Posts Tagged ‘ThinkingRock’

One of the best tools for GTD is Thinking Rock, an application developed in Australia, and free for all to use. It utilizes all the principles in David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, and applies them with great efficiency and productivity.

A great place to start using this application for any user, especially new GTD fans is the Home Page. This page not only shows you data flow, but also shows you those basic principles I talked about in a simplified, but very well understandable manner.

If you click on the pic you can see the full size version, which breaks down GTD into three + one steps. The plus one step is the setup, which is only needed once really, or following setup is only needed once in a while. The first real GTD action is the collection of thoughts. This should be a fairly large task at first, but once completed, you will only spend a few minutes a day on this.

The next step is thought processing. This is where you take all your thoughts and enter them into the real system behind GTD. Basically you have three choices. You can store the information as reference, store it for a future date, or decide that this is something that requires an action and either create an action item or a project (which is composed of action items).

The last process is where you actually do things. This doesn’t mean you sit down and do everything on your plate of course. Again, you have three choices. Do the item in question while it’s still warm, delegate it so it burdens someone else, or you can schedule it (defer it in GTD speak), meaning you push it off to another time.

The starting page of Thinking Rock displays pretty well that GTD is based on choice. It is based on the fact that people don’t usually make efficient choices, at least not in the context of their tasks as a whole. It forces you to categorize and make choices on a task level, and them the app is able to create reports, showing you how your decisions affect the whole. Using Thinking Rock, and the GTD method in general will get you into effective decisions in no time, so don’t worry, but you need to stick to it!