Roughly half way through day one of my GTD weekend and I have already fallen into a newbie trap, processing during the collection stage. It’s a very easy trap to fall into, especially when there is a large amount of stuff to go through. The trick to getting out of this trap, and to keeping the collection stage on track, is to be absolutely ruthless about the task in hand. Move everything into a collection area without distraction. This area can be a table, a corner of a room, or even a whole room. The idea is to get everything in one place so that the next stage, processing can be done without having to then worry about anything that may have been left behind.

And everything means everything. Tangible items are easy since you just pick them up and put them in the collection area. Digital items are a little more complicated, especially since moving things around within a hard drive could cause other things to break. For the time being I’ll just move the hard drives into the collecting area along with all the computers except for my Powerbook which I’ll keep to one side just in case. All projects that are in my head or things that I need to do are easy to deal with since they just get written on a piece of paper and put in the collecting area. I’ve used a moleskine for all the written down items since scraps of paper are just too easy to lose.

I’m not convinced that GTD is going to work for me. The shock of just how long it is going to take before I get back up to speed is starting to dawn on me. It was, perhaps, a little naive to think that I could get everything collected in a weekend. I’ll keep moving forward until everything is in one place since it wouldn’t be fair to give up on the GTD system so quickly. Thousands of GTD devotees can’t be wrong, can they?