GTD for the Sec 4s

I am quite excited to introduce the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology to my pupils doing coursework yesterday. Excited about the possibilities in increasing speed, sense of urgency and overall effctiveness in managing a very long spanning project. I set up a context in which each pupil has to manage a multitude of tasks and got them thinking about how best to effectively collect all these 'things' they are supposed to do and to follow up with processing whether each of them has be done.

List of 'things' on pupils' minds when we did an exercise about how to manage our lives.

Before I go on, let me elaborate a little about what this GTD is all about. The context behind this is that people in general have got a lot of things to do (pupils all rigourously agree to this). Our mind takes up so much energy with all these information about what we are supposed to do that it cripples our creatively and our general productivity. The central goal to this approach is to clear the mind with everything it has to do, trusting this list of things to be collected and eventually cleared entirely on an external system where it can be intuitively acted on and reviewed on a regular basis.

My pupils understand the idea behind and is kind of hopeful that perhaps this may indeed bring about a better level of mindfulness in managing their busy lives.

Having a large following on the Internet, there are many online platforms created to tackle the demands of GTD. Examples such as 'Remember the Milk', 'Toodledo' are well evolved and free of charge. iPhone apps such as 'To Do' and 'Things' also received rave reviews about their usefulness. However, the challenge to me here is to create the most low-tech system possible which is easy to use, and highly mobile. Although the Internet platform and other mobile IT devices have proven their usefulness to so many people, pupils do not have instant access to these tools any time they want and irregular accessibility creates a serious problem to implementing this method successfully. That is because if pupils cannot have instant access to a place to deposit all these information about what they have to do, there will be many open loops. Things will be forgotten, the system compromises its reliability and failure is certain.

So what we had devised together as a team yesterday was to try using Post-its on personal calendars. Unlike the typical way of entry where lists are hand written and static. Post-its enables the lists to be flexible and fluid, the items can be sorted by due dates, priority, context. Procrastinated items get noted. I get to also see the 'Completed' list. The context of what can be done on computers implemented on something very simple, low-tech and still highly mobile.

Going to try this out by getting lots of Post-its.