GTD with Twitter
The book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen is a book outlining about how to (you’ll never guess) get things done quickly but not getting bogged down in a huge workload of tasks to do, things to review, and all of the like. Getting Things Done (commonly referred to as GTD) has become more popular in recent years in the geek culture.
So, what is GTD?
GTD is a workflow. Now, you might think that workflow is something for corporate executives who promote synergy and make decisions all day. While GTD can be used in a business-supporting, decision-making, synergy-promoting executive culture, it can also be used by geeks who want to maximize how much they can get done in a day. As a geek who has read GTD, I use GTD every day and it really helps to relieve the stress of a huge, never-ending task list. The idea is to get everything out of your head and put down somewhere and rely on your system instead of overloading your brain. Geeks can think of it as moving data in RAM onto the Hard Drive so you can put your brain into a low power state. Also GTD has contexts which allow you to focus on certain tasks in a certain method, which would be similar to having a work computer that you only use for work and a home computer that you only use at home. Many GTD systems have been devised that are both software and hardware based to help you adhere to the GTD workflow, but really your system can be your own.
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders lists reasons why GTD is so geek-friendly:
I think Getting Things Done appeals to geeks for a lot of reasons. Overgeneralizing for effect:
- geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
- geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
- geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
- geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lo-fi tools
- geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
- geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
- geeks like fixing things on their own terms
- geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
If you’re interested in GTD, you can find more about GTD at 43 Folders in “Getting Started With Getting Things Done”.
How To GTD With Twitter
Twitter creates a lot of distraction and creates a new context for some using the GTD workflow. One way to GTD with Twitter might be to use Twitter as your GTD system, but that can get annoying. You’ll fill everyone’s feed with things like:
JesseDearing Need to email boss about time off. #context-email #nextaction
But perhaps if you set up an account with protected updates (I.e. JesseDearingGTD) then you could go to town with updates and follow yourself on your “social” Twitter account. You could allow co-workers to view your feed so that they know what you’re doing (they might actually be interested). Using hash tags and deleting items as you complete them, it’s possible to make Twitter an inbox for your GTD. It would make delegation easy if you just RT’ed your task in a direct message. Finally, using Twitter would reinforce the simple single task with it’s 160 character limit. If you can’t fit it into 160 characters, maybe it should be classified as a project instead of a single task.
All that being said, I’m not willing to take the plunge with this method, but I would be interested to hear if anyone is doing this now or has plans to.
The point of a social media platform is to share information through meeting people not alienate yourself, so let’s look at the inverse: using GTD with Twitter.
What if you made checking Twitter a part of sorting your inbox? Every time you sort things, check Twitter using your favorite client (going to get into that) and note tweets to reply to and favorite tweets to read later.
In the whole GTD methodology, you could think of tweeting as a persistent next action always on your list when you iterate through the process and checking tweets as a persistent item always in your inbox.
How Twitter Fits Into My GTD workflow
I use Outlook 2007. I actually use it by choice since it syncs with my phone, but also because it lets me centralize my workflow into one application. My emails, important RSS notifications, calendar, and even Twitter all in one location. It has it’s faults, but all in all it a very powerful and useful application. Using OutTwit all tweets come into my one inbox. I then sort (mostly read and throw away) my Twitter stream, sorting some tweets into my reference folders to look at later or flag them as needing reply.
By constantly sorting through my inbox and cleaning it out including my Twitter stream, I keep my mind clear of junk and continue to get things done even with something as highly distracting as Twitter going in the background.