KGTD Process

Hello folks,

This post is partly in response to an earlier post encouraging discussion on how we’re using KGTD (instead of a technical support question). I’ve had an opportunity to play with this file for about 10 days now, and I have to say it’s been a very good - and eye opening - experience.

First, I’ve taken some liberties with a few GTD (and KGTD) conventions in order to suit my personal tastes, so my useage may differ from your preferences..

For the top tier of the Projects section, instead of listing projects, I’ve made “superheadings” consisting of life areas, i.e. “Home Projects”, “Finance”, “Career Development”, “Recreation-Travel”, “Fitness and Health”, etc. Actual Projects and subprojects are listed within these larger headings. That way when I review and tweak projects I can call up every project within a certain area of my life instead of having a *huge* top tier filled with dozens of projects.

Secondly, when I migrated my original Projects lists from a generic OO3 file into the KGTD format I immediately noticed that I had lots of ambiguity in my project lists - tasks masquerading as projects and vice versa, lots of projects with no actions, etc. KGTD forced me to review these projects and think about actions and contexts in a more dogmatic GTD way. I didn’t realize I was being that loose with the system! Thanks Ethan - your setup has a built-in way of counteracting poor implementation of GTD.

That said, once I finished assigning contexts and actions to every project and subproject, I was left with a much larger, almost depressing amount of actions. This was troublesome as I have a tendency to procrastinate and enormous actions lists don’t help. Plus, I don’t think that a vast “Actions” section is congruent with GTD dogma. I’m more interested in “Next Actions” and I think there is a big distinction. So I took a cue from a previous poster who started removing contexts from his actions in order to gray them out. This works very well! These gray items are future next actions - not someday/maybe - but rather *future definite*. I only assigned contexts to those actions that I determine are truly Next Actions. I believe this is closer to the spirit of Allen’s book, and for me I now have a much smaller, manageable list of actions to work from each day. Then I can go back and review my project lists and assign contexts to grayed-out actions as desired.

Third, I’m going against the grain a bit by purposely allowing “singletons” - single actions that don’t require projects - into this system. I ended up with about 20 “singletons” - single actions that don’t require projects. These are listed under a Project entitled “Everything else”. These include mundane tasks like errands and even a subproject called “Fix Computer”, which is a one-time (hopefully) project that doesn’t fit neatly under my “life areas” headings.

Forth, I removed all the Review lists from the KGTD file and merged them into a OO3 Review outline I maintain seperately. I do this in order to keep the KGTD file size manageable and also so I can have my Review file side-by-side with my KGTD file on the computer screen as I go through the review process.

Last, I set up a seperate KGTD file just for work. I work in the entertainment industry, and the shows I work on have vast amounts of projects and subprojects. It’s easier and safer for me to maintain these seperately and not mix up my personal life or career development projects with my current show.

Both my personal and work files sync with iCal just fine, so long as the calendar names in iCal don’t have overlapping names. For instance, I have a Calendar (aka context) in iCal called @Calls, for non-work calls. For work-related calls, this calendar is named @Prd:Calls. ‘Prd’ stands for ‘Production’.

All in all, KGTD is in my opinion an amazing implementation of GTD, though there are some minor philosophical differences in both Ethan’s and my own interpretation of GTD as I see it. But these aren’t show-stoppers. On the contrary, the system is flexible enough to tweak a little to personal taste.

Thanks Ethan, this really rocks!

- Randy Kirk