate categories for high-energy tasks and low-energy tasks so that I can more easily locate tasks appropriate for having little brain. I've also been doing a half-assed job at really collecting inputs first and then acting on them, and always deciding what to do with something when it comes in rather than reprocessing it multiple times.

So, today I did a huge reorganization of to-do lists, processed a bunch more ideas that I wrote down while reading (that always happens when I read time-management books), and started doing a better job of collecting. Too many meetings today, so I didn't manage to finish, but I should be able to tomorrow. We'll see if I get just a temporary spike or if I can leverage this into another lasting improvement.