A few posts ago, I posted about my inability to apply Getting Things Done to my daily life. Now, I can proudly say that blogging for me now almost completely is ruled by the GTD Process. I’m not sure whether other bloggers have discovered a GTD way to blog, but this is the way I work. I know that GTD is meant to be a bit more wide-scale then something as small as a blog, but this seems to work good for me.

Note: This blog entry assumes you have a rudimentary knowledge of what GTD is.

1. Collection: The RSS Inbox

For blogging, your inbox is nothing more then your RSS Reader. Remember that with most blogs nowadays, there’s an RSS feed that you can use in your reader. Hook those up to your reader, and you’ve got a list of information on several things you can write about! So with that, get as much information as you can handle, and get it into your reader!

2. Processing: What to do with the info

So, now you have a ton of information. What to do with it? This process is twofold. First, you need to briefly scour your information for things that seem interesting to you. Don’t do any in-depth reading yet, as you have too much info to deal with. Instead, go through reading only the title and the first few lines of each blog, and place a mark on the ones you deem interesting.

So, you have that done? Now we move to phase two. Here, you’ll go through each blog entry, and read them. If there are any you don’t find interesting, toss them out. The ones that stay move on to the next level.

3. Organize: Where and what will they do?

Now that you have a list of potential things to blog about, we need to organize them. For simple blogs, or if you’re creating a specific project within your blog, you can organize them based on content. For instance, let’s say you were writing about Linus Torvald’s impending plan to destroy both Apple and Microsoft in a cataclysmic E-apocalyptic battle. (Is he?) As a blogger doing research on this, you can organize various articles into parts relative to the project.

Example for Torvalds:

@Plan @Statements @Threats @Apple responses @Microsoft Responses

These will allow you to separate the articles for future recombining and citing. Now, for blogs that have several different sub-sections (i.e, Lifehacker’s “Geek to Live” and “Download of the Day,”) you can organize by blog type (@Geek to live, @Download, etc.) By the way, if that’s how you people do it, more power to you.

4.  Review your past archives

Reviewing is quite important with GTD, and with blogs, it’s ESPECIALLY important, as news gets old quickly. Every week, go through your archives and delete old information. It makes life faster for you.

5. Write the bloody article!

After all that, take what you gathered from your organization, and use what you need to write your article. Once that’s done…well…WRITE!!! After you’ve done your wonderful post, take what you didn’t use, but is still organized, and put it in a Next Actions list. Personally, blog topics I want to write about go in the To-Do section on my Google Desktop. After I write about them, I check them off. It’s fun.

There you have it. Now, get blogging, and don’t forget your daily praise for David Allen!