How can you use the GTD method to manage your time effectively?

I personally love this method. The GTD method indeed is an effective time management tool, central to which is the principle of capturing everything. This approach involves recording every task, idea, or project that comes to your mind, regardless of its significance. By doing so, you free your mind from the burden of remembering, allowing it to focus more effectively on the task at hand. For instance, if you have a sudden thought about a work presentation while cooking dinner, immediately jot it down. This ensures that the idea is safely stored and can be revisited later when you're in a better position to act on it. The act of capturing everything helps to clear mental clutter, leading to increased focus and productivity.

In my experience, the best way to capture everything is to use our smartphone to send ourselves an email as a memo. Today, we always have our smartphone with us, and this is the fastest way to avoid forgetting or missing anything important. During our scheduled time slot to review our email, we will find the email and process it, deciding whether to do it (if it requires less than 2 minutes), to postpone it to a specific date/time, or to simply categorize it in our GTD system.

In my experience, understanding whether a task will require less than 2 minutes is not so simple. Often, I underestimate the time required to complete the task. Only with 'training on the job' will we improve our capacity to evaluate correctly the time required for a task. We have to be honest with ourselves: if we write a task in our GTD system, we really want to do it; otherwise, the best option is to delete it.

In my opinion, this is the most important phase in the GTD methodology and also the most difficult. The most difficult due to the fact that we have to understand that this phase is really fundamental to have a time management system working correctly. When I started to implement GTD, for several months I wasn't regular with my weekly review, and only when I understood its importance did my GTD system become productive and updated. It's important to prepare a checklist for our weekly review and to update the checklist itself.

In my experience, it is really important to understand the level of our energy at the specific time of our working day. If it's late and we are really tired, and we have planned to have a call with a procurement office to negotiate an important deal, the best option is to postpone it to a time when we'll have the highest level of energy.

For me, finding the right digital tool to implement a fully working GTD methodology, fully integrated with my Outlook, is like searching for the Holy Grail. Several years ago, I was very happy with IQTELL, but this wonderful system closed. I'm still experimenting with different digital solutions to find the best one for me..

In my experience, the Engage phase of the GTD method should prompt the user a second zoomed-out view of all that is feeding into the context, time availability, energy availability, and priorities. Looking at these individually during the gathering stages is good, but overlaying all of them together will give you a better sense of the balance. Often times the discovery is the energy assumptions are over-allocated and will need to be readjusted.