Source: TroyMason

You heard about this new personal productivity system that everyone’s talking about called Getting It Done. You decided to adopt this system and you found that it’s indeed effective in taming the deluge of tasks and information. You took David Allen’s system, tweaked it to suit your style, and you’re functioning like a well-oiled machine.

Sooner or later, it’ll hit you. You hit a snag, a roadblock, something that disrupts your workflow. The machine is not working anymore, and you fall back to your old habits. Things are piling up and you realize that you are now on an inefficiency bender. What can you do to get back on the GTD track?

First, let me say that this article is primarily for those who are using Getting Things Done, but can be applied to most sorts of a personal productivity system. There will be a couple of GTD concepts mentioned, but most of what’s written here can be generalized (on a side note, if you are a beginner to GTD, I have some tips for you as well as warnings for you also).

Why You Can’t Just “Start Over”
It feels like deja vu, the pile of papers on your desk, the list of tasks that has gone undone, and the inbox that has unread email for several days. You already tackled this problem with GTD before, so why can’t you simply start over? Because you lost integrity by allowing your old habits to come back, that’s why.

Part of the rules of the GTD system was that when you put something on your calendar, you do your level best to follow through with the commitment. Someone who doesn’t know the system has an excuse that they didn’t know any better, but you knew the system and you should know better. Just like credit cards - if you are delinquent enough with your credit, you will have a bad credit score. You lost your credibility. If you simply try to start over again, it will be even more likely you will get off track because mentally you already give yourself allowance to slide. I don’t want to be harsh here, I’m only trying to give you tough love!

The following are five steps for properly getting back to a functioning GTD system again.

1. Diagnose the cause: This step is the most important for getting back on track. It was Einstein that said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” At this point, you have to assess your situation and figure out what caused you to get off track. Was it external - in other words, an uncontrollable event that disrupted your schedule for a long period of time? Or, was it your GTD system - is there a weak link that will likely fail again over some period of time? Identify that weak link and address it before moving on.
2. Assess the damage: Here is where you assess how to fix your situation. How many missed actions and appointments do you have? How many can drop, and how many still needs to get done? Collect all the stuff that has piled up thus far. From there, figure out how long it will take to do those actions that still need to get done. Get a specific number: is it 3 days? 3 weeks? Give yourself some cushion, because you’d only be cheating yourself. The important thing here isn’t to get a low number, but just to simply get a number because it will be used in the next steps.
3. Re-prioritize: Because you already implemented GTD, you already have a calendar with scheduled actions. It does not make sense to do a low priority action when there is a higher one that still needs to get done. After doing Step 2, go forward on your calendar for the amount of time you have given yourself and re-prioritize all the scheduled actions.
4. Reschedule: This step was intentionally not combined with the previous re-prioritization step. Having additional constraints will only make it more difficult to get back on track, because you’ll be spending a lot of effort trying to not upset the already existing schedule. The number one priority is to get yourself back to your GTD flow, and the quickest way is by re-prioritizing first and then rescheduling as a separate step.
5. Monitor progress closely: In GTD, each action you put on the calendar is a promise that you’re supposed to keep. Because you got off-track you have broken promises, but now you’re given a second chance. However, give yourself only a short leash. Consider it probation. You already lost some credibility, and now you’re trying to gain some back. This step may be as important as Step 1.

Getting off the GTD track is not the end of the world, but it is a system that relies on proper maintenance to be effective. You don’t have to get back to using GTD, but if you want the kind of control over the stuff you need to get done like before, maintain the system properly and it will do the same for you.