Gaining Control Through Clarifying: 1. Gaining Control Through Clarifying 2. How to Deal with Your Stuff 3. How to Deal with Stuff: Actionable Items As I have already mentioned, the ultimate goal of Clarifying (the second stage of the GTD methodology workflow) is to completely empty the inboxes. To achieve this, you have to process all the items in each inbox one by one until there are none left. Here, the word process means to clearly define what relationship each of the inbox items has with you and decide what you are going to do with them. More specifically, processing an element consists ..read more

Gaining Control Through Clarifying: 1. Gaining Control Through Clarifying 2. How to Deal with Your Stuff David Allen calls stuff anything that appears in your world, physically or psychologically, and needs to be defined. This word refers to things that are sufficiently vague or amorphous that you need to determine what they are and what you are going to do with them. In theory, everything you capture is stuff and, therefore, needs to be clarified. Although it’s possible that not 100% of the issues actually need to be clarified (for example, an event that you have to go to and does not requir ..read more

Having clarity is essential to be able to deal with the vicissitudes of life. But clarity is not something that just happens, you have to create it. Clarifying is the second stage of the GTD methodology to gain control of your life and achieve a positive relationship with your environment and the commitments you undertake. Specifically, clarifying allows you to put the focus on those things that have your attention and allows you to use your energy and time in the most appropriate way. Without this process, it would be impossible to choose what to do at any given moment. Under normal circumst ..read more

Gaining Control Through Capture: 1. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part I 2. Journaling, Another Way of Capturing 3. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part II 4. The Capture Habit 5. Capture Tools and Best Practices. Having established in previous articles the value of capturing everything that catches your attention out of your head and accepting the limitations of the mind to retain things, it is completely legitimate to surround yourself with the best tools and procedures that can facilitate the habit of capturing and making the most of this first principle of the GTD methodology. To ca ..read more

Today we have published two new PDF reports in the FacileThings web application: One allows you to print a whole project, with information about the project and all the lists that make it up, including subprojects, if they exist. Each list shows all the information related to each item of the project (description, expected time, expected energy, notes, attached files, checklist, etc.). The other allows you to print a collaborator’s complete agenda, with all the actions that must be reviewed in a meeting with that person. As in the project report, actions display all the information they cont ..read more

Gaining Control Through Capture: 1. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part I 2. Journaling, Another Way of Capturing 3. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part II 4. The Capture Habit Thoughts pop into our minds and leave as fast as they came in, and create a chain reaction of other thoughts that are equally temporary. Every human being experiences this flow of ideas, which are largely lost, because the capacity of the human working memory only lasts a few seconds and reaches a maximum of only four elements. Capturing is a simple but very powerful habit, as it allows us to give a concrete and ..read more

This week we have published a new version of the mobile app (3.6.5) that includes the Collaborators option and will allow you to have your collaborators’ agendas at hand in your meetings with them. We’ve also included other small improvements and fixed some bugs. Collaborators and Agendas Access to the Collaborators option is from the main menu. As in the web application, the collaborator list is displayed divided into two lists. The first of them contains those collaborators who have at least one active action at the moment and, therefore, it will be the one you want to consult most of the ..read more

Gaining Control Through Capture: 1. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part I 2. Journaling, Another Way of Capturing 3. Gaining Control Through Capture – Part II In recent articles we have talked about the importance of capturing out of our heads everything that calls our attention to achieve real control over the commitments that we acquire in life, both those that we generate and those that come from external sources. As practical tools to capture in a massive way everything that may have relevance in our personal and professional lives, we have described the mind sweep and the focus horizo ..read more

So we have seen how capturing is the first step you need to take to gain control of your life. It is a behavior that, carried out habitually, allows you to become aware of what things concern you and are important to you in all aspects of your life, and, on the practical side, to generate a list or inventory of your pending commitments, internal or external, large or small, personal or professional. An additional way to increase your awareness and improve your control could be journaling. Journaling is about keeping a kind of diary, a written dialogue with yourself, in which you write down yo ..read more

Capturing is the first phase for gaining control of your life and building a positive relationship with your environment and the commitments you make. The goal of capturing is to identify what is relevant to you at any given moment. It’s about being aware of what things are catching your attention and, therefore, it’s an exercise that can have very important benefits on a personal level. Things that are running smoothly at the moment, or running “as they should,” are not going to get your attention at all. If your car is running properly and doing its job, you probably won’t think about it. I ..read more