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I was very early on the GTD hype. For those of you oblivious to what GTD means, it comes from Getting Things Done, a methodology proposed by David Allen, which was quite popular in the first decade of this century. I'm being mean here, it's still popular, only I'm not so hyped about it. So, like I said, I was pretty pumped up about the benefits one could get from becoming a productivity ninja. I was head over heels into it: devouring webpages dedicated to the topic, posting in groups, testing apps, the whole thing.

It will take an entire sequence of posts to go through all the ins and outs of GTD - which, let's be honest, is still a beautiful piece of work - and I may even do that if there will be enough interest about that, but I'm not gonna to it today.

Instead, I thought to give you a little bit of perspective of my own productivity framework, called Assess, Decide, Do - Natural Productivity. Yes, I'm blowing my own horn here and I do this because I not only believe this framework still offers a lot of value, but I'm also a walking proof that it does. I've been using this for over 6 years now and I feel great.

Productivity Freak versus Flow

The main danger of productivity is that, unproperly done, it will turn you into a robot. The more you do, the better you want to become at it. From a certain point, productivity defeats its own purpose: you get to consume more energy than the output you create. I learned this the hard way. I reached a few times some nasty burnout stages.

From that space, of being burnout a few times, I decided to carve a new path. One that will allow me to be effective, productive, to get things done, but all of that while still having a life. While still keeping some balance between work, personal life, relationships and so on. So this framework wasn't born out the blue, but following a few crises.

The 3 Main Realms: Assess, Decide, Do

After pondering a lot, I realized that the biggest drawback of GTD is the focus on the "Do". And I realized that we don't always live in "Do". We are also daydreaming, getting feedback, planning, exchanging information, learning. All of these are not in the "Do" realm.

So I came with this idea that we are living in 3 main realms:

• Assess - it's the realm in which we are, as the word says, assessing. We're taking feedback, we're evaluating, we're pondering, we're imagining, we're asking ourselves "what if?". It's a cumulative realm. We put together pieces of information, emotions, memories, until we come up with a specific object. When we can’t add to it anymore, when it looks the same to us regardless of my standpoint, then, and only then, it’s time to make a decision. Then, and only then, we can move to the decision realm.

• Decide - as opposed to assessing, decision is a one point structure. Once you can’t assess anything anymore, you decide what to do about it. You really have only 2 options:
  do it
  don’t do it
  If you decide to do it, you’ll move to the Doing realm. If you decide not to do it, you’ll discard the task completely. The nice thing about this dual attitude is that you won’t have to postpone it. You simply decide you ain’t gonna do it, period. You have the freedom to discard it completely or to move it back to the Assessment realm. If you can’t do it now, maybe the future will bring some more info and you’ll be in a better position to make a decision. But you made a decision about it, you can move on.

• Do - Here is the place for methodologies like GTD. Here is the place in which I make lists and do tasks and actually check them as done. If there’s something on my Do list, I know I already passed through 2 filters: Assess and Decide, so I don’t have anything left to do about that task. Except doing it, of course. The Do realm can be repetitive and can last days or months. It’s not a cumulative structure, although it can produce visible results, and it’s not a one point structure. It’s more like a flow.

iADD - Putting It All Together In An App

Ok, the world sounds great in theory, it's the practice that gives us headaches, right? So, after getting over the philosophical stage, I decided (see, I was in Decide) to implement the framework in a real app. It took me exactly 30 days to write the app from scratch, back in 2010.

The app is available for both iPhone and iPad and, of course, it's a dual app, meaning you pay once and you can have it on both devices. It syncs with iCloud, so whatever you write on one device will be automagically pushed to all other devices (provided you are signed in iCloud with the same account on both devices).

Each realm has a specific icon: Assess has "+", which means: "from this place you overload your system with information", Decide has "?", which means: "make a decision" and Do has: "-", which means: "discard this from your system".

There is also a color code of the realms, copying the traffic lights meanings.

Assess is red, which means: "stop and empty your mind"

Decide is orange, which means: "prepare for action"

Do is green, which means: "just go for it".

You can get iAdd form AppStore from here, for $0.99:

iAdd On AppStore

But if you want to just test it, you can also get the free edition, iAdd Lite, which has all the feature of the paid version, except form the fact that it only saves the last 5 items in the database. So if your to do list is smaller than 5 items every day, just go for it:

iAdd Lite On AppStore

Oh, one more thing: the app is fully localized for Romanian and, yes, Chinese :)

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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