The Bag Lady Attempts to Master the Workflow

Organizing the Process

Even if we’ve never attempted to record our methods, I think all of us have some sort of organizational system. I discovered mine was a combination of bags of stuff, piles of stuff, stuff in email and snail mailboxes, and the stuff inside my head. The GTD process is helping me control the stuff, instead of the stuff controlling me!

Collect

I first had to identify the categories of inboxes I use and what I use each for in order to organize the process of Getting Things Done. Upon reflection, I found that I rely heavily on bags to keep myself organized!  I have a teacher bag, a coaching bag, a student bag, and a personal bag (my purse) to keep myself sane and productive. The other stuff I gather on a regular basis is email and snail mail. The bags and the email systems are the collection buckets for my stuff.

Process

I am currently using and maintaining three different email accounts.  The two that are for very specific purposes, are not used as frequently as my main email account. I have a MSU student email account that I check about once per week.  I immediately delete about half of the items that come in without even reading them.  The other half I read and then delete.  This account has fewer than ten items in it at any given time.  I also have a Gmail account that I use specifically for two purposes.  One is to communicate with classmates in my Educational Technology graduate program.  The other is for receiving Education Association emails from union members and union administrators who for privacy reasons do not want to communicate via the school Outlook Express system.  The items that come in the Gmail account tend to be immediately actionable and therefore are acted on quickly and deleted.  This account also usually has less than ten items in it.

The challenge for me in using the GTD process was in dealing with my main Outlook Express account.  I use this account for all work related and personal related communications.  This includes emails from colleagues, administrators, parents, friends, relatives, stores at which I shop, and targeted emails from education related businesses.  This account was a monster!  When I began the GTD process, my Outlook Express account contained 107 pages.  With roughly 20 emails per page, altogether, I was sitting on about 2,000 emails! 386 of them were in the “unread” category.  The first thing I decided to do was delete any unread messages that were over two weeks old.  Next, I deleted any store emails I’d been holding onto (e.g. Borders’s, New York & Co., etc.) Then I created folders to manage what was left.  The folders serve the purpose of allowing me to organize the email by categories, namely teaching, coaching, parent communication, stores, businesses, and personal. In the process I realized I didn’t need most of the emails and I deleted approximately two-thirds of them.  The remaining emails are things I want to hold on to for reference purposes and they were divvied up into the new folders I had created.

The bag system I mentioned earlier is working for me and serves as an easy and effective bucket for non-electronic stuff.  Since I usually set aside time once per week to clean out and update each bag, I already have been following the GTD process with these buckets.

Organize

Since I am a technology teacher and have computer access readily available to me throughout my work-day, I decided that mainly keeping electronic files for the organize part of the GTD process made the most sense for me.  I made a separate e-file for the projects, next actions, and waiting for categories of the organize step.  These are working like “to-do” lists.  Although I created an on-line calendar in Google apps, I’m still finding it easier and quicker to maintain my paper-and-pencil calendar because it is small and portable. 

Review

I do a twice per day review of my calendar and action lists.  In the morning, I prioritize the lists and add any other next action items I need to take care of that day.  In the afternoon, I revisit the action list and update it.

Do

What I can get done, how much time I have to do it in, and the energy I have left for it changes constantly.  Teaching is a very dynamic occupation and managing the workflow is one of the biggest challenges of the job. Prioritizing and organizing methods only make being an effective teacher easier.

1. Going through the process for the first time:

Actually getting started using the GTD process was the hardest part for me. The biggest question was, “What are, or will be, my inboxes.”  Once I was able to decide on the number of and the nature of my inboxes, I was able to begin. 

Organizing and deleting emails was time consuming and somewhat stressful.  I had to face the fact that I was being an electronic pack rat!  I am glad I did it and feel much more in control of the “stuff.”

2.  Helpfulness of the GTD process:

Undertaking the GTD process has been helpful to me especially in the area of my main email account.  I have always wanted to organize it, but was unsure of how to get started.  The GTD process gave me a clearer understanding of the stuff I needed to organize and gave me a suggested structure for doing so. 

3.  Continuation of the process/use of an alternative:

I will continue using the GTD process because it will help me prevent being buried by email again.  There is more I’d like to learn about it like how to effectively use and manage the 43 folders.  Since I am still using the workflow management processes that I used to use, I have already adapted the process to suit my needs.

Lifehacker.com posted an article titled Practicing Simplified GTD by Gina Trapini.  The author describes her GTD system in the following eight words:  Make three lists.  Revise them daily and weekly.  The lists suggested are:  a To-Do List, a Project List, and a Someday/Maybe List.  Trapini says that use of these three lists in addition to using an email inbox and calendar is all you really need and is much less cumbersome.  This sounds like a viable alternative to me.  I don’t think I will be a purist about practicing GTD because it is time consuming and requires a lot of organizational discipline.