Getting Things Done - On Deferring
One of my biggest gripes with Getting Things Done since I started trying to heed its sage wisdom in 2004 was once you make these lists, they are your new psychic hell. I have been experiencing that for a while now. Basically, you need to go through your inbox one item at a time and decide to do it if it takes less than 2 minutes, defer it, or delegate it. Delegation doesn’t really happen that often for personal lists, so you have a huge pile of “deferred” - a bunch of stuff that isn’t in your inbox because you’ve already looked at it, but you haven’t done it because it takes more than 2 minutes.
What the hell do you do with that stuff?
I had resisted the idea of 43 folders (also the name of a GTD-focused website by Merlin Mann) because it seemed just too anal and far out there. For those who haven’t read the book, you make 31 folders for days, and 12 folders for months, hence 43 folders. You put stuff to do that day in the day folder, and things for the future months in the months. This is not a new idea, but it starts to remind me of the pencil-aligning boss in The Incredibles. It is a waste of time, if you can work without it. I don’t seem to be able to dent my pile without sorting it somehow, so I’m going to give this a try. The labeller and the file cabinet actually worked out quite well, so I’ve got high expectations here. Do you split up your to do list like this, or can you just get it done in one pass?