GTD for Academics
Academic work is hard. But sometimes we make it harder by entering into it without a clear plan for engagement and productivity. This was the case for me, for a very long time. I had an overflowing email inbox, a confused calendar (or no calendar at all), and was constantly at the mercy of the most urgent things to do rather than focused on the most important things. I'd forget about meetings, work countless hours on weekends and evenings, get horribly behind on grading, and was unable to be fully present with my students. I'd blame it on academia, but really it was my fault, because I was just winging it, rather than approaching my work like a scholar.
Around 2008, I discovered Getting Things Done, a philosophy of work management promulgated by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity and it changed my life.
It is a system based on the idea of capturing ideas that come into your head or inbox, breaking them down into easily-doable tasks organized by projects (and filing away or deleting those tasks that don't need to be done), and then executing those tasks that best fit your time, energy, and context at the moment --- always focusing on the question: What's the next action?
GTD transformed my life and my work, and I write about it a lot here. In fact, I devoted an entire series to understanding how GTD looks specifically for people involved in academia. For easy reference, here is that series:
And another article not strictly in that series but which ties the whole GTD approach together:
I hope you find those articles useful.
Here is an older version of this series that I wrote several years before the one above.