Bill Westerman tried couple of time management systems, including Getting Things Done, but all of them didn’t suit his working style. He came up with a method called “getting sh-t done”. It involves with simple task management, prioritization, and structure of his moleskine notebook:
… If my list of to-do’s is relatively straightforward, then I just dive in and get going. But more often than not, it’s a bunch of conflicting priorities and I don’t know exactly where to start. That’s when I do a bit of prioritization.
At first, I tried all kinds of schemes. I put numbers next to the checkboxes. I drew arrows pointing at the most important items. But as I worked through the page, and checked off important items, the numbers and arrows distracted me as I worked down into the second layer of items.
So I came up with a new approach. I look through my list and quickly pick out the top three or four items to be done. For each one, I put a little dot right smack-dab in the middle of the checkbox. Then I work through my items, checking them off or filling them in with Xs or slashes – which conveniently cover up the (now useless) prioritization dots. Once they’re done, I dot out the next-lower set of priorities, and so on. I’ve found that setting priorities “on the fly” like this is much more effective in juggling the dynamics of my day…
Getting sh-t done (GSD) – [Bill Westerman]
