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(Special Video post!) This week’s post is about using GTD techniques in engineering research. The more I learned about GTD, the more amazed I became with how much sense it made. A the same time I was very surprised that while if you ask any manager, marketing or sales person in corporate America, if they have heard of GTD, the answer would most likely be “yes”. However, I am yet to meet an engineer or scientist using the GTD method to organize his or her research. That’s the focus of todays discussion.

This is the GTD definition as described on Davis Allan’s website:

“The subtle effectiveness of GTD lies in its radically common-sense notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment. GTD embodies an easy, step-by-step and highly efficient method for achieving this relaxed, productive state.”

David claims that “Implementing GTD alleviates the feeling of overwhelm, instills confidence, and releases a flood of creative energy.” After implementing the GTD practices I can attest to that statement.

How great would it be if we all could release if not “floods” but at least a small stream of creative energy when we are in the middle of a research project. How useful would it be to be a bit more confident and less overwhelmed when trying to implement, say, a brand new system of experiments at a company or research organization.

Personally, I think that would be pretty great and very helpful to all of the engineers that I know. After I started using GTD in my workflow, I started to think about how I can help my customers implement some of the same techniques during our consulting projects. I came up with some pretty interesting ideas that you might be interested in as well.

Here is the deal. Think about your latest large research project that you might have been involved in. Maybe it was to put together a set of experiments to achieve a lower level of NOx from an engine. Maybe you had to set up an entire laboratory for testing a certain CVD process, or similar projects of that nature.

Now remember how overwhelmed and stressed out you were about the whole process. Remember those weekends in the lab? How about all the nights that you did not get home until you kids were already asleep? Now I truly believe that if you have implemented GTD process into your engineering project, from start to finish, you would have eliminated most of that stress and came up with a more creative and better solution at the end.

So how do we implement the Getting Things Done methodology into our engineering workflow?

For our purposes, GTD can be broken down into 5 steps:

1) Collect information that has accumulated in your brain

2) Figure out if its actionable

3) If it’s not, have a system for storing it

4) If it is actionable, figure out what is the next specific action (either do it, defer it or delegate it)

5) Weekly review

Simply speaking, this process applied to pretty much any area of your life, cleans out your thoughts and empties out your brain and leaves more room in your head for creative processes. Applied to engineering research and development work – you basically spend a lot less time stressing out about how to get the delta nu to converge to .001% and a lot more time thinking creatively about how make a cleaner fuel, a better engine, or a smaller microchip.

This process allows you to start thinking on a much higher level. It forces you to constantly re-evaluate your end goals instead of spending all of your time spinning your wheels and stressing out about small, much less important details. David Allan has books and seminars that describe all of the details of the GTD process. But lets see how it would apply to a an engineers.

Let’s say you have a large project on your plate – you need to put together a set of experiments to determine how you can lower soot production in an engine, which is one of your company’s existing products. Let’s try implementing GTD from the very beginning of that project.

1) Collect information – sit down and brainstorm. Write down all your thoughts associated with putting those experiments together. And I mean all of you thoughts. Your list might include:

a. Buy experimental hardware

b. Purchase a software license

c. Schedule weekly lab meetings

d. Get a new phone line put in

e. Order 10 litters of CO2

f. Hire new lab technician

g. Tell your annoying co-worker that you have been promoted to lab manager.

The idea is to dump put all of the thoughts you might have related to that project out on to a paper or a word document.

2) Action/no action - After you get your ideas out, go through them step-by-step and decide whether or not each of those thoughts is an idea that you need to take action on. Buy hardware – you obviously need to take action on that. But you might decide that rubbing your promotion into your co-worker’s face, is something you don’t want to waste your time on and you can move to step 3) and trash that idea.

That thought of your annoying co-worker, used to occupy your mind subconsciously. But now you consciously decided to get rid of that thought. You just emptied a little bit more of your brain to allow room for more creative thoughts and less stress. Its amazing how that works. I really encourage you to try it.

3) Store/trash non-actionable items - Most of your thoughts related to putting together a new experimental setup, will probably be actionable. Buying hardware and software, finding vendors, putting in new phone line, developing and actual plan for your experiment, etc. Which moved you to step 4 of GTD process…

4) If the item on your list is actionable, decide whether what is the next action step and whether to do it now, defer till later or delegate it. So in case of buying hardware, your next step might be –make a list of all the parts you might need to purchase. Or conduct Internet research to check out vendors and compare prices. In case of needing a new phone line put in you might decide to delegate it to your secretary. In which case your next action will be “send e-mail to secretary”.

5) Weekly Review – this is the most important step in the whole process and it is also the step that most of the engineers that I have ever met, seem to be missing out on. That is the weekly review step. David Allen advocated doing this on a weekly base, but depending on your schedule, you can make this into a daily or bi-weekly routine.

During your weekly review, you look at the big picture and ask yourself:

- ‘What is the overall goal that I am trying to accomplish?”

Why are you setting up this experiment to begin with? Is it to create a new innovative product for your company? Is it to better an existing product? Is it to help bring in more government funding? Once you focus on the main goals, review all of your action steps and ask yourself: “Do my actions bring me closer to my overall goals?

And this is a tricky step, because it is so easy to get stuck on small but stubborn details! How many of you have ever has a thought like this:

- “If I could just solve this asymptotic equation, everything will be fine. I just need to solve this equation.”

OR

- “I really just need to get the flame speed down a few cm/sec. That’s my goal that is what I need to focus on.” And before you know it, you have spent six months writing your own computer code that would properly calculate flame speed just to find out in the end, that it did not bring you any closer to your company’s goal of designing a better engine!

This happens all the time. Engineers waste countless hours and days working on something unimportant, because they think is their overall goal. When all they needed was just an hour or two each week to conduct a weekly review and to think about their work on a larger scale.

If I had a dollar every time I asked an engineer what is the overall, end goal of his group’s research and he told me something along the lines of getting a lower value of delta or getting lower concentrations of NO molecules, I would be able to buy myself a nice sports car.

In the engineering process it is so easy to loose track of real goals of your work – like creating better more innovative products or to increase your company bottom line. We get lost in details and forget where we going. This creates stress and feeling of not getting anything done, even if you are constantly working. The constant cycle of these various thoughts swarming in your sub-consciousness allows for less and less room for creative thought which is so important in problem solving.

So I have a proposition for you. Try this for just one week and let me know how it works out, in the comments below. Pick a large or small project that you are currently working on. Follow the 4 GTD steps:

1) Ask your self “Why am I doing this project? What is my goal?” Hint the goal should not be “decrease the value of delta by 2%”. Ask “What is my overall goal?” Is it to help your company create a better product? Is it to get a raise? Keep your job? Or all of the above?

2) Purge your brain of any thoughts related to that project, by writing them down.

3) Decide whether to take action or not to take action on each step.

4) For every actionable item write down a specific next action to take (and take that action)

5) At the end of the week, look over what you have done and ask yourself: “Did I get closer to accomplishing my overall goal? Did the actions that I implemented get me closer to that goal or did they send me on a tangent that might not be important in the overall scheme of things?”

Do this for one week and see how you feel. Hopefully, less stressed, less overwhelmed, more empowered and possibly more creative. Don’t take my word for it. Test it out and see for yourself.

Best of luck!

Tags: David Allen, Getting Things done, GTD, GTD for Engineers. Productivity, Work Skills

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Computer Modeling Best Practices, GTD, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.