If you want to make this adaptation easier, you shouldn’t try to take in everything the methodology has to offer from the beginning. If you try to do it all at once, you will probably overwhelm yourself at a time when your personal organization mainly needs to establish a good foundation that will allow you to grow and improve later on.
Clarify
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.” ~ Elbert Hubbard.
To master this step you have to ask yourself a series of questions for each of the items you have captured. At first you must force yourself to do it step by step, until you take over the process. The questions are:
What is this? You must express what that capture means to you.
Is it actionable? It’s actionable if you can do something about it and you want to.
You must use your mind to get things off your mind.” ~ David Allen.
Organizing is simply about putting everything in its place. Our brains are good at relating places and meanings, so we just need some containers with a clear meaning to be more effective.
Next Actions: List of actions to be done by you, as soon as possible.
Calendar: Actions you need to do (or information you need to be aware of) by a specific date and/or time.
Agendas: These are “next actions” where you need to meet with someone in order to complete them.
“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” ~ Henri Bergson.
This is the most important step of the methodology, as it helps to maintain a usable and completely reliable system. Basically, it consists of doing a Weekly Review of your entire system. It’s just a review; you shouldn’t do what you haven’t been able to do during the week.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” ~ Mark Twain.
First of all, you need to have a first inventory of incomplete elements in your personal and professional life. Do a mental sweep following this list of possibilities: Incompletion Trigger List.
Define the right contexts for your specific situation, which will help you have situation-specific Next Actions lists: @calls, @computer, @office, @home, @errands, @Evernote, @Mary, etc.
Once that first big catch has been made, clarify each of the items and organize them, putting reminders in the appropriate lists.