We thought you would enjoy this story, passed along by Joseph McEntire.
I had a funny and rewarding GTD experience that I thought was worth sharing.
Today I found a piece of paper crumpled up inside of my vest pocket. A pocket I use only for my voice-recorder and not for hand written notes. The note was labeled as follows…
08-14-09
Patty
<her phone number>
BCV Phone
Exchange AccessI stared at that piece of paper during a freak lull in traffic, wondering what in Crom’s name it meant. Back at the office I called Patty and confessed “I dropped the ball on something but I can’t even recall what it was. Can you help me interpret this note?” It turns out that I had actually handled the issue some time ago. She was very happy that I called to make certain it had been handled, though. We both had a good laugh about it.
This experienced proved to me how absolutely essential it is that I train myself to use the correct collection buckets, otherwise information will not get into the GTD process flow to begin with. If capture is not working then all the rest is useless. Luckily I had trained myself well enough to put down the date, the person and the
phone number. Otherwise I would have been lost and had no where to turn.Cheers.
-JMC
If you have a GTD story, we’d love to hear from you. Send it along to [email protected].
One of our receptionists labels those calls as the “Who Am I and Why am I Calling You?” calls.
I’ve saved myself so much grief and stress by collecting well, since I took the GTD seminar. That one habit has made a big difference for me.
Some years ago I got all my appointments and reminders for events such as birthdays etc organised, and it was working really smoothly. So smoothly that I sent my sister-in-law two birthday cards – I’d actioned it so well in advance instead of my usual last-minute panic, and when the same reminder popped up a few days later, my workload being pretty intense at the time, I’d totally forgotten that I’d already sent one!
love this! I have a large stack of notes to myself that I have no idea what they’re for. It’s become part of my process — I need to improve drastically. Thanks for the reminder.