So yesterday I got to talking about this "self-taught MBA" I've been giving myself over the last year, in preparation for trying to open a small business myself here in Chicago (a commercial arts center, to be precise), and laughing over the millions of bullshit business buzzwords I've come across over the last year, most of which don't actually help companies in the slightest. Ah, but there is a buzzword I've come across recently that I'm actually intrigued by - GTD, which stands for "Getting Things Done." And the more I read about the system, both through the official book and all the unofficial websites, the more I'm starting to agree with everything said about the system, to the point that I think I'm going to try to implement it in my own life as well. So I thought today I'd give a little overview for those who have never heard of it, so that future entries regarding the subject will make a little more sense.

At its heart, GTD is but one of a million "personal efficiency" systems that have been invented over the decades (or "time management" systems, or whatever you want to call it), this particular one by David Allen, one of those private consultants whose industry collectively writes about 80 percent of all business books that exist. And a "personal efficiency" system, of course, is basically a codified and regulated way for people to manage their lives better - a series of tricks and rules, in other words, that supposedly make you a more proficient worker when implemented, a more efficient person, a person with more free time on their hands. And as we all know, every so often one of these systems will suddenly get real popular, just like fad diets sometimes do as well, and a bunch of people will try it out, and will eventually give it up again when they realize that it's not nearly as successful a system as its inventor promised.

Allen's GTD system, however, starts with a basic premise that I've never heard one of these business consultants say before - that the key to really being efficient, to really getting things done, is to first have a Zenlike blank mind before attempting to actually accomplish anything. In other words, what's really holding a lot of us back from getting a lot more done in our lives is not the lack of time, or too many commitments, but rather that we're carrying all these unfulfilled projects around in our heads with us all the time. And so, every time we sit down to write a report or get through our taxes or whatever, our brain is assaulting us with little worries and reminders about all the other crap we still haven't done as well, making it almost impossible to actually concentrate on the task at hand and simply getting that one thing finished in a quick and efficient way.

Allen in fact compares this process to the way a computer works, which makes a lot of sense - you can think of your short-term memory, for example, as the same thing as a computer's RAM (that portion of a computer's memory dedicated to only what's happening on the screen that moment). "Human RAM," he opines, is much like a computer's RAM - profoundly smaller than the overall memory of the machine itself, and only able to accomplish a couple of things simultaneously before crashing. The reason computers work as well as they do, he argues, is that they're only accessing one or two little things at any given moment, with all the rest of our computer's innards simply stored away in long-term memory, ready to be accessed again when needed but otherwise not affecting the RAM at all. And this is the problem behind so much human inefficiency, he argues - that our brain's RAM is trying to hold a hundred, two hundred things in its memory at the same time, which simply leads to a crash of the whole system.

What we need to do, he argues, is what computers do - get all those niggling little things in our front brain out of our front brain, and down in a permanent form outside of our short-term memory altogether. It's only when we empty our short-term memory of a million random little reminders and projects and ideas and worries, that we can truly sit down and concentrate on one of them, and zip through that one thing much faster and in a better way than we ever could before.

This is not too terribly that profound an idea, frankly, and there are a lot of personal-efficiency systems out there based on this concept. Where GTD differs from them, though, is that Allen believes many of these previous systems to be way too complicated themselves, way too regimented and way too hard to follow, for the person in question to actually get any benefit from them. What's the point of having an efficiency system, he argues, if you're constantly having to reorder your lists, rearrange items, use an organizational system that's nonintuitive to you, and the like? Jeez, that's more work than actually sitting down and just doing everything in the first place. And so he's instead come up with a five-step system that is in some ways about as broad as personal efficiency gets:

Collect the new thing in your life that's outstanding, and put it in a dedicated "inbox" area;

Process that new thing - decide whether it's something that can be done that second, something date-related that should go in a calendar, something that can be delegated to someone else, etc;

Place it in the right area of your organizational system;

Review all the parts of your organizational system on a regular basis;

and then do the things your organizational system tells you to do, at the times it tells you to do them.

The thing I like about this system the most is that he doesn't place restrictions on what these "things" (or "stuff," in GTD terminology) should be - "finish annual report" goes in your inbox, "clean the garage" goes in your inbox, "try to fuck that hot woman at the cafe" goes in your inbox. Allen goes out of his way, in fact, to put as few predefinitions on the steps in his system as possible, in order to let you customize the system to fit your own particular life the best. For example, GTD is much like other efficiency systems in that it's based around the various "projects" that are going on in your life; but Allen defines a "project" as "anything in your life you're trying to accomplish, that takes more than one step to complete." This then lets you define your projects in about any kind of way you want, and have one system that can simultaneously handle such disparate elements as "Have lunch with boss," "send flowers to my secret lover," "shop for private yacht," "buy groceries," "fire my secretary," "stop by my dealer's and buy dope," and anything else you can imagine.

Everything in the GTD system, in fact, can be boiled down to a series of lists and folders, which is about as simple as an efficiency system gets - you have a list of all your outstanding projects (30 to 100 for most people); then you have other lists for each project itself, containing all the steps left; then you have a list of "next actions," which collects the next one or two things that need to be done on each of those 30 to 100 projects, sorted into the context in which you will do these things ("phone calls," "emails," "while at the office," "while running errands," etc). And then, of course, you have a series of folders that correspond with each project, where you actually store all the things you need for that project; and you have a series of daily folders as well, where you can easily place things that you won't need until a future date (plane tickets, reference material for a meeting, etc). Once every single outstanding item in your life is successfully placed in one of these lists or folders then, according to the theory, they are now out of your brain's RAM, allowing you to much more efficiently concentrate on the task at hand. And as long as you're diligent at reviewing these lists and folders on a regular basis, he says, the items will remain outside of your brain, and not come creeping back in right in the middle of trying to do something else.

The key to all this working in harmony, and the thing that I'm gathering is the hardest thing for most people to accomplish in GTD, is simply placing these outstanding items in the right list or folder. For example, Allen claims that action items should absolutely never be put in your calendar, unless that item can only be done on that exact date, that exact time; that is, no penciling in items that you hope to get done that day, even though it's no big deal if it doesn't. This defeats the entire purpose of the calendar, he argues, and invalidates it in the eyes of your short-term memory; your brain won't take anything in that calendar seriously if it knows that some of them can be skipped. And so you're back to where you were before - with unfinished items slipping into your consciousness on a regular basis, in the middle of trying to get other things done.

This, Allen argues, is the main reason most efficiency systems don't work, because the people using them are trying to do the wrong things with the wrong tools. Having a to-do list is great, he says, but if it's this mishmash of things that absolutely need to get done, things you hope to get done, things that are less important than others, things that can be signed off to another person, your brain will literally crash from all the overload and just stop paying attention to the list altogether.

So instead, you get this very logical order in GTD, one that requires no rewriting, no sorting, none of the administrative work that makes so many of us give up on efficiency systems. You have a master list of projects, written in no particular order, to remind you of all the outstanding multiple-step things you're trying to accomplish these days; each project then has its own sheet, listing all the things that need to happen for that project to finish. But you don't have to pay attention to that project sheet all the time; you simply review it once a week, cross off the things you got done, identify the next two or three things that come next. Then you take those two or three next things from each of the project sheets you have, and combine them all into one "next action" list, which is what you do reference all the time; this is the list you carry around with you, the one you consult whenever you're at the phone and it's time to see all the phone calls you need to make. But since you're not accessing every step of every project at once, the list isn't overwhelming; it's this nice little list of maybe 100 or 200 things that you're determined to get through by the end of your week (or however far apart you make your regular reviews). And then during this weekly review, you also review that master list of projects you have, just to keep a good overall perspective on how the entire thing is going, and to see whether or not you need to add some new projects, or maybe delete ones that are now finished.

It's a little more complicated than this, obviously, or else there'd be no reason to buy his book; he has a specific way, for example, of thinking about projects, and determining all the steps that should be listed on that project sheet in order for that project to be considered completed. Surprisingly, though, today's entry pretty much explains about 70, 80 percent of the entire system itself; it really is that simple, and really is that easy to implement in your life. And man, I've never seen so many people talk about an efficiency system in such glowing terms before; seriously, it's almost like a cult out there in the blogosphere, the passion that so many people get when discussing the system and the difference it's made in their lives.

So I'm trying it out, starting tomorrow for the first time, which is why there's probably not going to be a journal entry from me tomorrow. See, the hardest part of GTD (naturally) is simply getting started; the first thing you have to do is literally, physically, go around your living and working environments, collecting up each and every single object in your life (physical and mental, the mental ones written down on sheets of paper) that currently doesn't have a resolution, and throw them all into a giant physical "inbox" (a trashcan for me); then once that's done, you actually start taking all the objects out, one at a time, classifying them and deciding where in your organizational system they belong. And he warns that this takes at least five to six uninterrupted hours for most to accomplish, and sometimes even up to two days for those who are especially busy. So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow - setting up my organizational system for the first time, and getting my system ready to be used for the first time. And I've got a whole lot of outstanding projects in my life, as you can imagine, so I'm already figuring that I'm going to be one of those full-day-if-not-more people.

Anyway, so welcome to the church of Getting Things Done, and hello from its newest convert. I'll be letting you know of future news on this subject as it arrives.