The book and methodology Getting Things Done by David Allen showed up on my radar late last year, and I ended up buying a copy because:

• It has the words "stress-free" on the cover
• I was not happy with my own organizational system.

I read the book carefully over the last month (including losing a copy and having to order another), not just picking up his system but also reflecting on my own system. I like his claims that the book is more about collections of tricks that work than silver bullets, and the promise that the system is more about feeling comfortable with what you are and aren't doing than about being able to simply do more:

And whatever you're doing, you'd probably like to be more relaxed, confident that whatever you're doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing—that having a beer withy our staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of your, or spending a few informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you're doing it. GTD page xi.

These claims and promises were partially fulfilled.

The crux of GTD seems to be to be this:

• You can only do one thing at time.
• If you have more than one thing to do, you will inevitably not be doing something you want to do.
• You must write down all of the things that you are not doing right now
• You must truly believe that your system will give you access to these things when you need them.
• Then, you should be able to forget about everything you are not doing
• Then, the stress from those things should go away

I won't further regurgitate his book here; google GTD yourself if you want summaries. Instead, here are the items that struck me especially:

List of things you are waiting for. Delegating doesn't eliminate stress because you still have to worry about the possibility of follow up. Make a list of things you may need to follow up on and then forget them.

Review. This is the big thing I'm missing. I make a lot of good lists and then don't revisit the lists for literally months or years. You need a good system of review, very consistent, before the things that are out of sight truly become out of mind. (a cogent argument for weekly review)

Checklists for review. To improve the review process, create checklists and use them. Here is my in-box checklist:

• email in-box
• physical in-box on shelf above my computer
• things that are on the floor near the front door
• bugzilla bugs for main project
• bugs in other bug tracking systems on other projects
• answering machine
• Files named "notes" in my laptop or desktop home directories.

Keep your inbox empty. The basic argument is that a 1000-item inbox is really a to-do list, and a very bad one. I've already become much better about emptying my email inbox, and can confirm that looking at an empty in-box does reduce stress. I've been worse about allowing physical items to pile up.

Have a good filing system. I realized that, by putting my filing system into a plastic box on a shelf, I created a barrier to filing, and this caused my physical inbox to grow. Last week I bought a filing cabinet (I got a "Hirsh" because it had the smoothest drawer action of the choices at the store) and a label printer, and put them both within arm's reach. I'm very happy with it so far.

Clear outcomes. "One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most powerful to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes." GTD page 69. This resonated with me. As a project manager, it's my most important skill. It's how I enable a group of people to do work that they can do, want to do, need to do, but aren't yet actually doing. I also find that, in working with developers, the more concretely I can spell out a feature and how users will use it, the more the developers support the feature.

Home/work distinction. GTD freely blends personal and professional, asserting that since they are all things you have to do, you should manage them in one system. I can't rebut that argument, but think it's still important to maintain boundaries between the two. The book erodes those boundaries beyond my comfort:

Many people lose opportunities to be productive because they're not equipped to take advantage of the odd moments and windows of time that open up as they move from one place to another, or when they're in off-site environments. GTD page 90

[If you have] zero built-in time or space for regrouping ... you'll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home. GTD page 188

Doing. I used to have a giant, overwhelming list of things to do. I hardly ever came close to emptying the list, and it stressed me. Eventually I started kicking a lot of things into the future, so that my daily list was, in theory, do-able. A few times I was able to clear the reduced list, and that led to a sense of well-being, but I still usually failed to clear the list. I realized that I had put myself in the psychological situation of started each day "behind" and having as the best possible outcome merely breaking even. One disappointment in GTD is that nothing in it really addressed that process.

What GTD does push is having context-specific lists of things to do. Because I work from home and spend most of my time with the computer and phone instantly ready, I don't context-switch as much as a frequent flier or office worker would. I'll still use context lists for some stuff, and to separate work from personal, but my big disappointment is this: If I follow the GTD method, I end up with a pretty decent-sized list of to-dos, maybe 50, and then the "Doing" chapter of the book stops helping. It suggests trusting your gut, and keeping the lists short enough that you can scan them and the next good thing to do will jump out, but it's very short on practical tips.

So after going through one good pass of the book and starting to change a lot of my process, I feel like I've been gently and persuasively led half-way across a rope bridge to a better place and then abruptly abandoned to get the rest of the way across on my own. So as I do that, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Massachusets has been pushing a new policy requiring all government software to use open standard document formats. The software itself can be proprietary and expensive, but the files have to be standard. Of course this would torpedo Microsoft's monopoly on office software, so Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail. They recently went after the state CIO personally, via bought and paid for state senators, and the CIO indeed quit. Today's good news:

In an important new development, the administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has not only appointed a permanent replacement to State CIO Peter Quinn, but also dedicated the press release announcing that appointment to reconfirming its steadfast commitment to the implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument Format.