Oh wait I just realized that it’s the 20th anniversary (approximately) since I got on GTD!
Over the past 20 years, two short-cuts have snuck into my practice that are both big no-no’s in GTD even though they save a lot of time.
One is that I often bypass my inbox and all that processing and instead write things directly where they are meant to go. Calendar items get scheduled directly, todo-times get written on their right context and with a project on my projects page if they’re multi-step.
The other is that I often skimp on the weekly review, just quickly read through things instead of carefully spend a lot of time on each times. I usually don’t teach the review right away either. I know from my own experience with my own pre-GTD self that some people are just so messed up that just going from nowhere to having a list of goals and their next actions is a life-saving win on its own and it’s well worth to just start with that.
These shortcuts are well and good but taken together they really exacerbate each other’s downsides. Cruft gets on there that really aren’t the best thing to spend my time on (or to spend procrastination-guilt on). I get nerdsniped and overly SOFA. I can see why these shortcuts are considered so taboo in GTD. “If you’re not doing a review, you’re not doing GTD”.
GTD didn’t keep the “four quadrants” from Covey where things can be urgent and important separately and we need to take time from urgent non-important things to do important non-urgent things. It doesn’t do all that fiddly prioritizing stuff. (I guess GTD guilty of its own “shortcuts” too.)
So while I’m probably gonna keep the “skip inbox” shortcut for the forseeable, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my weekly reviews for the past few months and that has been a lot better. And by “a lot more time”, it’s still what under fifteen minutes or so? It’s time well spent and it’s enjoyable, valuable time. It only seems like a lot compared to the like half a minute or so I was down to.
The “no-inbox” shortcut doesn’t really save a lot of time either actually. I mean, either way I still need to take the time to consider whether or not I actually want to do it, and put it in the right place. But these days a lot of our inputs are already mediated by inboxes (like email). I don’t need to create an extra layer of capture, then parse, then re-enter, then erase.
Maybe I’m dating myself by saying “these days”. That’s 90s style. Modern-day apps don’t have inboxes anymore, they’re just a constant barrage of notifications and info. But you can see those notifications as being in an inbox-of-sorts on the OS level.
I don’t need to feel too bad about my habit to put things in directly where they should go. It’s just me, uh, “being really fast at processing”. I’m getting better at looking at messages batchedly instead of all the time so I can better process them this way.