5.31.10: Creative Professionals Get “Things” Done

The market is awash with books, instructional materials, and kits of every possible iteration on ideas that have ever been conceived regarding the matter of time management and personal productivity.

If you know where to look, and even if you’re not looking, you’ll be greeted with all sorts of tools that purport to help you reframe your mindset to get better organized, turn you into an action-oriented productivity machine, and in general, teach you how to make better use of the most precious and limited resource of all: time.

Year after year, this very specialized twin concern of time management and personal productivity has grown into an industry in itself. You may have not noticed, but judging by its increasing rate of growth, there must surely be a need for it—with so many people looking for viable solutions and alternatives to better manage time, increase productivity, and along the way, lead better and happier lives.

The most consistently popular ideas for managing one’s day-to-day affairs are rooted in the combined use of commonly available tools such as calendars and appointment books, to-do lists and checklists, notepads, journals and scratch paper. Many have managed to get through their days, some in fact cramming in more and more activities in a somewhat heroic attempt to accomplish as much as possible, thereby turning into workaholics with no time left over for other important things, such as tending to their personal lives. Others, on the other hand, end up getting frustrated because these tools don’t seem to be of help at all, leaving a daily trail of half-finished activities, missed tasks, and botched jobs mixed with a sense of despair from wasting time and not accomplishing anything of value and meaning.

Many fixes have been prescribed on how best to handle the hours, minutes and seconds of our days, and those who are into this sort of thing have endlessly discussed and debated its finer points, the way some would carry on about politics, religion, sports and sex, as if talking about it in minutia will wring out an extra iota of time.

More than  other types of individuals, artists and creative professionals, as well as freelancers in many fields, are particularly keen on the idea of making the most of their time, and are very interested in increasing their productivity. Since these types have to manage time and oversee the conduct of day-to-day affairs on their own– as opposed to those whose work hours are imposed or dictated to them– much of their success, and the preservation of their sanity, depends on the capability to self-organize the flow of their lives.

Of all the fixes, the most sensible and perhaps effective to have been devised comes from a now-recognized time management and productivity guru, David Allen. Allen developed a very bright idea that followers (yes, mostly artists, creative professionals and freelancers) now commonly refer to as GTD.

What is GTD? Simply, GTD is “getting things done.” At its most basic, it means you think up of something to do, and then you just do it.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Nothing is. So in less simple terms, GTD is a system, a process, and a methodology—a way of thinking, a way of handling day-to-day tasks and events, and a way of living life (notwithstanding religious beliefs and other similar or opposing views) that logically, almost scientifically instructs you on how to make sense out of the myriad vagaries of life and living, and how to capably conduct your affairs in a way that considers with extreme flexibility the planned and unplanned moments of your existence. In the end, the purpose of David Allen’s GTD is to “improve the quality of life by providing the world’s best information, education, and products (yes, that too!) that enhance personal and organizational productivity.”

In other words, David Allen’s GTD is about efficient time management, sensible work productivity, and increasing personal happiness, by putting all the discreet tools already available—such as calendars, to-do lists, writing pads—to sensible, organized and meaningful use. GTD is about knowing what these tools are about—what they will and will not do for you and why, learning how to use these tools the right way, organizing and enhancing them, with the aim of helping you keep track of everything that must be done in order to accomplish what you want to, and eventually lead you to what is meaningful in your life.
Now, I can’t blame you if you think this is all a lot of hard back-end work on top of your already burdensome front-end work. But give it a chance. All you actually need to do is reorder some of what you are already doing to manage your life, give up one or two things that isn’t working, and inject in their place a couple of techniques that work. It’s just a matter of reordering things a bit, fitting and adjusting how you already work things out and how you conduct your day-to-day affairs.

In the most pragmatic of terms, all you need to do is implement a personal GTD workflow system.

Sounds like too much trouble? Actually, it’s not. To really understand how this GTD thing works (the science and logic behind the method), and how it can help you, all you have to do for starters is read through David Allen’s perennially bestselling book, Getting Things Done. This book is the original “manual” that provides you with detailed overviews, examples and coaching advice to get the GTD system up and running. Spending a weekend on this book will help get you started. By the time you’re done with this book, you should have already put in place your own GTD system, ready to work for you.

In addition to the book Getting Things Done, David Allen also has two other books that you can refer to for more guidance and inspiration. These are Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work. These titles aim to reinforce what you may have learned from the first book. As supplemental material, these books are designed to help you become better at managing time and work. And, if you find yourself needing to learn more, you’ll find many more materials and tools to help you put into action a “smarter way to work and live” on David Allen’s website.

Most people will be able to quickly and easily adopt the GTD methodology on paper. Using paper-based tools such as calendars, to-do lists, and journals to manage one’s GTD workflow offers ease of use and flexibility. David Allen’s website offers these kinds of supplemental products. The good thing however is that you can also implement GTD with similar paper-based tools that are readily available or easily accessible to you. In fact, if you are so inclined, you can even design and create your own paper-based tools.

However, if you are a digital photographer, graphic designer, or writer, and you work mostly on your computer, you might find that it is more sensible or practical to adopt the GTD workflow using your existing digital tool. And if you are on the Mac computing platform, as many creative artists and professionals are nowadays, you’d be happy to know that there are several software applications that have been designed to help you implement a seamless GTD workflow.
One such software is called Things by Cultured Code. Things is one of those intelligently and meticulously crafted software that is elegantly designed for the Mac. Though it does not specifically mention GTD as the over-arching framework in how you can make the most out of the software, it is obviously clear that the principles of GTD are evident in how you will use it. Things allows you to incorporate and implement GTD even without knowing much or understanding the total scope of the GTD workflow.

The goal of Things is to set you up right away on the GTD path. In a very short time, you’ll be up and running, and using the software intuitively. It is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing workflow and accommodate your current computing habits. It is an amazingly focused and intuitive task manager.

Similar applications on the Mac either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Things instead offers the perfect balance between ease of use and powerful features. Like a Lego building block, you can just plug this into your existing workflow and work style so that your appointments, to-do list, and all the information you require to help get things done become better organized and more easily accessible.

One of David Allen’s GTD principles is known as “mind like water.” What this means is that everything you ever thought you wanted to do shouldn’t clutter your mind. You need to empty your mind of these often nagging thoughts and irritating reminders by writing them down on a single place so that you can instead use the most of your mind to actually focus and concentrate on doing what you need to do at certain times.

One of the things that Things is good at is that as soon as a nagging thought or an irritating reminder pops up in your head, you can instantly call up a dialog box with a universal combination of keystrokes, no matter where you are in your computer or whatever you’re doing, so you can empty your mind by writing it down, and then allowing you to promptly go back to whatever you happen to be working on. By making it easy for you to jot down a string of stray thoughts, reminders and inspirations into a single place instead of many different places like Post-It notes, scratch papers, and the back of envelopes that can get lost, everything you have thought up is in a single, organized place that’s easy to find. Later on, you can go through all the things you’ve noted down and think about them some more, organize or expand them, process them, and fit them into the puzzle of your workflow.

What’s nice about this is that, since all sorts of ideas come to you at the most unexpected of times, Things has a version for the iPhone and the iPad where you can jot down notes even when you’re not working on your computer. By using Things for iPhone and Things for iPad, everything you’re writing down is automatically synched so that when you come back to your computer, the information you’ve added is right there. This makes for much more efficient management and processing of information. You can spend more of your time on organizing the information and coming up with better strategy on deciding how to get things done than on looking for the scattered pieces of information to begin with.

This is just one of the many GTD-based principles that Things can do for you. This award-winning software has many more easy-to-use features that will help you effortlessly manage to-dos, notes, due dates, and projects. The idea is to allow you to work as effectively as possible, where the GTD methodology stays in the background as a framework in the accomplishment of your day-to-day work. This is one of those software gems that don’t get in the way of getting things done. In other words, it will manage your life.

As a modern-day creative professional or artist, you need all the help you can get making sure you are able to do what you’ve set out to do. Of course there’s the matter of inspiration that you still have to contend with, but from among the many options available for you to try, David Allen’s GTD methodology and Cultured Code’s Things are two of the tried-and-tested, award-winning tools that can actually help you do just that.

OH, ONE MORE THING: As a way of saying thank you to the readers of The Pictorialist blog, I’m giving away a free high-resolution, full-color image of the Statue of Liberty. You can download this professionally photographed 7. 57 MB JPEG image file now for free from my Flickr gallery. Just click here. You can do whatever you want to do with this photo, no restrictions and no strings attached. You can use this picture for personal, educational, commercial or any other purpose. This is the first of many more free images I’ll be giving away. To keep up to date, follow me on Facebook and on Twitter. Also, check out and bookmark my other blog here. Thanks!

Dominique James is a New York-based professional photographer and writer. You can send email to Dominique James or visit his fine art photography website at Zatista. For more information, please click here.]