Frogplate - GTD with Shadow Plan

The Problem

It all started going wrong when I discovered "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. That book was a turning point in my life. Up until then I had been drifting along, reacting to events, without any clear idea of where I wanted to be in the future. "The Seven Habits" made me think about where I wanted to be in a decade's time and how I was going to get there. I also gave me the perspective to divide the unimportant, but urgent tasks from those that were really important to achieving my goals. It's a fascinating book that's full of insights. But there was a problem...

Up until then my task list had been kept on an old and trusty Psion Series 3a. I added the odd task as and when needed and occasionally ticked one or two of them off as well. But Covey taught me to plan, to organise tasks into Quadrants that identified their urgency and importance, to think about my Goals and plan accordingly. My list of tasks was getting longer, but I found I was referring to it less and less.

By the time I graduated to a Palm, I was actively avoiding my task list. Its sheer size had become intimidating. There were so many activities micro-planned that it was hard to see the wood for the trees. But worse, when I did take the plunge into the dark forest I found a profoundly depressing catalogue of forgotten activities, delayed projects and missed deadlines.

I am incredibly jealous of those who can sail through life, never making even the simplest list of tasks and yet alway remembering what needs to be done at any one instant. Unfortunately a butterfly mind and a particulary poor memory make extensive tasks lists the order of the day. But how could I become their master?

By the time David Allen sprung to the rescue with "Getting Things Done" I had graduated to Agendus on a Palm. Each of my "roles" in life (Husband, Father, Developer, etc) was allocated a task category, and the priorities reflected Covey's four quadrants. It worked, but each task category contained hundreds of actions in no meaningful order. It was hard to plan individual projects, or to see what I had to do next to fulfill my goals.

Like many of the best lifehacks, David Allen's techniques for Getting Things Done (GTD) feel so obvious once you've read about them, that you kick yourself for not thinking of it yourself years ago. It is not a big book and doesn't go into the philosophical and psychological background in the way Covey does. What it does provide is a small set of pragmatic rules for running your life efficiently.

Two of the techniques described in this book showed the way out of my task problems:

Firstly, categorise each action according to where it can be carried out, that is give it a context (Office, Shops, House, Garden, Internet, Anywhere...). That way when you are in a particular context you only need to consider the relevant actions.
Secondly, mark the tasks that are the 'Next Actions' you can carry out on each project. They are what you need to focus on, not the monolithic mass of other actions waiting in the wings.

It took an evening to bash my task list into shape. Instead of my roles in life, my categories now reflected task contexts - for example I had an '@Shops' category for tasks that can only be carried out at the local shopping mall. In each context the tasks that needed to be done next to progress things were marked with priority one. All others defaulted to five.

How did that help? Let's say I'm nipping out to the shops at lunchtime. In my Covey system I might have had an action to buy my son a toy Dalek. But it would have been categorised under my role as a 'Father' and as a quadrant II task (Not urgent, but important!). The chances of remembering it, when I nipped down to the shops?

But in the new scheme of things the action was in the '@Shops' category, and as the 'Next Action' in my project to encourage my son to get good school reports, it was marked with a category of '1'. So now, when sneaking out early to lunch, I just needed to pull up the '@Shops' category in Tasks.

When I got back to the office, I marked the relevant actions as complete and then changed the category to '@Office' to see what I had to do next in order to keep the salary coming in. Suddenly it was much easier to find out what I needed to do next in any situation or location.

This worked very well, and was a big improvement over my previous planning systems. The only problem was, that it was still difficult to plan projects that contained many actions. A project might have actions that needed to be carried out in many different contexts and so would be spread across many different categories. It was difficult to get an overview of a single project. I tried appending a project ID to each action's name. Each id was a four digit number in curly brackets, for example {1234}. I could then search for all the related actions in a project using Find. By putting the id's in curly brackets I made sure Find didn't match normal data, like phone numbers. By putting the same project id's in Memos and Note Pad, for example, other documents could also be associated with the project.

It worked, but it was a little unwieldy and still didn't allow actions to be ordered, let along have more complicated relationships. What I needed was an Outliner. I looked at Arranger, Bonsai and Progect, before finally settling on Shadow Plan.

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