Zen to Done - Half Way Through

David Allen is a control freak. Sorry to say that, but the twists and turns of his system had me slacking. There was just too much. I don't have room for a tickler file in my backpack. I downloaded software for GTD like Thinking Rock to test it out. There are too many steps to start with at once. I have used a Moleskine since before I heard of GTD and kept lists there. But I never really went back to them.

Since learning GTD however, I have made the Moleskine my inbox and then use software as my system to keep all my lists and projects in. I open the software and am now faced with 20 separate projects with no priorities. David Allen doesn't really address priorities. He says to be familiar with the different perspectives you can look at your projects with, but in the end to trust your intuition. For some of us, this does not work. I see twenty projects and go, "I will go through them tomorrow."

I have been adding to the GTD system as I go along. Some things just aren't there. I have an hour and a half most days to get things done. No time to look through the whole list of projects. So I keep a seperate list: projects that I revisit daily. ZTD addresses this issue. Planning is a big part of ZTD.

And for those of you who hit the stumbling block of changing everything at once like I did, there is minimal ZTD. This is stripping everything down to the basics, one list. I am a one man business. There is no delegating. I might as well take most of the things from the "Someday Maybe" list and drop them in the trash or leave them to my kids after I am gone. I have been working on the theme to this site for over a month now.

And the book is short and to the point. To me, just about every book has fluff. Some books I buy and read only the table of contents. I am a list person. Let me read between the lines, because I don't have time to read a novel. Leo has written a short, tightly focused book. You could probably read the thing in one interrupted hour and come back with more ideas how to go from Zen to Done.