Painless return from holidays with GTD
This week i started working after four great weeks of holidays in Provence, France. I had a lot of open projects and email-threads when I left, so coming back is always interesting.
It has been truly marvelous how easy it was to get back on track, and a lot of the credit goes to eProductivity - the Getting Things Done add-on for Lotus Notes.
When I came back from my long holiday I needed to do almost no work to get the overview of what was in progress and what needed to be followed up on. Because when I left everything had already been organized into Projects and Actions and especially the "Waiting for" Actions.
The Actions that I knew I needed to do when I came back had already been linked to Calendar entries.
An example:
When I came back I had an email in my inbox. It was from the helpdesk at a company that is developing a set of web services that we are integrating with. This is work in progress in both their and our end. The email asked me to please let them know if we had any still open issues with them; they were afraid that they had missed something because they are in the early stages of establishing their production environment and the helpdesk is also new.
It was so easy to answer that. I went to my "Waiting for" folder in my eP-enabled mail and looked for any lines that had to do with that project.
There were no open issues. Had there been any they would have been there as I always create "Waiting for" Actions when I open issues with external helpdesks.
Easy.
I have talked about eProductivity and the GTD way of working in these two reviews: