The Software Advice blog called A Million Little Wins has a post about how they’ve applied GTD at an organizational level.
Borrowing from the classic text on organization, Getting Things Done by David Allen, we updated the author’s advice to reflect the modern project management tools that we use and adapted his core principles to apply to our business. Here’s what we teach to all of our employees:
This is our adaptation of Allen’s “getting things done.” The principle is twofold:
- Get everything out of your head and documented in one place. Most people know that if you need to remember something, you should write it down. However, most people also write a lot of different things down in a lot of different places. If you really want to get and stay organized, you need to have one dedicated place where you document all the things you need to remember and the tasks you need to complete. Here, we use a web-based project management application called Basecamp to keep track of everything.
- Break up projects into manageable chunks. In the corporate world, you’re frequently given multiple projects that each have multiple steps. When you think about all the things you have to do to complete them at once, it can seem overwhelming. So we teach our employees to focus on the very next step that needs to be taken to complete each of their projects. This makes projects feel more manageable, and allows everyone to always be making progress. We keep track of these next steps in Basecamp, too.
You can read the full post here.
