What's the next action

It's time to move!

29 04 05 - 23:33 - Bookmark this post

Noooo….not with this weblog! But in real life! Yep, that’s the reason things have been really quiet (again) on these pages. I have been swamped with things to do for our move to a new city. If you are from The Netherlands or familiar with it, I now live in the town called Breda. It’s near the south. Actually there is a Wikipedia-entry about it. As of this monday, me and my girlfriend will move into our new house in Utrecht, which is in the center of The Netherlands. It’s actually about 60 kilometres (about 37 miles) apart from each other, but nonetheless it’s a big step for both of us. We have been living together for 6 years, but now we bought a house instead of renting one. So we need to take care of a lot of things. That’s were some of the GTD principles come in handy…

I already told you I didn’t really pay any attention in implementing the GTD principles at home, since I want my girlfriend to take part in it and help each other make our chaotic life a little less chaotic. But without a full-blown implementation, I still managed to get a few things done in a way that normally would cost me tons of sticky pads, reminders everywhere in the house, in and on my PC and somewhere on our chalkboard in the toilet.

But we both bought the little Moleskines and use them as our Inboxes for the move. Everything we think of, brainstorm about, see in a store, in a magazine or on TV, goes in our respective ‘skines. Three times a week we simply look over the pages, compare them, talk about it and make decisions. Sometimes we need to check it more often, most of the times not.
When we made the decisions what to do with the items (who calls the guy for the floor, where do we put the table, what about our lighting?) we jot down what we should do the following days and well…just do them. For instance, since my girlfriend is more at home, she’s been in charge of the whole “moving”-process. Everything about that process is not in different folders in different rooms, but we keep it all in one reference-folder. Same with bills and “change-of-adress”-lists, keep’em all in one folder and update once a week.
So yeah, I know, it’s not all rocketscience. But let’s face it, David Allen’s principles are not meant to be rocketscience. They are simple and effective reminders on how it is possible to organize your life. The broad view is there (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do), how you fill it is up to your personal situation.

So, be aware that this might be one of the last posts here the coming weeks. But hey, it’s not that the frequency has been sky high right? Wish me luck with painting, moving, scrubbing, everything in our new house. Hope to be back in 10 days or so! You can check some photos of out new house on this Flickr-page, where you can also find some of the pictures we make for furniture to decide on later