{"id":132298,"date":"2019-12-11T17:20:20","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T17:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/?p=132298"},"modified":"2019-12-11T17:22:05","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T17:22:05","slug":"passports-and-pinball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/2019\/12\/11\/passports-and-pinball\/","title":{"rendered":"Passports and Pinball"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ever seen a pinball machine? Great, then you\u2019ll have a mental image of a metal ball pinging around under glass, side-to-side and up-and-down, flippers flipping and lights flashing for as long as you can stop it from disappearing down the hole.<\/p>\n

I sometimes use this odd metaphor in GTD\u00ae coaching and training to help people see how a project\u2019s next actions \u2018travel\u2019 around a GTD system over time, and to illustrate this, I\u2019d like to share the story of a personal project that began in 2016 and finished just recently.<\/p>\n

That year, here in the UK at least, the future suddenly changed, and, irrespective of how you voted in the Brexit referendum that I\u2019m referring to, things have been unclear for everyone since.<\/p>\n

For me, personally, the realisation also gradually dawned that clouds had appeared in the cobalt blue skies of my Mediterranean retirement dream, so a project that had been languishing on my \u2018someday maybe\u2019 list for ages got promoted to my \u2018Projects\u2019 list: \u2018Get Trinidad Passport\u2019.<\/p>\n

Trinidad & Tobago is a Caribbean nation off the coast of Venezuela. I\u2019ve always been entitled to \u2018Citizenship by Descent\u2019 there through my dad, who came to the UK in the Windrush years, and suddenly a second passport in my back pocket felt like it would be a very nice thing to have indeed.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s turn to GTD. And pinball\u2026<\/p>\n

The desired outcome of the project was always the same. Every week, during my GTD Weekly Review\u00ae, there it was, reminding me: Get Trinidad passport<\/em>. And every week, the next action was the metallic ball moving from list to list.<\/p>\n

My GTD lists saw all of the following next actions come and go as I slowly trawled the paper trail of my dad\u2019s life over the course of two years, locating all the necessary bits and pieces of bureaucracy from the UK and Caribbean. Here\u2019s a simplified snapshot:<\/p>\n

2017<\/p>\n