This article is going to be about the second core princple is "Process". I've writen about the first principle already, and after the "Process" principle we still have three more to do:

• Collect
• Process
• Organize
• Review
• Do

The "Process" principle is all about processing the things you collected in while practicing the "Collect" principle. David Allen, the founder of Getting Things Done, suggests the following process workflow:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into your "collection".
• If an item requires action:
  • do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
  • delegate it, or
  • defer it.
• If not,
  • file it for reference,
  • throw it away, or
  • incubate it for possible action later.

When reading this workflow, I must say, this is only possible for managers. Specially this two-minute-rule. I'm sure about managers in this world who have to delegate lot's of their tasks, but I'm not a manager, I'm a worker. So this rule doesn't apply to me. Also I'm not sure about never put anything back into my "collection". What does defering and incubating mean? For me it means putting it back in my collection for later. I think this workflow item is confusing, so I also remove the "Never put anything back.." item. So I changed this workflow to fit my needs:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• If an item requires action:
  • do it, or
  • defer it.
• If not,
  • file it for reference,
  • throw it away, or
  • incubate it for possible action later.

In my first article about Getting Things Done I talked about the need for gathering everything you to be doing in some kind of list. A lot of people would gather all things to be done in Outlook Tasks or some kind of notebook.

But I'm not like anyother people, I'm a Software Engineer, and have been busy building my own gathering tool voor all Things that need to be done by me.

It's a very simple application that has a list the user can filter. Off course the user is able to add, change and delete todo-items. There is some simple kind of grouping by Priority, Project, Context and Dates. You can see a screenshot below of my GTD collecting tool, for the moment I call it NToDo.txt. It's very simple with a plain text file as datasource with a format much like Todo.txt and build in .NET 2.0. As soon as I'm satisfied with it I might put it on the site for downloading.

 

Besides the purpose this tool has, I've got a purpose for building it. I want to build it because I need something to practice on Design Patterns and other patterns I rarely used.

Getting Things Done or GTD as I will mention it from now on is an action management method. It also is a trademark of David Allen, the founder of GTD. GTD rests on the principle that a person needs a free mind so he can concentrate on working on his tasks. By a free mind, I understood they mean free from the job of remember everything that needs to be done.

There are five core princples of GTD. I'm going over them one at a time. I'm not even sure of GTD is going to work for me, as it has a focus on managers and I'm still not a manager, I'm a Software Engineer, with a lot of tasks to do.

The five core principles are:

• Collect
• Process
• Organize
• Review
• Do

I'll start with the first principle Collect.

The collect principle means capturing everything you need to track, remember or act on. Get everything out of your head and put those things together. Use a ToDoToDay notebook, your Outlook, PDA or whatever else. Put it into a so called "bucket". Every bucket needs to be processed to empty at least once a week.

I think I will be able to this. I've been using a book to make notes about what to do, for about a year ago. Time to pick it up again I guess.