My Wife Sarah and I try to have Life Dinners every month. It’s a great time to organize, talk about upcoming trips or things we want to accomplish together. Recently we have found ourselves with little to talk about related to life tasks and schedules as we leverage basecamp and email for passive communication about life stuff. However, passive communication can get overwhelming at times. I have found myself barraging Sarah with emails about various life tasks which stresses her out and creates the same problems we were trying to solve with the Life Dinners.
A few weeks ago I attended the “Mastering Workflow” GTD seminar. This was mostly review for me but the tactic of using “Agendas” really stuck. In Things, there’s a “People” list that I have never leveraged before. As life tasks crop up that I need to discuss with Sarah, I associate them with her in the Things and wait until our Life Dinner to discuss. I also do this with my boss as we have a weekly video chat standing meeting to review anything outstanding.
Using Agendas is a great way to cut down on daily email and task switching while still feeling organized.
Kelly Taylor's Blog 