[This one’s for the 43Folders-ites and GTD dorks; apologies if readers less obsessed with life-hacking find it far too anal retentive to sustain their interest.]

Though I’ve been GTD’ing for about three years, I’ve recently stumbled across two things that have done wonders for inching me towards a watery mind and away from my naturally procrastinatory ways. Thought I’d toss them up, in the off chance that others might find them useful.

The first is the power of the checklist. Though David Allen mentions checklists throughout GTD, I and (from the implementations I’ve seen) most others seem to give them short shrift.

In my myriad approaches to wrangling GTD details, I’ve always had particular trouble with recurring tasks. I play the trumpet on the side, for example, and try to put the horn on my chops for at least a half hour of daily practice. When I was using to-do managers with recurring task capabilities, I was able to set recurrence daily, and check off trumpet each day. But, using VoodooPad as I do now, I didn’t have a good approach.

So, I initially set up a daily checklist as a way of managing the larger recurring tasks in my life, things like trumpet practice, blogging, or hitting the gym, which I wanted to do each day, and which didn’t lead from one action to the next, but required the same action again and again. Each morning, I’d paste my daily checklist across to my Next Actions list, and then get to work.

As I started doing that, however, I realized there were any number of other things I did (or, at least, should) daily. Things like taking a vitamin. Obviously, popping a vitamin is a ridiculously minor task, and well under the two minute time cutoff, so I’d initially left it off my task list. But, as it was something I wanted to do daily, I’d been unwittingly carrying around the obligation mentally. Further, there were a number of similarly small action obligations inherent in my approach to GTD itself: emptying my in basket each morning, checking the prior night’s voicemails, or copying the hard landscape of my day across from iCal.

Very quickly, my checklist began to expand, from major recurring daily to-do’s, to the very small ones. And the cognitive energy freed up by getting all of those out of my mental RAM was on par with the initial surge that hooked me when I first implemented GTD. Eventually, I added in weekly (including an action-by-action break-down of the weekly review), monthly and yearly checklists, all of which have been slowly populating with the small, inane tasks that otherwise didn’t seem to fit well into the GTD framework. My brain feels vastly emptier (in a good way!) as a result.

In the process, I also discovered a second, equally powerful, use of checklists: scheduling procrastinatory tasks. One huge time suck for me, for example, is Bloglines. I’d load the site throughout the day, derailing my attempts at staying on task. So, on a lark, I added surfing Bloglines to my daily checklist. Each day, I was giving myself not just the permission, but the obligation, to pull up the site, and read through everything that popped in.

The amazing thing was, the rest of the time, Bloglines didn’t hold nearly the draw it previously did. Knowing that I’d get to check it at least once a day, the constant impulse to make sure I hadn’t missed anything abated.

I added scheduled requirements of other procrastinatory ploys to my checklist, and found the same thing. In retrospect, that makes a lot of sense. I tend to procrastinate not by doing things that are bad, things that I shouldn’t be doing at all, but by doing things that are less good, that I shouldn’t be doing preferentially to my more important tasks.

Still, as those procrastination escapes were things I really did want to do, I was carrying around the mental obligation to them as heavily as I’d been carrying around any other unrecorded project or next-action. No wonder the urge to do them had been popping into my brain at the least opportune moment!

So, fellow GTD acolytes, I’d urge you to give the same hack a try: put together a checklist of the things you want to do each day, each week, month or year. Put really small, stupid things on the lists, every single one you can think of, to free up mental RAM. Then add in a regular obligation to do the things that make you waste time. Do them regularly, do them like you mean them, and discover you’re unbothered by them until you’re required to do them again.

Go to it.