The Organize stage of Getting Things Done (GTD) – how a few tweaks can get you finishing more projects and faster

The Organize stage of Getting Things Done (GTD) is about classifying the clarified actions, support and reference material into appropriate categories.

My biggest struggle was on Projects!

• The broad definition of Projects meant that I had a list of more than 50 projects. Enough to overwhelm me into inaction.

• Both “Buying a Home computer” and “launching a Facebook campaign to drive sales” were projects. Yet one had higher stakes which didn’t reflect in my organizing system.

• Projects with long lead times – some a year long and many between 3-6 months. This meant more time spent planning with less information. And complacency in execution.

This is how I tweaked my Organize stage to increase speed, clarity and focus for GTD:

• Used Tiago Forte’s PARA method to organize by Projects, Areas of responsibility, Resources and Archives. Google PARA to know more.

• In PARA, an Area of responsibility can have a task regardless of whether the Area has a project subset or not. So “buying computer’ could be under the Area of responsibility “Home” while the FB campaign sat in Projects. So, fewer projects with greater attention on each.

• Defining every project narrowly so that it could be completed within 1-2 weeks. The FB campaign split into several mini projects – Create funnel audiences, create bottom funnel campaign, create mid funnel campaign, etc, each of which could be completed in 1-2 weeks. The short lead time brought immediacy and energy to the projects. And minimized initial planning time.

Start small and tweak to a system that works for you.