Philosophy, cookery and geekery

This summer/autumn I went from being a student to a pretty-much real-world worker, in something that approximates to an office.  My job is actually a lot more diverse than most office work, insofar as I have to spend a large portion of my time doing things in other parts of the theatre (bar, cellar, and front-of-house areas, primarily).  However, I thought it would be interesting to compare the productivity challenges and solutions that I faced as a student, to those I’m experiencing now.  While I had three years of student life (more than one of which after my discovery of GTD) to hone my work patterns in, I’ve only been in this environment for less than two months, so naturally I’m comparing a finished item to a work in progress.  I’m also going to be assuming that most aspects of my work aren’t too dissimilar to typical office work, which may not be true, but is a helpful simplification.  Caveats aside, here I go…

An easily noticed change is the dramatic reduction in the number of possible contexts for my actions.  As a student, I usefully distinguished in my to-do list between actions “on my PC”, “on the internet anywhere”, “in my room, but not at the PC”, “in college”, “in my department”, “in the town centre”, “at the ADC”, “in Devon”… a rather long list.  This helped me prioritise based on where I was, and make efficient trips away from where I was currently to do a number of things at once, rather than, e.g. having to go to the town centre and back more than once in a day.  It also meant I could avoid leaving my PC on for extended periods – I could go through the list of “at PC” and “at internet” things, switch it off, and then look at things to do at home that didn’t require a PC (like reading for essays…).

Now, although I could potentially still make a lot of these distinctions, I find I don’t need to.  Since I’ve spent the summer being poor, my primary collection bucket is a simple hPDA, with lots of yellow cards for collection of “stuff”, a pink card for listing of non-work projects, and two blue cards: one for all non-work actions, and one for any work-actions that I need to process when I’m next at work.  Stuff comes in to the yellow cards, and then I occasionally sit down, identify the actions, and move them to the relevant blue card or do them right away.  When I’m next at work, the work-actions get copied into Outlook, and crossed off immediately.  The non-work actions are never so numerable that subdividing them is worthwhile – two sides of A6 can easily be scanned for things I can do right now.

The really major difference between student and adult life is that of work/home divide.  As a student, it simply doesn’t exist: my bedroom was my study and primary workplace, and all possible actions (things to be done) could be easily lumped under the single meta-category of “life”, whether they were university, social-life, or something else.  Now, I have a clear distinction: when I’m at work, I want to think only about work-related actions, and when I’m not, I don’t.  This isn’t easy, especially since my job demands long hours of me.  I do unavoidably think of personal things whilst at work, which need to be recorded appropriately so I can deal with them in my free time; I also do think of work-related ideas/projects/actions in my free time, and need to be able to record and postpone these until I go back to work.  The hPDA allows me to do this but because I’m transferring work things to Outlook, I find I don’t really, truly trust my system – a necessity in the GTD paradigm. It means I sometimes re-think up a work action in the middle of the night, that I later discover was already in Outlook – but since I’ve then lost sleep over it, this is a blatent Fail.

Returning to using a digital PDA would solve the problem, as I could easily track work and non-work actions in one place (syncing it to Outlook if I wished) and view only the ones appropriate to where I am.  But I don’t want to do that! I’m currently holding out for the release of the Google Android, so I can compare to the iPhone and buy one or other of those.  Then I’ll probably move to a web-based action-tracking system, which I’ll be able to access from my office PC or from the phone, whichever is more convenient.  This example of GTD gone wrong is a pretty clear proof of why David Allen insists that you need to have one single trusted system for all your actions, and be able to get at it at any time.  

The third real difference between student and adult life is simply one of available time: after day-to-day existence, the time I have left for persuing non-work projects is pretty slim.  As a student I had enough time for non-academic projects that I wasn’t forced to refine my action-picking system too much – a few wasted seconds didn’t matter.  Now, I really try to squeeze things in in the 5-minute gaps in life – so being able to track every last thing and effectively pick the best to do right now is so much more important.  I think changing to a web-based to-do list, with the ability to check it anywhere, will probably make this better, but for now I’m just limping along with the hPDA and a slightly less-than-total coverage of open loops in my personal life.