by Balki
It seems like the end is near… at least for chapter 2!
We discussed the six-level model for reviewing your own work which is popular among the geek circles. The model has 6-levels starting from the runway height to 50,000+ feet level.
As expected the topic raised multiple passionate discussions that took us to the boundaries of philosophical nirvana :) We talked about everything from the definition of happiness to life’s purpose.
Some definitions of happiness as coined by the elite group members:
- Happiness = # of desires fulfilled divided by total # of desires
- if you are smart you probably figured out how to increase your happiness level
- Happiness = # of hours you can sleep every night
We will probably close chapter 2 on that happy note. Hopefully, we can switch to the “real-world” of GTD project management mode starting in April. I will post the mindmap for chapter 3 in the coming weeks.
See you soon…
by Balki
We moved on to the Review and Do stages of the 5-stages of GTD workflow yesterday. One of my weakest areas in the whole GTD system is being able to concentrate at the project level. I can do a pretty good job of handling things at the task-level. We can blame the nature of our jobs (customer support) on this short-coming but that will take us no where. We are all hoping that participants like Troy will help us out in this area.
We talked about using Wikis and sharepoints for keeping track of projects both at a personal and team-level.
Some other random, yet relevant things we discussed:
- turn-off all email notifications (sound, prompt, icon etc.) within outlook to be able to concentrate on the task at hand – Talk to Troy or Bala on how to do this
- turn-off email completely (set it to offline mode) for better concentration
- We discussed at length about how the traditional view of an “ideal employee” behavior wherein he/she would simply correct his/her errors, others mistakes and creates the impression of never making mistakes may not be truly IDEAL. It may be prudent of a leader to actually encourage noisy complainers, disruptive questioners and troublemakers!
In the “Do” stage, we talked briefly about the four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment and three-fold model for evaluating daily work.
If you missed this meeting, not everything is lost. Catch-up with one of the other participants and just start showing up every 1st and 3rd Tuesday. Guests are always welcome!
by Balki
We had several gatherings over the last couple months where we focused on the first half of chapter 2 (Collect –> Process –> Organize). We had some lively conversations on the topic of “Getting Things Done” and a lot more on totally tangential topics like creativity, etc.
Some highlights:
- re-emphasized tools like ReQall, ClearContext, Jira, ReadItLater, PageAddict etc.
- Rajeev talked about how he maintains an envelop for his taxes and shoves all related document into it throughout the year so filing in Jan/Feb would be a breeze (yeah, right!)
- How different people handle the “waiting for” bucket?
- Troy and Melvin keep them in their Inbox until the loop is closed
- Bala uses the @WaitingFor outlook folder and the ClearContext Defer feature to stay on top of those times.
- Somehow ended up on a very interesting and intense discussion about “creativity and the workplace”; we discussed the following blog entries/case studies:
- We have two new members: Jeremy Bench and Troy Wilson… both of them are non-geeks so we really love their involvement