Full spectrum attention management

The comment at the bottom of this article sums it up: "This is THE best blog post about a GTD implementation I have read so far."

Katherine Doubek is an engineer, artist, and writer living in the American south and studies artificial intelligence at the University of Texas at Arlington. This post is a fantastic summary on personal project management and electronic organization for the Mac OS.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (book) allows busy people to manage their attention, energy, priorities, and tasks in a simple, straight-forward manner. It’s discussed and reviewed in a number of places online, but example setups aren’t presented frequently. This article outlines my personal GTD setup, and how you can adapt it to help track your time and attention investments.

GTD Workflow Diagram

I keep all information with me at all times which I may need to be able to reference on short notice, such as my portfolios, codebase, and medical history. This stays in a folder on my Mac’s desktop:

Local archive folder layout

If you’re interested, I’ve compiled a PDF of the full taxonomy of my archive folder for you to download and reference.

peterdurand

Peter Durand is an artist, educator & visual facilitator based in Houston, Texas.

He is the founder of Alphachimp LLC, a visual facilitation company that helps clients understand and communicate complex systems visually. He is a leader in graphic facilitation and a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.