For those who aren’t familiar, GTD, the Getting Things Done method, is a productivity method that breaks productivity into a series of five simple steps.
As someone relatively new to GTD, I find the method very intuitive. I feel as though I already take some of these steps in my natural process and Asana makes it very easy to do so. Step #3, Organize, is particularly easy with Asana. I also like step #3 very much: “If it will take less than two minutes, do it now.”
For those who don’t use GTD, what do you think of this method? Can you see yourself adopting it?
For those who do use GTD, I am eager to learn about your experience. I’ll start with the questions (below) posed in this GTD blog post and also ask, regarding step #4, do you do a weekly review, why or why not, and what does the review look like when you do it? Feel free to answer some or all and add any color you’d like. Thank you!
How did you hear about GTD?
How has your GTD system evolved since you started and what tools do you use now?
What’s your favorite thing about GTD?
What’s still challenging for you, if anything, around your GTD practice?
Also, @enyonam, you brought up a question involving GTD in your post, “How to deal with context?” That post inspired me to dig deeper into GTD, so thank you! Looking forward to learning your thoughts on this.
Hi Alexis, yes, I use Asana to manage my workflow via the GTD methodology. At least my version of it… The only real issue for me with Asana is I just can’t seem to get my ‘today’ view working properly in ‘my tasks’ list. I seem to have to manually drag tasks into this view…
I decided to use Asana predominately as my App for implementing GTD for myself… I reckon I do alright on steps 1,2 and 3. 4 and 5 take a bit of work, and probably don’t hold myself accountable enough for those parts.
My biggest challenge with Asana is dealing with all the meetings that I have and the fact that it is just me using Asana (apart from my Wife and Sons for home stuff).
@Woodsysnr and @jeremystewart You’ll be able to help educate me on the ways of GTD
It looks like we’ve covered the My Tasks question in a separate thread where you’ve been tagged, @jeremystewart, so take a look and be sure to reach out if you have follow up questions.
@Woodsysnr could you elaborate on the challenges you express here? Let’s see if we can come up with some solutions. First, what do you think makes Asana hard to manage with “all the meetings” you have? Second, in what environment are you using Asana and have you thought of inviting your teammates to join?
The challenge I have with the meetings is keeping track of them all and making sure I don’t lose track of any actions etc. If I don’t assign a task to me then the meeting project can get lost in the mix of all the other projects I have got going. Am using the Asana Agenda Template with some modifications and it is starting to work better. After watching the Asana & Springest Webnair last night, I have a few more ideas which I am going to try out today.
@Woodsysnr Ah, I see. On thing that might help you is having specific projects for recurring meetings. For instance, I have a 1:1 with my manager each week and we keep all notes and action items in our private 1:1 project. This has helped me keep things organized. It’s nice to know that you’re finding value in the Asana Agenda template. I’m assuming you’re referring to the template from the Guide here?
Also, I know @Kaitie will be delighted to know you found value in the webinar! Yes, please keep us posted on how things go.
@Woodsysnr Woah. I just encountered the exact issue you’re having with keeping track of meetings and meeting prep! Perfect timing.
I had a note that I wanted to remember for an upcoming meeting and I didn’t know where to put it. So, I just created a “meetings” project! Each parent task is for a different meeting, the descriptions in each task are things to remember / agenda / etc., and the tasks are action items. Voila!
@Alexis Yep that is exactly what I am looking at doing. Going to have a project which contains the outcome statements for all of Real Projects and My Meetings Projects.
Will change my templates so they automagically create the Task in this project so they don’t get lost.
I also make sure that I have a reoccurring task set for the day of the meeting so I make sure I review the meeting project prior to the meeting taking place.
Hi @Alexis =), Nice to hear my question prompted some thoughts about GTD and Asana! I am a 15-year GTDer and have used many different system throughout the years. Asana I must say is the first one that allows me to both do GTD fairly well and collaborate with my teams at the same time. Infact, it’s allowed me to pass on some GTD practices to my company :). This is amazing for a GTDer because we’re always trying to figure out how to get others to GTD!
My biggest challenge with Asana remains that I cannot easily create a context for each action, and filter or sort my list by my context. Yes, tags do exist but because this is a site that the entire company uses I do not want to take over the tags and include my personal contexts. Any ideas there?
@enyonam what a great feeling to know you’re able to help other people on your team with GTD.
I’ll look to the community for advice about how they use contexts in Asana. As someone new to GTD, I’m still learning too. Of course, my instinct was to recommend tags. Another idea could be to create sections that apply to each context and then do advanced searches by section…? Notice my question mark at the end of the sentence.
I came across this blog post about reframing the idea of context and how it fits into our hyper connected age. You might find it helpful.
@enyonam You could use Private Projects as the context… You add the task to the relevant context project… As an example I have a project called “Da Plane Boss” which I put taks that I want to look at on my weekly plane commute.
@Alexis , I did indeed notice the question mark. I tried that as well but the incoming churn of new tasks was still too high.
And definitely regarding working in a company where we all GTD. I found the secret to getting colleagues to do GTD … build your own company! lol.
Thanks for sharing that article as well - it’s one of the better ones I have read on the new way of thinking about contexts. Over the last 7 years my contexts have definitely morphed in this direction. The other thing I realized is I don’t have to have one context per action! For example, I can do @Office or @Calls if there’s a colleague I need to speak to. This makes it easier to ‘snack’ on my lists when I get a ‘extra’ time to get stuff done. No matter the context, I do see everything that can be worked on in that context.
Interesting @Jason_Woods! I actually have not thought about that version so many thanks. At the moment, it’s a lot of work to have to add it to each action but I do like the fact I can do it from the inbox. So I see I would be adding the context during my processing such that I only process once. That’s awesome. I am going to work on the “My Tasks” views because I clearly need to use the Projects view but that is now stuffed up with all the other projects. I’ll keep tweaking!
@enyonam Watch the Springest video. It gives a good suggestion about creating a project to manage all your projects so you can streamline your project view…
I’d love to see this thread (or new threads) get more attention from the community of Asana+GTD loyalists.
I dabbled in GTD years ago (many task managers ago as well) and I am just getting back into it now. It was getting to the point where I would stare at my tasks and projects and have no clue where to start. Just dusting off my GTD knowledge and doing some more reading and workflow tweaking has already shown benefits.
Now, my contribution:
I like the idea of private projects as contexts as mentioned above. Tags are universal and I think they will cause unnecessary clutter for my company (YMMV).
I plan to create saved searches that will act as the additional context lists so I can be smarter about it.
Say I have private projects of: “Calls to Make”, “Emails to Send” and “Office” contexts for example.
Then I can have a saved search called “At Office” that will include all three of those contexts (“Calls to Make”, “Emails to Send” and “Office”) since they can all occur at the office.
I can go into the individual private project contexts depending on my location, access to technology and desire to do work, or I can crack away at the “At Office” saved search that will incorporate all the tasks that I can do.
Does this sound like a step in the right direction? I’m sure some of you are already doing this or something similar.
Looking forward to more discussions on Asana and GTD.
Hi guys and thanks in advance. I looked and found some information about weekly review and GTD, but not my question. In my team we have boards for clients and some tasks get a lot of traffic and others don’t. In GTD part Lance I like to do a weekly review and touch everything. For many tasks, maybe even most, they are already in the right place but some things will get a status change.
If something is lagging and it’s okay then it might get bumped back into the queue.
If something is in the queue but is actually being worked on it might get moved into “in progress” and the like.
So my question is this… If I’m going through maybe 25 tasks on board how can I easily/quickly/maybe visually keep track of what’s been reviewed and what has not (in a given sitting).
The best way to come up with so far were to attach a tag to everything and then remove it as I go so that I can do a search for that tag and see what’s remaining but this is not very good. Suggestions?
Brand new Asana user, about a year using GTD. I haven’t trialed this extensively, but perhaps making a custom field for context might help?
Otherwise I might create subsections for my Today Upcoming and Later. Or as suggested in another comment, make separate private projects and add the tasks simultaneously to the project that fits the context and the “real” project if there is one that the task belongs too. And favorite those context projects so that they’re easy to find on mobile.
Of course, my instinct was to recommend tags. Another idea could be to create sections that apply to each context and then do advanced searches by section…? Notice my question mark at the end of the sentence. 