DNAphil

I have been a GM for over 20 years. I started the same way many GMs did: picked by my friends to run the game for them. I don’t know if I was a good GM or bad GM, but my friends always said nice things about the games I ran, and I know that we had a lot of fun. Over the years though, my skill as a GM has certainly improved as I have learned from other GMs, the Internet, and other sources.

So I got to thinking, what if I could pass information to my past self, about how to GM better, just what would I tell myself….

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It is one of the great questions in GTD: What should I be doing right now? You now have control of your inputs, the ability to process your inputs to determine what do next, and expert filing skills and yet none of that actually tells you what item from your To Do list you should actually be working on at any given time. The answer to that great question requires some understanding of who you are at work and at home. Don’t worry, in this week’s article I am going to help you develop a personal compass to steer you through the maze of your To Do list.

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Call them Mooks, or Minions, or Goons, these are the disposable NPCs that heroes blast and cut their way through wholesale. Most RPGs do not have specific rules for handling Mooks, which I think is a big oversight. In this week’s article I am going to discuss what a Mook is, how RPGs should address them in their rules, and what you can do with them in your games.

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This is the third in a series of articles designed to look at how to ease into the GTD system, using some simple tools and the essence of the GTD method. Last week I discussed how to Process your inputs, so that you could quickly make decisions on what to do with the requests that come through your inputs. This week, we are going to talk about how to file the small amount of paperwork that you are now keeping (since you are discarding all the non-essential paper you receive when you are clearing your inputs, and the mess of papers that you were hoarding before you embraced GTD).

The goal of filing is simple: place papers where they are organized and tidy in a way that they can be found quickly when they are needed. It sounds simple, and it is, and yet most people do not file properly. So let’s talk about what it’s going to take to get you filing the correct way….

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This is the second in a series of articles designed to look at how to ease into the GTD system, using some simple tools and the essence of the GTD method. Last week, we discussed Getting Control Of Your Inputs. This week, we look at “processing requests,” the art of being asked to do something and quickly determining what to do with it. Processing is the engine that drives the GTD system. A GTD master can look at an incoming request and in seconds know if it should be put on a to do list, handed off to someone, or done right away. In this article we will talk about how to process requests from your inputs, and extend the system that we set up in the last article.

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A lot of people read the Getting Things Done (GTD) book and like the concepts that are presented but are at a loss as to how to get started. In GTD, David Allen does not espouse a specific system of productivity but rather provides guidelines for how to execute a system that you need to create. The biggest issue I hear from friends and family who have read the GTD books is that there is too much going on in their lives right now to get a system started, making GTD a great idea but too hard to put into pratice.

Unless you are a C-level executive and can afford someone from Davidco to come over and coach you through the conversion, getting started with GTD can be a formitable barrier. In the next four Wednesday posts, I will lead you through one way to get started with GTD by taking the essential GTD principles and presenting a simple system you can use right away to start putting them into practice.  This simple system is not “true GTD,” but rather a short -cut to help you get started.  As you master each small part, you should read the GTD book and upgrade your GTD system.

In this first post, we are going to tackle getting control of your inputs, those things that are coming at you that you need to get done that are keeping you from getting your system developed.

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