Getting more done

I've been taking advantage of my free time to get organized. I'm trying to manage things using the system in David Allen's book Getting Things Done. I discovered David Allen through weblogs and his approach seems to be very popular in the tech community (this Scoble post links to several "GTD" related posts).

It's only been a few days, but I'm pleased with the results so far. One thing I'm trying to learn to do is to limit the frequency with which I check my e-mail. (See this post on Merlin Mann's excellent weblog 43 Folders.) Since, oh, 1995, I've been in the habit of being constantly connected to e-mail while at a computer. I had my mail clients set to check mail every three to five minutes. This meant that e-mail regularly interrupted my workflow. I've pushed the frequency back to about once every 20 minutes. In fact, because I'm now more focused on what I'm doing, I often don't notice when an e-mail arrives until I decide that it's time for a break.

I haven't tried to manage what I do this way in the context of a busy office yet, and it's probably a great luxury that I can start out without having to do that just yet. I feel good about this, that it could have a very good long-term impact. I feel that I've definitely used the last week well.

But I'm not yet to the point where I trust the way I've organized things enough for me to relax about what I have to do next on each of my projects. That's supposed to be one of the big payoffs of the Getting Things Done system. I seem to have freed up my mind to fret about and plan things that don't really need to be addressed, at least not yet. I need to learn at a more habitual level that when I've put those things down on my "someday/maybe" list or my "waiting" list, I can just let them go for a while.