Getting Things Done: Things

I'm at a point in my life where there are so many things going on at one time, plus I'm lazy, I need help. I ran across a timely Mashable article that featured 20+ Mac Apps to increase your productivity. I decided to try one out.

One of the apps that caught my eye was the first one, Things. Things is an award winning task management application for the Mac. It's a great looking app (hence the Apple Design Award) and so far it's been very helpful in organizing the different things I want to do.

I'll defer to the Mashable article and won't describe all of the various features of Things. They do offer an iPhone app that will sync w/ the desktop app, I will say that.

After doing a little looking around, reading various reviews on Things I saw a lot of the commenters saying "gtd" and "getting things done". A quick google brought me to a book by Dave Allen called Getting Things Done. I have yet to read it but scraped this off the wiki, this really spoke to me for some reason. Here it is:

GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

GTD is defined by Allen on his website. In traditional time management, priorities usually play a central role. In contrast, his version uses two key elements — control and perspective. It advocates three major models for gaining control and perspective:

  1. A workflow process
  2. A framework with 6 levels of focus
  3. A natural planning method

The first major model is the workflow process, which is used to gain control over all the tasks and commitments that one needs or wants to get done. The workflow process consists of five distinct phases listed below (with each described in greater details in the Principles section):

  1. Collect
  2. Process
  3. Organize
  4. Review
  5. Do

Allen uses an altitude analogy to illustrate his second major model, 6 different levels of focus, and give perspective on tasks and commitments. These 6 levels of focus, from the bottom up, are:

  1. Current actions
  2. Current projects
  3. Areas of responsibility
  4. Yearly goals
  5. 5 year vision
  6. Life goals

For me, the area where I get real sloppy is 1. Current actions and 2. Current Projects... Sometimes I get into a funk where it's hard to see the forest for the trees. I jump between projects and tasks with no real rhyme or reason and I have a hard time putting tasks into areas of responsibility. Also sometimes I don't pay any attention to the priority of a task, only whether I feel like doing it or not. I think by using a task management software like this I'll start to get a better handle on that.

I've only just started using it, still on the trial version as you'll see.

I almost forgot to mention, you can sync your Things database across multiple machines by using the almighty Dropbox. Here's a tutorial on how to do that.