I’ve been thinking about the upcoming holidays, my impending birthday, and the start of another year. This is pretty much a pattern for me through most of my life. Near the end of the year I have a tendency to look both backwards at how the year has gone as well as forwards to the things I want to accomplish. It’s kind of my pre-New Years Resolution ramp up.

Over the past few years I’ve implemented more and more systems to help me keep track of what I’ve done through the year. I’m not claiming that I use them throughout the entire year, but I do have the systems in place. During the first part of the year (typically before the Summer starts) I do a pretty good job of tracking all sorts of things. Then I get mired down in tax season, but struggle through, continuing to track what’s happening. Then summer hits and its like my brain goes on hiatus. A few weeks after the kids start back to school (and in our case, we’ve shipped several of them to the far corners of the US) I start to track things again. Then I come full circle and try to take a look at the plans and aspirations that were in place at the start of the prior year as well as what I ought to accomplish in the coming year.

It’s about this time of year that I start hating on several authors. Actually, I don’t hate them in the traditional sense. I really admire all of them. What I hate is that they’ve gotten into my brain and have planted the seeds of success. Unfortunately, all too often I forget to fertilize and water those seeds. And more often than not I forget to pull the weeds of my past to help those seeds flourish.

So quite honestly, I’m using you as my accountability partners. I’m going to write a series of posts about folks that have impacted me, where I like what they’ve written or said, and how I would like to incorporate their principles in my daily life. Then I’m going to revisit these topics and folks throughout the year, fessing up to you as to how I’ve done with my actual implementation. Hopefully you’ll see the benefits of what these folks have to say, and you might even learn by example of how to incorporate these ideas into your daily life. Of course, it’s also likely that you’ll learn by example how not to incorporate these ideas into your life through my failure to do so.

But today is that bright, shiny, first-day-of-school thought that it’s all gonna be better. That I can do this. I am what I believe. Yeah…all the good stuff today.

The first person that I love to hate is David Allen (http://www.davidco.com/) the author of Getting Things Done, Making it All Work, Ready for Anything. Yeah, he’s written several books and has all sorts of cool products that will help you, ummm, get things done.

You can read my review of Getting Things Done. The bottom line of the review is that I do love what David Allen has to say. I’ve even managed to implement some of his ideas. The biggest one for me is a cogent and integrated filing system. Before reading GTD, despite the fact that I had a home office at that time, I had two filing systems, one for work and one for home. The work filing system had migrated from my last out-of-home office, and I’d never really considered integrating the two systems. Work and Home seemed to be such separate entities. But I discovered I had more and more crossover. Dumb things like software manuals, user agreements (yeah, I keep the paper copies and I’ve even read several), software licenses, product manuals, etc.

Early in the book David Allen talks about doing a big collection of all the stuff that you need to deal with. I did a big collection of some of my stuff and set about creating a neatly labeled, well-organized filing system. I’ll admit that there are thousands more items that need to go into the filing system, and I’ve yet to actually do a purge of things I don’t need, but the stuff that got into the filing system is now so much easier to find and use. Dumb things like birth certificates, deposit slips, receipts. They’re all in there and I can actually find things. And I can find them quickly.

But this is where part of the love-hate relationship starts. There are lots of things that haven’t made it into the filing system. You see, GTD is about a way of being, if you will. It’s about actually processing things and putting them into the filing system. My lifelong habit of piling stuff up all over isn’t really a proactive lifestyle. It’s a lazy one. GTD requires me to be a more active participant in my stuff-o-verse. That means that I actually have to look at something, decide what to do with it, and then perform whatever action to process the thing. All that takes energy and a willingness to do it. As the saying goes, the heart is willing but the flesh is weak. In my case, the flesh keeps piling things up.

But, there are days that I love the system. I get the bug to actually get things done, and I process through a huge amount of stuff and get it in the files or wherever it needs to go. Then I need something that was in those piles and I discover that I’m able to find it faster and better because I know where to look without rifling through stacks upon stacks of paper. Each time it happens I get a bit of positive reinforcement.

My other reason for the love-hate relationship is that filing is just one aspect of GTD. I keep telling myself, “Self, once you get all the filing under control you can implement the other aspects of GTD”. Then later I say, “Self, you are an idiot, you will never get the filing completely under control within the foreseeable future, so you need to move forward with the other aspects of GTD”. Then I usually end up in a first-person argument inside my own head. Kind of scary, honestly.

But I have successfully incorporated a few other ideas of GTD into my lifestyle. I’ve started, stopped, started, phased-out, started, and lumbered along with project/task handling. Within the GTD system, anything that requires more than one step is a project, so most of the issues I have to tackle are projects in the GTD world. The reason that I’m going full speed ahead and then sputtering is that the very management of the tracking of the projects and tasks is hard to do. Not impossible, but hard enough that I get burned out on it and I become a lapsed GTDer. Then I get a renewed interest, more energy, and reinvigorated to use the system. I can honestly say that when I’m using GTD project/task management techniques I do a much better job at being an effective Hectic Dad…rather than the running-around-like-an-idiot Hectic Dad that I am the rest of the time.

So here’s the bottom line. GTD can make a huge difference in your life. It really can. You don’t have to swallow it whole, and you don’t have to use every part of the system for it to be beneficial. Heck, you can use just one part, like I did for so long, and still get HUGE benefits.

I strongly recommend the book Getting Things Done. In fact, I have physical, electronic, and audio versions. That’s how much I like the book. The configuration of the audio version is such that it’s great for listening in short snippets…like when you’re running errands or doing really short workouts.

Now for the hard part for me…I’m putting it out there into the official blogosphere that I’m going to work towards implementation of more of the GTD concepts and practices into my daily life.

Feel free to start nagging me about it anytime. Commenting on this post is a great way to do that. Honestly, I could use the nagging…we’ll just call it “reminding”. OK?