December 10, 2011

Making It All Work

  —A look at David Allen's new book "Making It All Work".

I make a point of reviewing one of the GTD books by David Allen on a regular basis. My two favourite books are the original Getting Things Done and the more recent Making It All Work. I usually learn something new whenever I carry out a review.

During my latest review, I was re-reading the chapter on Control and came across the idea of bookmarking. Bookmarking is basically a benefit of practising and developing the capture habit. The idea is to capture what you are working on by taking notes while you are engaged in the task.

Bookmarking has two major benefits. First, it allows you to track where you left off and thereby create a bookmark for the task if you move onto something else. This is handy if you have multiple projects on the go and need to return to wherever you left of on a task at some point in the future. It will certainly help save time when you try and pick up a task and you need to remember where you where. Second, it helps you deal with interruptions.

Dealing with interruptions may be the biggest benefit of bookmarking tasks as you can never be sure when you are going to be interrupted and if you have the habit of writing down where you are when you do get interrupted then you never have to worry about loosing time by redoing work or trying to remember exactly what you have completed.