Stress-free productivity does exist

Evernote is a great tool, both to capture stuff and to save reference material, two very important issues in any GTD system.

The GTD capturing phase has normally got a reactive nature. This means that you will be doing some work, going for a walk, or in the cinema, and suddenly, you see something, someone tells you something, you remember something or an idea comes to your mind. So you capture it to avoid the stress of having it at the back of your mind all the time or making you feel worried you might forget it.

At any specific moment throughout the day, how do you decide what are you going to do next? It could be that you are still used to defining your priorities by assigning a number to each of your pending tasks so that later on you can choose the one with the highest number (even though that number was assigned 20 days ago, when the situation was completely different to the actual one). Working with these type of priorities, though usual, it’s a very poor self-management strategy.

The traditional way of approaching new projects in companies has always been performing a comprehensive planning of all stages which will form the project. This is done in such way since many times you have to develop a budget that someone else has to define as acceptable; otherwise there’s no project. It’s also important to be clear about all the resources that are going to be needed in order to reach the goal.

Stephen Covey says in his famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that we accomplish all that we do through delegation. We delegate either to time or to others. In the first case we are talking about efficiency, in the second one we are talking about effectiveness.