As the name defines David Allen’s personal productivity system ‘Getting Things Done’ is intended for an individual to use to boost their own work effectiveness.
However it’s especially powerful when implemented across the enterprise, utilizing functions that smoothly synthesize tasks from the project and team to the individual, and back again.
This way work is flowing naturally from the organizational to the person level in the most efficient way, boosting both individual and enterprise productivity simultaneously.
Ie. the base unit of organizational productivity is individual productivity, and when the project level systems enable, rather than inhibit, personal effectiveness then the overall enterprise work rate is enhanced.
In the bad old days most corporate workers found project management systems overly bureaucratic, adding more work for them to do and thus perversely acting as a detriment to the success of the project they’re trying to manage. In contrast the right combination of 365 tools can better manage work as a function of enabling individuals to be more productive, cascading up that improvement into making the projects more effective.
Linking GTD to Planner, Teams and Outlook
For example in this video Microsoft demonstrate how to add Planner into Teams (also documented here) so that it’s ultra simple for project tasks to be created, indexed and then assigned to colleagues right from within the environment where you are communicating and collaborating. This assigned task can then be fed into that person’s GTD system, as a To Do task.
In this tutorial Jonathan Edwards expands on this in much more detail, providing a comprehensive explanation and demonstration of how tasks can be synchronized across Planner, Teams and To Do.
Specifically from 2m:55s to 3m:15s he shows how a task created in Planner is automatically routed to him through the ‘Assigned to Me’ function. Learn more about Assigned to Me in this one minute Microsoft video.
Once the task has been added in to his To Do list he can then manage as he would any other, utilizing the types of GTD activities carried out in To Do described in the previous articles, thus demonstrating how team level project work can flow smoothly and immediately into the individual GTD level and system.
Jonathan’s whole video covers:
00:00 Introduction
01:32 Main 365 Productivity Principle
02:21 Microsoft To-Do Tasks
02:44 Microsoft Planner Integration
04:20 Outlook Integration
06:32 Microsoft Teams Integration
