Recently I got… lets call it – lack of motivation. After spending few hours on the internet I found out that I got big chaos in my mind.

Aha! – said the voice in my head – You need to put things in order, make some lists etc. thats the way.

So happily, because I could do something different and kind of easy, I started to look for anything that could take and organize my ‘todo’ list and mix it with Macbook style – You know those gadget freaks.
On my favorite time eating website Lifehacker I’ve found a lot of “Getting Things Done” ideas on how to put some rhythm into our life.
Getting Things Done (shortly GTD) is a workflow defined by David Allen and its all about control and perspective.Its five core principles are: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do.

Of course first thing I did – I installed The Hit List – software for Mac which I already had thanks to MacHeist 3 Bundle. I will try to write a short review of that later.So after few articles and one installation I had a lot of motivation to try something new.

From taking out garbage to childhood dreams…

First I wrote down all things I wanted to do for the next day. Here came my first surprise – “Oh my god I got only five things to do for the whole 24 hour day – what a wast of time“. That brought some new ideas, some projects and some dreams I had.
At the beginning it was a hard work but after a while it was a great fun. I was feeling like 7 year old boy telling stories about who will he become and which stars will he conquer. Let’s call it back to the future feeling.
Hours passed and I had big list of things I want to do.
Happy again with a plan and objectives to accomplish I fell asleep. New day came and I was surprisingly happy and motivated to work again.

What does it mean!?

Ok then. What happened in that simple yet, as it came out for me, pretty powerful process?
As I see it we people just get lost in our day to day life and we forget about is important for us. What this process made for me was first with few simple tasks it gave me feeling of peace and structure for the chaos of daily tasks. This gave me an easy way to metaposition from which I saw myself with less emotions. This plus the feeling of calmness allowed me to get into creative state from which I dugg out new ideas. After that to find my inner resources for more ideas I went back to my childhood memories and emotion I was having back then. When we are children we usually know what we really want and what’s true with us – that gave me one very important question: “What’s important for me now and how it truly suits me?“. That became the filter for all my tasks.

The most important thing for me now: Make it REGULAR!

To make the long story short.

My diagram of how it works:

Getting Things Done workflow through my eyes:

• Brainstorm – write down all the things you got on your mind, what you want, plan, need to do, all ideas that pop into your head.
• Analyze – look at the things you wrote one item at a time and try to validate them.
• Group – take the list and try to categorize, group and prioritize.
• Review – regularly check your list, add new items, regroup.
• Execute – START DOING THEM! and check/strikethrough the ones you done.

I know it’s a simplification but hey that’s how it worked for me. If You want to know how it really works – You want to try it for yourself!

Tatsu