GTD Habits

A friend of mine posted an article recently about the dangers of blaming technology for a failure in your productivity system.  In this case, the system is Getting Things Done (GTD).  What's more important is establishing the habits of GTD and using technology to supplement those habits.  This struck home for me a bit because I found myself recently fiddling with a couple different technology solutions for GTD and not being fully satisified with any of them.  I kept telling myself that if I could just find that right tool, everything would be honky-dory.  Well, that just isn't true. 

After reading about how to integrate GTD with Outlook and OneNote, I have optimized my technology solution as much as I care to for now and want to focus on improving my habits.  So here are the habits I'm currently focusing on and specific practices I've identified to help me with them.

Daily habits

• Adding to my inbox. Practice - I need to keep OneNote open all the time to help me improve my useage of it. I may also need to start creating items in my OneNote inbox from emails. I'm still struggling with capturing everything here and need to focus more on developing habits for centrally grabbing all thoughts.
• Clearing my inbox. Practice - My email inbox I will clear 2-3 times a day. My OneNote inbox will be cleared once a day.

Weekly habits - Perform weekly review every Monday morning

• Ensure my week's goals move me toward my month and year goals.  Practice - created pages in OneNote for monthly and yearly goals.  Created subpages under month goals for each new week.
• Ensure that I am making progress on each project.  Practice - where I am not waiting for somebody, verify that I have a next action item in the weekly goals

I am adding reminders in Outlook to keep reviewing my progress with these habits.

There are also some habits that I know I will eventually need to improve, but they are lower priority to the ones above.  Once the above habits are working and ingrained in my system, I will work on the following issues:

• How often should I review "Someday/Maybe" items?
• How can I use eletronic references most effectively?
• How can I best plan projects within this framework?

With a bit of applied focus, I am confident I can improve these habits and my overall productivity.