Over the last week I have done a major tidy up of my home office and my desk at work. Getting Things Done was the spur to sorting these things out. I first heard of it reading a Guardian article, and have since noticed references in several other places that I regularly read.

At home, getting started took a solid weekend, involving several visits to Staples to get all the necessary supplies. A4 filing cabinet folders, a labelling machine, tape for the machine, pads, manilla folders, card, etc.. The shredding machine was exercised nearly to the point of expiry. Several sacks of shredded paper built up by the garage. Essentially, I took every bit of paper I could find and went through it all as if it were all in the intray. For every bit of paper we decided whether it was actionable or not. If not, did it get trashed or filed? If actionable did it go in the tickler file, pending tray or just get done?

Eventually, it was all done. There isn’t a single bit of paper anywhere other than the filing cabinet, several things surfaced that needed dealing with (such as address changes on my pensions), and the action lists are working. I’m getting done little things I’ve meant to do for ages, like selling old books on Amazon, taking a photo of the family to work, etc..

Then, I decided to go whole hog, and implement the same thing at work – this is slightly more of an interesting proposition since I have no filing cabinet, just one filing drawer and we didn’t have any foolscap folders for it, etc. So, another stationery expedition later, several hours of paper shuffling, and lots of bemused looks and comments and I have a clear desk, and the ability to lay my hands on any document in a moment.

Work email is a slightly different issue, and I am trying out the GTD outlook add-in. So far, I’m not really impressed. My biggest issue with it is the fact that when you have finished a task it leaves the associated email in the @action folder. When you purge your completed tasks it then deletes the email at the same time. I never delete any email – hard disks are big enough. I hate the way someone decided that I would want to trash emails once I had dealt with them. You can work around it, but it is several steps of awkwardness, instead of one swift button click. I guess that I am going to manually handle email, perhaps using the excellent Next Action web application. Programs like this are revolutionising web applications, and I will probably write up the technology on my other blog.