If you've read the other entries about my app, you'll notice I like to post things on Monday. That's because I take Sunday to figure out a way to demonstrate the interface, the design, or something else about how the app works. In all that, I need to include the psychology of the application.

When I was throwing this app together before I shuttled off to war, I realized there were a zillion things we needed to get done before we left America. Wills, powers of attorney, and other activities that require people to be in a physical location would have to be accomplished before we were unable to put people where they needed to be. Inside my app, I had a decision to make on how to prioritize those events.

Ultimately, I came to two schools, almost without thinking about it. The first school - the one I chose - was that I would put them all in and give them the same priority. I'd go through the list, and see what I could accomplish, and what I really needed to get done, but I wouldn't forgo a small task just to get part of a big one. That's the problem with the other method.

I had seven days to figure out how I was going to keep track of important activities. We're talking secret stuff, people shooting at you, all the real-life serious stuff. While working on a way to track how important something was, I realized that, on paper, it would take more effort than could be expected by any mortal to come up with some system of 1-10 on some sort of rating scale. More time would be spent on figuring out the priority than using the app.

Does this mean I don't prioritize things? Of course not. Er, wait, that's confusing - I mean to say 'the app has all kinds of priorities in it,' but without using the simple language, it got confusing.

That's another reason not to internally organize the actions. As an example, look at these two tasks, and try to figure out which one is the more important:

Get milk
Get gasoline

Seemingly similar, but context is the clue. If I had to get milk for my wife to bake our child's birthday cake, that would obviously be more important. If my tank was on empty, I'd sure want to remember that I was out in case I made plans to get somebody from the airport. Priorities in John's GTD app are implicit, and contextual.

There's something else about the contextual basis of the app: if I don't get some task accomplished (again with the grammar), I leave it to do later. It will remain un-acted upon until such time as I get to it. As all the English instructors are cringing, I'm using language that is similar to the reverse nature of the task list. They are future events to be acted on later.

Or not. I could cancel a task without ever working on it. I could delete this entry with just a mouse-click, and I could delete a task with a X. The task doesn't care what priority it is, whether it was high or low, all that matters is that it exists to either be acted upon, or not. I could ignore the task, I could cancel it, or never annotate it.

This is the zen of gtd - getting things done. Get things done, or not done, there is no try. Okay, now I'm channeling Yoda, time to move on to the next task.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-11-07T14:42:27.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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