RKNet Blog... Thing

Let me preface this with the following: I love my job. I love the company where I work. But, full disclosure, I also cannot stand where I work sometimes. It’s a battle of the heart and mind every single day, and for the most part I would not have it any other way. We’re a young bunch, and an energetic bunch, and a painfully disorganized bunch on top of it. Everybody’s got fantastic ideas and everybody’s got to share them right away. Add on top of that the propensity for errors to happen in a tech-based company and you’ve got a stewpot of frustrated, disorganized, and passionate people all aiming for the same goals but rarely realizing them in a truly rewarding way. In truth, we all get a lot accomplished. I work with some really amazing people. Unfortunately circumstances set it up so that we rarely feel accomplished and absolutely can’t track what’s been done versus what needs to be done.

With that in mind, and for my own health (quite literally), I have been intently researching how we can be more organized as individuals and subsequently as a team. It’s going to take a lot of work but I’m determined to help myself and my co-workers to be happier. Happier because we know what we have to do, we know what we’ve done, and we know that we can keep going without the anxiety of forgotten priorities and missed deadlines.

One of the most highly praised and best supported systems or philosophies of organization that I have come across thus far is David Allen’s GTD. I recently picked up a copy of Getting Things Done, written by David Allen to introduce people to his researched and tested methods of personal organization, and I’ve been doing voracious online reading of articles by people who have implemented this methodology already and have come up with favorite ways to do things. Slowly but surely I’m trying to integrate things into my thought processes and into my daily habits. I feel as though just keeping in mind the need to write things down, and to refer to a system or set place for these notes is the first step to getting into the habit of being organized. So far so good, too, I already feel a little bit better about my day-to-day, I’ve already kept a few situations under control which otherwise would have been forgotten or stressful. Still, I know I’ve only scratched the surface. GTD might not be the be-all-end-all of organization techniques, but I feel like it’s a good place to start for a number of reasons. The concepts and habits are simple. It works in a digital or paper environment. It seems like something that’s easy to instruct others in, which will be important if I’m going to help my co-workers get organized.

All-in-all I feel like this current path is really promising, and I look forward to sharing my insights with you all as I get better acquainted with this method of doing things.