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Last night we got 2 1/2 feet of snow here in Western New York. Needless to say, schools are closed and the landscape of my carefully scheduled day has drastically changed. It’s not even a fun kind of sledding snow day — it’s only 3 degrees outside so I can’t sent the kids out to play.

What to do? First things first, get the kids distracted by a dvd long enough to get on the telephone and cancel all my appointments for today. That’s done in the nick of time. The television has started to bore the kids already and their attention is drifting towards me. “I’m boorreed. What can we do?”

Any chance of me doing work at home has disappeared. As soon as I open my laptop, my chatty 5-year-old daughter comes over to ask “What are you doing Mommy. Can I help you?” I’ve been through this before. There is no computer work getting done today, at least not while the kids are still awake.

Turn to my “with kids” context from my implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD).

My with kids GTD context consist of items that I CAN do when they’re around. They like to help me with these projects. I have the routine @next actions, like laundry and dinner, and I have someday/maybe items, which are projects that are worth doing, but not urgent.

Today’s productive yet time-killing with kids item was Tear Down the Kitchen Wallpaper. This project was something we were told to tackle in the next few weeks anyway, as we are getting our house ready to put on the market. Apparently new buyers hate wallpaper.

Kids love to destroy things, so this one fit right in. In fact, my daughter started her love of tearing down wallpaper in the crib, when she used to pick at the border in her room.

I had the tools, and we had the time today. It wasn’t how I had intended to spend my day, but the kids dove right in, and the three of us finished this task in 5 hours.

Before I implemented GTD, I had created a reminder system, similar to Flylady, to remind me about important recurring tasks that I tend to put off. I used Yahoo Calendar to schedule “appointments”, which Yahoo then emailed to my main account upon their occurrence time.

Flylady’s tips remind users about important daily household chores, like laundry, dinner, and quick cleaning (5 minute room rescue). Mine remind me about important recurring work duties, like answering my email, cleaning out my inbox, and invoicing.

I have daily, weekly, and monthly reminders for different tasks. They are timed to come to me at key moments of the day and key days of the week when I am most likely to actually do these tasks. Household chore tasks come to me when I am actually home. Work tasks come to me when I am in the office. Like Flylady, I limit myself to 15 minutes to complete these tasks. On super busy days, I limit myself to only 10 minutes per task.

Here is a partial list of some of the reminders. If anyone is interested in the complete plan, I’d be happy to detail it out with screen shots.

Daily Reminders:

• Laundry (sent every night)
• My “HotSpot” — my inbox (email is sent at about the time I get to the office)– I use David Allen’s GTD method to get through this in 15 minutes
• Respond to emails — again processing my email inbox using GTD
• Return phonecalls — I have to remind myself to do this otherwise this is the task I will put off, and the one that putting off will hurt me the most
• My five minute room rescue is actually just running through my whole house picking up for 15 minutes.
• Get something out of freezer for next night’s dinner
• Make coffee for the next day. We have a timer on our coffee that times it to finish brewing at the time we wake up — 6:00 am. If we forget to do it, I tend to lay around waiting for my husband to get up and make the coffee. And he does the same, waiting for me to get up and make the coffee. This leads to us oversleeping. Yet I can spring out of bed when I hear the beep that the coffee is done.

Weekly Reminders:

• Delegate Tasks (sent on Wednesday midmorning)
  Usually by Wednesday, I can figure out whether or not I’m actually going to be able to do something I promised a client I would do. If I’m just too busy, a crisis distracted me, or the task turns out to be beyond my capabilities, I find someone else to do it, usually an employee or a subcontractor. But if I don’t remind myself to do this, the tasks build up so much that I get stressed and lose sleep.

Monthly Reminders
Like Flylady, I use zones to concentrate on cleaning up important areas. She concentrates on rooms, like kitchen, living room, etc. I concentate on systems. In addition to household zones (mine are kids rooms, kitchen, family/ living room, playroom, and yard), every four weeks, one of these zones appears for every single workday for 1 week, reminding me to clean them up so they don’t become monsters.

• Zone: Filing
  • clean out files
  • file stuff in file box
  • make sure projects have info sheet (Each web development project gets a project info sheet stapled to the front with usernames, logins, registrar info, mysql info, etc.)
• Zone: Quickbooks
  • clean up
  • add in mileage
  • unbilled expenses
  • follow up on late invoices
• Zone: Company website
  I do so many websites for clients that my own company’s website is often neglected. Like the mechanic whose car is in bad shape. If I don’t remind myself to update my own site, it can become an embarrassment.
  • Search engine optimization chores
  • New content
  • Link checking
• Zone: SugarCRM
  Sugar is a CRM (customer relationship management) program that we use daily to track possible projects, leads, and assign tasks to different employees and subcontractors. If I don’t clean it up once in a while, it becomes a messy monster.
  • Close out old meetings
  • Follow up on opportunities
  • Enter completed tasks into Quickbooks for invoicing
  • Enter any new contacts or leads

Less Frequent Reminders

• Color your hair!
  If I don’t remind myself to do this every 6 weeks, then I forget until I catch a glimpse of myself under some harsh fluorescent lighting and am completely embarrassed.

Recently I started implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, as described in his best-selling book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

This system appealed to me for many reasons, but one was his use of labeling tasks with “contexts” — the location in which the task needs to be done (i.e. office, home, car). I had already been using a similar system, but it was “in my head”, exactly the wrong place it needed to be.

My contexts need to be more specific, as “office” and “home” didn’t categorize my tasks well enough to be useful. I already knew, basically, what I need to do at home — starting with the three Ds — Duds (laundry), Dinner, and Dishes.

I own a website development firm. I do have an office out of the home, but the nature of my work is so virtual that most of my work tasks could be done either from home or the office. I do use home and office contexts, but since I use my GTD system within Evernote, I can apply multiple contexts to a single task.

Maybe I’m being really anal here, but for the amount of time it takes to launch a program, get going, get focused, it’s usually easier for me to do similar tasks in one program before switching gears and moving on to another program. The days I feel most inefficient are the days I jump from one task to another.
For example, Quickbooks is kind of a memory hog and takes a bit of time to load up. I apply the Quickbooks context to all of my bills that need to be paid, invoicing, statement reconciliations, etc. When I fire up Quickbooks to do something time-urgent, I’ll just take 30 minutes to an hour afterwards to finish off all the rest of my Quickbook tasks. I’m in the right mindset anyway. It makes me feel great to knock off all of those little tasks, and I’ve saved time by not having to constantly wait for Quickbooks to load, find the invoice or reconciliation screens, etc.

Here is a breakdown of my GTD contexts:

• @home (housecleaning chores, organizing, kids’ projects, cooking, etc.)
• @car (errands to run, podcasts to listen to, notes to record)
• @laptop ( I have certain programs installed on here that aren’t on my tablet)
• @tablet (I have certain programs installed on my tablet pc that aren’t on my laptop)
• @Dreamweaver
• @Quicken
• @Quickbooks
• @webjobs (a web application that I am seriously modifying for a bunch of clients)
• @phone
• @offline (most of my work needs to be done online, so offline are things I can do on my tablet while waiting in doctor’s office, as a passenger in a car, etc.)
• @office (these are mostly just filing related tasks, big copy or faxing jobs, etc.)
• @with kids (I save any tasks that the kids can help with for this context — like baking — as they are constantly seeking my undivided attention.)
• @people (insert names here of husband, parents, kids, employees, partners) (things I need to discuss with or give to certain people, includes helping kids with school projects, etc.)

I may have too many contexts, and I definitely have too many “Next Actions”, but this is Month 1 of my implementation of GTD. I assume I will tweak it until it fits.

What contexts do you use?