We have to assume that since the Getting Things Done methodologies are David’s invention that he is at a Second Degree Black Belt level with this stuff. In light of that, it’s always nice to know that ‘The Master’ experiences the same things we do:

I recently went through an event over the last few weeks, or the last few days really, where I thought I was nice and clear and re-focused and I realized that I really wasn’t. So I sat down and wrote for three hours in my journal. And boy did that release an aweful lot of stuff and let me move forward.

Although I’m not looking to overhaul my system, I’ve started playing with wiki’s some lately. I’m brainstorming about how I can best use them in my life. Since I’m a web developer, the concept of organizing stuff in a web is very attractive to me.

About 6 weeks ago, my boss started requiring a weekly update on all my current projects. (I’ll blog more about this when I give my commentary on the next track. ) So, I created a project list in Microsoft Word. Each project name is in bold. I give an update on each project, indented underneath it each week. Since I’m updating a page every week, I though it might be nice to be able to easily compare the list from any two weeks. The web based wiki that I’ve been experimenting with, Doku Wiki, does this automatically.

This weekend I set up security for a projects namespace so that no one else can easily view my project information. Then I started listing all my @home projects. @home comprises everything isn’t part of my full-time job: personal, side businesses, and church. As I started creating this list, I realized that the list on my Palm wasn’t as current and accurate as it really should have been. Once I got all the projects down, I started at the top of the list to start writing down some information about the project.

Suddenly, I realized why some of these things had been on my list for so long. I’m not really as clear and focused on them as I thought I was. Just like David did, I see that I need to spend a significant block of time writing in my wiki about all the open projects on my @home list. I may be able to grab 15 to 30 minutes here and there, but that would rush me. I think I need really spend several hours with this. I’m not sure when I can do this, so I’ve added a next action to “Find four hours to think.”