Cleaning my desktop: the next step in GTD

I suffer from a messy desk. I need to clean it up.

I get lots of bright ideas. I think of things to do, and with my browser right there within reach it's easy to start a research project that might lead to something. Some of what I think of ends up in my ever-growing GTD list and some still stays stuck in my head.

GTD, or Getting Things Done is David Allen's system for organizing the "stuff" of life. It's a habit that I've made three tries at developing and have working in part.

David Allen's point is that you need to free up your memory RAM up by getting all those floating reminders of things to do out of your head. Then you organize them all in an actionable way in lists and folders (not too many). Then you process the stuff that's in the folders.

I've been doing the list thing pretty much since the start of the year. Now I've got this Word document called "GTD Combined" and a 4.5x3.5 notebook that fits nicely in my pocket along with one of those little pens that makes dotty marks in my jeans and drives B crazy. "But never mind," I say. "Jeans are supposed to be messy."

Whenever I have an idea or someone tells me something that I've got to do, out comes the notebook, and in goes an entry. On a regular basis, and getting more regular, the items I write down in the notebook get transferred to GTD combined. So I'm not losing ideas, too much, and not having brain cells quietly muttering "What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?" in the background.

Theory is that you then organize them, review them weekly, and then actually them. Or you put them on a list called "someday/maybe" so that they won't get lost.

And from there I actually do some of them, though less by accident than design. So things to do are not getting lost. They're just not getting done.

A lot of the items are things to write, and here my execution sucks. And here I'm going to take a stand.

Worse, I've discovered a secret cache of "stuff" that's not making it to my GTD list. It's stuff that ends up on my computer desktop, and lingers there for a while, radiating a small but measurable number of attention-attractons, small particles that pull attention out of my head leaving me with less to apply elsewhere.

So my immediate project is going to be to take every window that's currently open on my desktop and turn it into a GTD-processable item either by (preferably) turning it into a post, or (preferably--I was going to say less preferably) turning it into a someday/maybe item.

So this is the metapost. The post about how I'm going to post all these other posts.

It's 3:24 in the AM. A fine time to be doing this crap.

Oh well.