How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work More Fun.
Me and Ali are quite afficiandos of the life-changing GTD methodology. What’s GTD? GTD, stands for Getting Things Done. It’s a system of best practices, founded by David Allen that anyone can adopt which enable one to:
- have laser sharp focus
- hence getting much more work done,
- in a stress free manner,
- thereby actually making making work much more fun.
I’ve personally experienced days when my productivity sores to 10 times the levels to that of days when I’m not practicing GTD. And this figure of 10 times greater productivity is by actual Empirical measurement (comparing the tasks I got done post-GTD with those of pre-GTD) and not just random figure. Therefore we were really keen to imbibe the GTD methodology into Vakil Housing culture as much as possible. Well it’s been two years running that we’ve been implementing GTD within our organisation with varying results. Some took the GTD system like fish to water. They caught the concept immediately and instantly began emptying their heads to various capture devices to experience the “mind like water”. Others found it sufficient to implement just a couple of key concepts and rules.
It has been quite a journey for us to reach the level of GTD Implementation that we have at Vakil Housing. At our peak group implementation, we had almost all senior managers:
- Clear the email inbox to “zero” every 2nd or 3rd day.
- Carry a paper based GTD Notebook with them everywhere
- Have their personal “only-swivel-distance-away” Reference Filing system.
- Have a clear understanding of Projects and Next Actions,
- The always have a current list of Projects with them handy.
- Use the Natural Planning Model to do Project Planning
Our implementation is still continuing and ongoing. However the steps we have taken over a period of two years to the above stage have broadly been by doing the following:
- Conducting Weekly GTD Training Meetings for Department Heads
- Finding a working paper based GTD system and handing that out to everybody
- Conducting one-to-one GTD Training at the desks of various individuals
- Pairing people up as GTD Buddies to help each other do their daily process
- Making a personalised pocket notepad, to encourage all to capture commitments
- Putting up various GTD posters up in our conference room
- Personalised Jott system within the office to encourage capturing when one is not able to write.
- Finally being trained and creating trainers within the organisation to make this an on-going process.
We’ve learnt a lot over the last few years. And we were thoroughly pleased when Me and Ali were requested to write about how we went about our implementing GTD at the official GTD Blog, GTD Times. We’ve named the series, “Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing”. We’ve completed three posts on the steps we’ve taken to roll out GTD across Vakil Housing, which are:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.
Second Post: A Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization to Collect & Have a Mind Like Water.
Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions.
We’ll have many more posts on this series, so stay tuned on GTD Times to catch them.
To learn more on how you personally can begin implementing GTD, click here to read our post on GTD for Beginners.
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