It’s been three years since my initial post about Getting Things Done. The last couple years have been weird, to say the least. I’ve still stuck to the Getting Things Done methodology, but the last year in particular has made me acutely aware of weaknesses in my practice. This year, almost all the projects I took on had high number of unknowns: becoming a manager, buying a house, and improving the house. The slight discomfort I identified in my previous retrospective has grown to an unavoidable problem. When the next steps for most of my projects aren’t obvious, my “external brain” frequently gets out of date and stops helping me. In turn, the staleness of my “external brain” erodes my trust in it. This feedback loop got me back into a pattern of reacting without much planning, and the stress of internalized time management came back. In the last six months, I’ve been improving my tooling to address this problem.

It’s been a little over a year since I wrote about using Getting Things Done (GTD) to organize my life. I wanted to circle back about what worked well and what I learned over that time.

In this blog post, I’m to do a deep dive into the specific steps and tools that I used to achieve this new mindfulness. If you haven’t read my first blog post about Getting Things Done, you should take a look. I’m not recommending the tools here in any capacity other than from my own personal viewpoint: I’m not getting paid to promote these. I still recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen to understand the theory and reasoning for why to use particular tools, and adapt for your own circumstances.

It was a packed day: all meetings that required my attendance. The only breaks were for breakfast and lunch and a lone 30-minute break between other meetings. I had to meet with my remote manager, my new product manager, one of my team members, and customer liaisons for a new customer we were hoping to work with. On top of that, it was Agile sprint planning day — I had to run the task planning meeting and moderate two design discussion meetings. In between all that, I needed to write up my top accomplishments to my manager for performance review. The previous night, I realized that one of my mentoring meetings tomorrow didn’t have enough time to actually accomplish my mentee’s goals. All the while, a wave of emails and pings were crashing in. How was I going to get this all done?