Web Worker Daily has published an excellent post on GTD for Bloggers. Essentially GTD (Getting Things Done) is a method for you know… doing stuff. But more than that, it’s a set of guidelines for organizing your work and increasing productivity while reducing the amount of time you spend doing useless time-sucking stuff.
At least, that’s what I assume. I have to say, I’ve never been fond of self-help style guides, and so I’ve kind of avoided the whole GTD movement. But after reading WWD’s article today, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I’ve already doing a pretty good job at getting my own things done.
For example, I’ve been using one email inbox for the last year. I’ve got multiple email accounts set up, but almost all of them dump into my Gmail account, and I use filters and labels to help sort my email. Personal email and communication with readers and other bloggers, I respond to right away. Other emails like story tips I usually sift through just a few times a day.
Probably my most useful blogging tool is Google Reader. I sift through hundreds of feeds every day, including some custom feeds made of keyword Google, Technorati, and Digg RSS feeds. Early in my blogging career (you know, a year ago), I would start reading and pause every time I found an article to blog about. This kind of works, but I’ve found that it’s more efficient to quickly scan through all of my unread articles first, starring items that I might want to write about. That way, I only have a few dozen potential items to blog about instead of a few hundred. And if multiple news sites and blogs have written about a topic, I’ll have more context for the article I plan to write.
The only thing I’d really like to do to make my day more efficient is do a better job of setting time limits for myself. If I have non-blogging work to do, I need to do a better job of telling myself to blog until 1 and then switch over to another project. Or vice versa.
Anyway, if you’re looking for ways to improve your blogging efficiency, I definitely recommend checking out the Web Worker Daily post.
If you’d like a tool for managing your time and projects, you can use this application inspired by David Allen’s GTD:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage and prioritize your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.