GTD for Academics: Engage

How GTD informs the actual act of doing work

Photo by Benjamin Zanatta on Unsplash

We're continuing our overview of the Getting Things Done (GTD) framework applied to the academic life. This week we're looking at the fifth, and final stage of GTD. The first four stages are

• Capture, where we take things that come into our minds and get them out of our minds and into a trusted system;

• Clarify, where we decide what each captured items means to us;

• Organize, where we put those items into a location that matches our relationship to each one; and then

• Reflect, where we decide how to handle the things we have to do before we do them.

These four stages are important, but the only reason we do them in GTD is to set us up for the fifth stage: Engage. This is the stage where we actually do work, and actually get things done.

Doing (aka Engaging)

I am taking a page from Leo Babauta's excellent book Zen To Done and rechristening Engage with the simpler and more evocative word: Do.

It's always seemed odd to me that so little of writing about "productivity" is focused on actually doing work. Instead, it seems more focused on pushing questionable life hacks and hawking the latest tools. But it turns out that actually just doing work is hard, even if the work itself is familiar or even enjoyable.

It's especially hard in academia, where the work is always overflowing both in quantity and variety. When you actually do have time to sit down and get something done (i.e. the time isn't taken up by a meeting or a class), then what do you pick? Here's how it often goes.

• The sheer quantity and variety of work that needs to be done causes a fight-or-flight response, and it takes time and energy simply to engage with the list of to do items. (Even if you have a list; especially if you don't.)

• Usually the outcome of that response is to pick the most urgent-looking thing available. Often this is an item from someone else's to-do list, passed on to you. Sometimes the item hasn't been clarified and it's not really something you should be doing, but you do it anyway because it looks like a fire that needs putting out. Sometimes urgency is exaggerated (and people who want you to handle their to-do list items are quite good at making things look urgent). In any case, you end up spending the day working only on seemingly-urgent things, not on things that are important to you that build you up and sustain you.

• Even if you resist the siren song of the seemingly-urgent and pick something else, you often end up feeling guilt and worry because the choice to work on that thing is also 999,999 choices to not work on all the other things. So you're not focused.

• Or maybe none of this happens, but you select something to work on that's ill suited to your present situation --- a task that takes 30 minutes to complete when you only have 10; a task that needs to be done in one part of campus when you're spending the day in another; a task that takes a lot of focus when you're worn down at the end of the day and don't have it in you.

• And very often, all of the above causes you to just shut down completely and doomscroll on social media.

It's no wonder so many faculty feel exhausted and burned out. The supposedly simple act of merely picking a thing to do and then getting to work on it, is full of holes through which our time and energy (and mental health) leak out constantly. If you approach it without some kind of framework to guide the process of actually working, then we have no reason to expect that the exhaustion will ever abate.

How to "Do"

"Doing" in GTD starts with being consistent in capturing, clarifying, and organizing. So we start this stage having gotten reasonably caught up in capturing all open loops, clarifying what they mean, putting them in the right place in our system, and reflecting on those tasks appropriately. If you're not completely clear on those stages, you should probably review the posts on those. If you are clear, you're good to go.

Picking a thing to do in the moments you have available, in a way that makes you happy about what you are doing as well as what you are not doing, basically involves taking the mountain of things on your next actions list and applying a series of filters:

First check your calendar for things that must get done. This is your "hard landscape", and your choices may be limited. If you have an email to send by 5:00pm that day, you should probably put everything else aside and work on the email. But if it's not due for another day or two, you have more flexibility.

If the calendar doesn't give you something to do, then look at your Next Actions, both the next actions that come from projects and the disaggregated items on your Next Actions list, and filter by context.

In the Organize article, we introduced contexts as tags or meta-data on your tasks corresponding to the location, tool, or situation needed in order to complete the task. You can think of contexts as sub-lists, where you've partitioned up your next actions according to what you need, or where you need to be, in order to get the action done. Traditional notation for GTD contexts uses the @ or # symbols. For example, if you need to be at home to do a task, the context is @home. If it's a phone call, the context is @phone or @calls. And so on. This Reddit post gives a useful discussion of different ideas for contexts and how people use them, if you're looking for examples. Contexts are best added as soon as possible, ideally at the moment of capture but definitely no later than the "Organize" stage.

To use contexts, determine which context you are currently in, and then filter your next actions to show only those that can possibly be performed in your current context. This means that you are not considering, or even thinking about, any task that cannot possibly be done due to being "out of context". For exmaple, if you are at the office, there is no point in spending any amount of time thinking about actions that cannot take place in the office, like anything in the @home context. You might have an @online context for tasks that can only be done on a device that has an internet connection, so if you're on an airplane, you can ignore every item on that sublist.

David Allen invented GTD by having a stack of 3x5 index cards, one for each context with next actions keyed to that context, and shuffling the one for his present context to the front of the stack so the only thing he saw were the tasks for that context. This is the basic idea: Focus only on the items you can possibly do in your context.

From here, filter down even further by time required, energy available, and priority. If there's a task that fits your context but it takes at least an hour and you only have 30 minutes, skip it. If it requires a lot of focus but you're tired at the end of the day, skip it. And if it's a lower priority than some other task that also fits your context, time, and energy, focus on the other task first.

At the end of all this filtering, you will end up with a much shorter list of tasks, all of which are available to do (i.e. not screened out by your calendar) and which match your location, time, energy, and tools available. Then, it really is simple: Pick the one thing off the list that resonates with you the most, and work on it single mindedly without distraction. Shut the door; put your devices in airplane mode; close out your email client and get to work on it.

How I "do"

I keep my calendar items in Outlook. My tasks are in ToDoist, and without going too deep into the weeds about how ToDoist works, here's the basics.

When I go through the Clarify and Organize, I add two kinds of data to each task:

• Its context, by using a label. The contexts I use are @email, @computer, @grading, @home, @errand, @calls, @gvsu, and @writing. (However this list is never totally adequate it seems; and I'm constantly trying out new contexts and eliminating old ones.) I also add:

• Its priority, indicated in ToDoist with the labels p1 through p4, which shows up as a color. I use red (p1) for the most important task of the day, orange (p2) for tasks I'd like to complete that day (limit 8), blue (p3) for tasks to complete this week, and p4 or no color for everything else.

So, suppose I ordered a book from the campus library's interlibrary loan, and I get a notification that it's come in. It's captured by my email. The item is actionable, it takes longer than 2 minutes, it's a single action and not a project, I am the right person to do it, and it has no fixed due date; therefore it goes into my Next Actions list. But when I add it, I'll add the context @gvsu which is for all tasks that I can only do on the campus of my university; and although the act of picking the book up has no due date, I'd like to get this done before the week is out, so I'll give it the p3 priority ("blue"). So it looks like this when I add the metadata:

From there I can move it to the "Next Actions" list by drag-and-drop, by typing #NEXT ACTIONS, or by clicking on a menu. There it will sit, reviewed on a regular basis.

The next time I am on campus, I can filter my tasks so that I only see the ones labelled @gvsu by clicking on the label:

It appears there's actually two things in my next actions that can only be done on campus, and they are both picking up books (the "ALC book" is a different one from the library and I have to get it from a different place). So when I am on campus, I might batch together 30-45 minutes to go knock out both of these tasks at once -- a form of heads-down focused "getting things done" where I am working single-mindedly only on these tasks.

All other things being equal, in other words, these two tasks are the best things to get done at the particular moment. So I can feel good about doing these when I'm on campus, and I can also feel good about the things I am not doing so long as I am not ignoring stuff that's on the hard landscape of my calendar or stuff that's higher priority.

And when I am in a different context, like @home or @errand, I'll have those contexts pulled up, like David Allen's index cards, and these tasks will be out of sight/out of mind because it's pointless to even look at these tasks if I am not actually on campus.

In a later post, I'll get into some of the minutiae of ToDoist. For example, if I am working in my campus office, I'm on campus (@gvsu) and at my computer (@computer) and I have my phone (@calls) so technically I can choose from any one of those contexts. I can do a search in ToDoist using the query @gvsu | @computer | @calls to get all the tasks that are on one of those lists. Or, I can further filter this (still pretty long) list to show me only the items that have p3 priority and which were added more than two weeks ago. And so on. More on search and filter in ToDoist later; and many other GTD software tools do the same thing.

Sometimes I will do all this filtering and still have dozens of tasks from which to choose. In that case, I go with my gut, based on my current reserves of energy and the time I have available. I have Faculty Senate meetings every Friday from 3-5pm for example (yeah, I know) and so once that meeting is over, I know my energy is going to be basically zero and the only tasks that stand a chance of getting done are ones that require no brainpower. Or, if I know I have to leave my current location in 15 minutes, and I think a task will take more than that time, I'll ignore it (unless I feel OK with getting started on it but not completing it). Some people add additional contexts for this, like a @highenergy or @1hour label to let the software do that filtering, but I find it's less work to just do this on the fly.

The point is that in the Capture/Clarify/Organize part of the process, adding context and priority gives me a way to take the ridiculously long list of next actions that I always have, and winnow it down to things that make sense given my calendar, location, tools available, priorities, energy level, and time. Then I can just pick whichever item off the resulting list that I want to do the most in the moment, and that feels pretty darn good.

Further notes

I've been bringing up power dynamics throughout this series because it comes up a lot and it's an important issue. Here's how I think this plays into the discussion about engaging with work:

• It requires no special position or investment of power to think about your contexts, or to add contexts to your tasks. Anybody can do this, regardless.

• It does require some careful discussions to navigate calendar items and priorities. If for example you are being dragged into meetings constantly, this is going to have a major impact on your time devoted to work. (Because in too many meetings, work does not actually take place.) I think it's worthwhile and reasonable, if you are being given more time constraints than you would like or if you are unsure of the priority level of some task you were given, to just ask someone "in charge" about it. For example: Would you consider this report to be high, medium, or low priority? Or, What role am I playing at this meeting? Do I need to be present for the whole thing or is it OK if I just come in for part of it, or be available through the week for questions? This may sound dangerous, but to me -- as a former department chair and someone who has been "in charge" -- they're polite, professional, and reasonable questions that I would expect other professionals to ask if they are serious about their work.

Now you do it

Homework time:

• Write up a list of contexts that make sense for the way you work. The Reddit post I linked above should give you some ideas.

• Go through your Next Actions lists, which you made in the previous weeks, and add one context to each item. Try to resist the urge to give a task two different contexts, although it's OK if you do (it will just weaken the effects of the filtering).

• Also add a priority to each one. Not everything is high priority. I suggest my priority system: Priority 1 for the single most important task of your day; Priority 2 for stuff you would like to (but don't necessarily have to) get done today, and limit this to 8 in all; Priority 3 for stuff you would like to (but don't necessarily have to) get done this week; and Priority 4 (basically, no priority label) for everything else. Note that this assumes you'll revisit your next actions lists on a daily basis to reset the Priority 1 and 2 items.

• The next time you sit down to work: Mindfully, intentionally choose a single item to work on based on your calendar, context, energy level, time available, and priority levels.

• Then work on it for at least 30 minutes with no distractions.

That's it for the five stages of GTD! Thanks for reading through all this, and it won't be the last you've heard about these concepts. Keep trying them out, and see what questions arise.

I'm now going to switch back to the bi-weekly posting schedule here at this blog, with the next post coming on February 28. I'll be revisiting the idea of high level review that I first mentioned in the Reflect post with a look at reviews at the Weekly and Quarterly/Trimesterly level.