Post written by Marlon Ribunal.
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There are various systems people are implementing in their daily workflow to invigorate productivity. The best workflow system, arguably, is the GTD System of David Allen. The GTD system is comprised of different steps wholly aiming at “relaxed, productive state”. The pillar of this system is its “Five Stages of Mastering Workflow”: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do. If you devotedly take these stages into practice you will surely attain a stress-free productive state. We will look into this in another post.

While the GTD is a proven system to turn around things, its entirety is rather overwhelming in the real world practice. The system requires consistent diligence and constant maintenance for the whole system to work. The system itself is solid and the only point of failure is the implementor. If you think that implementing or infusing GTD into your system can engulf your work rather than mitigate it, you can scale down it into two-step subsystem. This is what I call “Upcoming and Inwork Productivity System”.

First of all, you need two baskets like what are shown in the picture above. There are only two stages in this system; namely, Separate and Do. This system is easy to maintain and simple to implement. In the picture above, the basket in the left (grey folder) is the “Upcoming”, the one in the right (brown folder) is  the the “Inwork”. Obviously, this system starts to work at the post-collection stage.

Upcoming Basket

Your Upcoming Basket contains all the collected tasks lined up for your day-to-day consumption. If you are like most knowledge workers, this basket contains your any upcoming actionable tasks not due on the current deadline (it does not matter if your deadline is weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc). You do not keep your “Someday/Maybe List” or your other scheduled tasks (not part of the deadline)  in this basket . Some have their work forwarded to them few days or weeks prior to the deadline. It is ok to compile any work for future deadline. The main point is to separate the future-deadline-work from the current-deadline-work, which goes to the right basket.

Inwork Basket

As mentioned above, this basket contains everything due on the current deadline – prioritize accordingly. If there are date-sensitive work to be done, then those will be on top of your basket. To-do list is ok but this system is most effective when the only “list” is the compilation of the work due on the current deadline. The purpose of this is to eliminate complexity incurred by the system to focus on the real meat – the work needed to be done in time for the deadline.

Although this system may seem to only cater to the knowledge worker with predefined, deadline-centric work, this can easily be adapted in just any type of work. No one system can perfectly fit everybody. Do you have your own system that you are implementing to maximize your productivity? What do you think is the best possible system that will work for everybody?