Welcome to Getting Things Done

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There is no single, once-and-for-all solution. No software, seminar, cool personal planner, or personal mission statement will simplify your workday or make your choices for you as you move through your day, week, and life.

Part 1: The Art of Getting Things Done

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1. A New Practice for a New Reality

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The methods I present here are all based on two key objectives:

• capturing all the things that need to get done – now, later, someday, big, little, or in between – into a logical and trusted system outside of your head and off your mind;
  
• disciplining yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the “inputs” you let into your life so that you will always have a plan for “next actions” that you can implement or renegociate at any moment.

The “Mind Like Water” Simile

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines, your thoughts about what you need to do, your children, or your boss will lead to less effective results than you’d like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don’t operate with a “mind like water”.

The Principle: Dealing Effectively with Internal Commitments

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Most of the stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments made or accepted.

You’ve probably made many more agreements with yourself than you realize, and every single one of them – big or little – is being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you. These are the “incompletes”, or “open loops”, which I define as anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is. Open loops can include everything from really big to-do items like “End world hunger” to the more modest “Hire new assistant” to the tiniest task such as “Replace electric pencil sharpener”.

It’s likely that you also have more internal commitments currently in play than you’re aware of. You have accepted some level of internal responsibility for everything in your life and work that represents an open loop of any sort.

In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and collect all those things that are “ringing you bell” in some way, and then plan how to handle them. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but in practice most people don’t know how to do it in a consistent way.

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments

Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors:

• First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you’ll come back to regularly and sort through.
  
• Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it.
  
• Third, once you’ve decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

Why Things Are on Your Mind

Most often, the reason something is “on your mind” is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:

• you haven’t clarified exactly what the intended outcome is;
  
• you haven’t decided what the very next physical action step is; and / or
  
• you haven’t put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust

That’s why it’s on your mind. Until those thoughts have been clarified and those decisions made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will think about as often as you need to, your brain can’t give up the job.

The Transformation of “Stuff”

Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

The Process: Managing Action

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You need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all:

• you don’ manage five minutes and wind up with six;
  
• you don’t manage information overload – otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you’d blow up; and
  
• you don’t manage priorities – you have them

Instead, the key to managing all of your “stuff” is managing your actions.

Managing Action is the Prime Challenge

What you do with your time, what you do with information, and what you do with your body and your focus relative to your priorities – those are the real options to which you must allocate your limited resources. The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage actions.

The lack of time is not the major issue. The real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are.

Horizontal and Vertical Action Management

You need to control commitments, projects, and actions in two ways – horizontally and vertically. “Horizontal” control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved. “Vertical” control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects.

The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get things done.

The Major Change: Getting It All Out of Your Head

The short-term memory part of your mind – the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff” – functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level.

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that things you should be doing that something all the time.

Can you get rid of that kind of stress ? You bet.

2. Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow

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The core process for mastering workflow is a five-stage method. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We

• collect things that command our attention;
  
• process what they mean and what to do about them;
  
• organize the results, which we
  
• review as options for what we choose to
  
• do

This constitutes the management of the “horizontal” aspect of our lives – incorporating everything that has our attention at any time.

The dynamics of these five stages need to be understood, and good techniques and tools implemented to facilitate their functioning at an optimal level. I have found it very helpful, if not essential, to separate these stages as I move through my day.

One of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success with “getting organized” is simply that they have tried to do all five phases at one time.

This chapter explains the five phases in detail. Chapters 4 to 8 provide a step-by-step program for implementing an airtight system for each phase, with lots of examples and best practices.

Collect

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It’s important to know what needs to be collected and how to collect it most effectively so you can process it appropriately.

Getting 100 Percent of the “Incompletes”

In order to eliminate “holes in the bucket”, you need to collect and gather together placeholders for or representations of all the things you consider incomplete in your world – that is, anything personal or professional, big or little, of urgent or minor importance, that you think ought to be different than it currently is and that you have any level of internal commitment to changing.

As soon as you attach a “should”, “need to” or “ought to” to an item, it becomes an incomplete. Decisions you still need to make about whether or not you are going to do something, for example, are already incompletes. This includes all of your “I’m going to”s, where you’ve decided to do something but haven’t started moving on it yet. And it certainly includes all pending and in-progress items, as well as those things on which you’ve done everything you’ve ever going to do except acknowledge that you’ve finished with them.

In order to manage this inventory of open loops appropriately, you need to capture it into “containers” that hold items in abeyance until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what, if anything, you’re going to do with them. Then you must empty these containers regularly to ensure that they remain viable collection tools.

The Collection Tools

There are several types of tools, both low- and high-tech, that can be used to collect your incompletes. The following can all serve as versions of an in-basket, capturing self-generated input as well as information coming from outside:

• Physical in-basket
  
• Paper-based note-taking devices
  
• Electronic note-taking devices
  
• Voice-recording devices
  
• E-mail

The Collection Success Factors

Unfortunately, merely having an in-basket doesn’t make it functional. Most people do have collection devices of some sort, but usually they’re more or less out of control. Let’s examine the three requirements to make the collection phase work:

• Every open loop must be in your collection system and out of your head
  
• You must have as few collection buckets as you can get by with
  
• You must empty them regularly

Get It All Out of Your Head

If you’re still trying to keep track of too many things in your RAM, you likely won’t be motivated to use and empty your in-baskets with integrity. These collection tools should become part of your life-style. Keep them close by so no matter where you are you can collect a potentially valuable thought.

Minimize the Number of Collection Buckets

You should have as many in-baskets as you need and as few as you can get by with. You need this function to be available to you in every context, since things you’ll want to capture may show up almost anywhere. If you have too many collection zones, however, you won’t be able to process them easily or consistently.

Empty the Buckets Regularly

If you don’t empty and process the “stuff” you’ve collected, your buckets aren’t serving any function. Emptying the bucket does not mean that you have to finish what’s in it; it just means you have to take it out of the container, decide what it is and what should be done with it, and, if it’s still unfinished, organize it into your system. You don’t put it back into “in” !

Process

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The item-by-item thinking required to get your collection buckets empty is perhaps the most critical improvement you can make. What do you need to ask yourself (and answer) about each thing that comes your way ? This is the component of action management that forms the basis for your personal organization. You organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done. Let’s take an overview.

What is it ?

Figure out what the communication or document is really about. The next decision is critical.

Is It Actionable ?

There are two possible answers for this: YES and NO.

No Action Required. If the answer is NO, there are three possibilities:

• It’s trash, no longer needed
  
• No action is needed now, but something might need to be done later (incubate)
  
• The item is potentially useful information that might be needed for something later (refference)

These three categories can themselves be managed; we’ll get into that in a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that you need a trash basket and key for trash, a “tickler” file or calendar for material that’s incubating, and a good filing system for refference information.

Actionable This is the YES group of items, stuff about which something needs to be done. Two things need to be determined about each actionable item:

• What “project” or outcome have you commited to ? and
  
• What’s the next action required ?

If It’s About a Project You need to capture that outcome on a “Projects” list. That will be the stake in the ground that reminds you that you have an open loop. A Weekly Review of the list will bring this item back to you as something that’s still outstanding.

What’s the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you’ve collected; if you answer it appropriately, you’ll have the key substantive thing to organize. The “next action” is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion. Reminders of these actions will become the primary grist for the mill of your personal productivity-management system.

Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options:

• Do It. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined
  
• Delegate It. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this ? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity
  
• Defer it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists

Organize

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For nonactionable items, the possible categories are trash, incubation tools, and refference storage. If no action is needed on something, you toss it, “tickle” it for later reassessment, or file it so you can find the material if you need to refer to it another time.

To manage actionable things, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you’re waiting for.

All of the organizational categories need to be physically contained in some form. When I refer to “lists”, I just mean some sort of reviewable set of reminders, which could be lists on notebook paper or in some computer program or even file folders holding separate pieces of paper for each item. Incubating reminders may be stored in a paper-based “tickler” file or in a paper- or computer-based calendar program.

Projects

I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step. If one step won’t complete something, some kind of stake needs to be placed in the ground to remind you that there’s something still left to do.

Projects do not need to be listed in any particular order. You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it “done”.

Project Support Material

All of the details, plans, and supporting information that you may need as you work on your various projects should be contained in separate file folders, computer files, notebooks, or binders.

Support Materials and Reference Files Organize your project support material by theme or topic. Store your support material out of sight.

The Next-Action Categories

That action needs to be the next physical, visible behavior, without exception, on every open loop. Any less-than-two-minute actions that you perform, and all other actions that have already been completed, do not, need to be tracked; they’re done. What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day (enter these in your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your “Next Actions” lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a “Waiting For” list).

Calendar

Reminders of actions you need to take fall into two categories: those about things that have to happen on a specific day or time, and those about things that just need to get done as soon as possible. Your calendar handles the first time of reminder. Three things go on your calendar:

• time-specific actions;
  
• day-specific actions; and
  
• day-specific information

Time-Specific Actions Appointments. Simply tracking that on the calendar is sufficient.

Day-Specific Actions Things that you need to do sometime on a certain day, but not necessarily at a specific time. That should be tracked on the calendar for the day. It’s useful to have a calendar on which you can note both time-specific actions and day-specific actions.

Day-Specific Information The calendar is also the place to keep track of things you want to know on specific days – not necessarily actions you’ll have to take but rather information that may be useful on a certain date. Include directions for appointments, activities that other people will be involved in them, events of interest. It’s also helpful to put short-term “tickler” information here, too, such as reminders to call someone after the day they return from a vacation.

No more “Daily To-Do” Lists Those three things are what go on the calendar, and nothing else ! The calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments.

The “Next Actions” List(s)

All the action reminders go on “Next Actions” lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization.

Any longer-than-two-minute, nondelegatable action you have identified needs to be tracked somewhere. Keep them in appropriate lists, or buckets. If you have only twenty or thirty of these, it may be fine to keep them all on one list labeled “Next Actions”, which you’ll review whenever you have any free time. For cases when the number is bigger, subdivide your “Next Actions” list into categories, such as “Calls” to make when you’re a phone or “Project Head Questions” to be asked at your weekly briefing.

Nonactionable items

No-action systems fall into three categories: trash, incubation, and reference.

Trash

Throw away anything that has no potential future action or reference value.

Incubation

There are two other groups of things besides trash that require no immediate action, but this stuff you will want to keep. It’s critical that you separate nonactionable from actionable items.

There are two kinds of “incubate” systems that could work: “Someday / Maybe” lists and a “tickler file.

“Someday / Maybe” Maintain an ongoing list of things you might want to do at some point but not now. This is the “parking lot” for projects that would be impossible to move on at present but that you don’t want to forget about entirely. You’d like to be reminded of the possibility at regular intervals. You’ll probably have some subcategories in your “Someday / Maybe” list, such as CDs I might want. Books to read / etc.

You must review this list periodically if you’re goint to get the most value from it. Include a scan of the contents in your Weekly Review.

“Tickler” File This is a system that allows you to almost literally mail something to yourself, for receipt on some designated day in the future. Your calendar can serve the same function.

Reference Material

Many things that come your way require no action but have intrinsic value as information. You will want to keep and be able to retrieve these as needed. They can be stored in paper-based or digital form.

Paper-based material is best stored in efficient physical-retrieval systems. These can range from pages in a loose-leaf planner or notebook, for a list or phone numbers, to whole file cabinets. Electronic storage can include everything from networked database information to ad hoc reference and archive folders.

Referance should be exactly that – information that can be easily referred to when required. Reference systems generally take two forms:

• topic- and area-specific storage
  
• general reference files

The first types usually define themselves in terms of how they are stored.
The second type is one that everyone needs close at hand for storing ad hoc information that doesn’t belong in some predesignated category. The lack of a good general-reference file can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal action management system.

Review

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You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels. This is where you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops, at what I call the 10.000 foot-level, on a weekly basis. It’s your chance to scan all the defined actions and options before you, thus radically increasing the efficacy of the choices you make about what you’re doing at any point in time.

What to Review When

If you set up a personal organization system structured with a “Projects” list, a calendar, Next Actions” lists, and a “Waiting For” list, not much will be required to maintain that system.

The item you’ll review most frequently is your calendar, which will remind you what things will die if you don’t do them. It’s a good habit, as soon as you conclude an action on your calendar, to check and see what else remains to be done.

After checking your calendar, you’ll most often turn to your “Next Actions” lists. These hold the inventory of predefined actions that you can take if you have any discretionary time during the day. If you’ve organized them by context, they’ll come into play only when those contexts are available. “Projects” “Waiting For” and “Someday / Maybe” lists need to be reviewed only as often as you think they have to be in order to stop you from wondering about them.

Critical Success Factor: The Weekly Review

All of your open loops, active project plans, and “Next Actions” “Agendas” “Waiting For” and even “Someday / Maybe” lists should be reviewed once a week.

The Weekly Review is the time to

• Gather and process all your “Stuff”
  
• Review your system
  
• Update your lists
  
• Get clean, clear, current and complete

The rewards from implimenting this whole process are at least geometric: the more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it. The Weekly Review is a master key to maintaining that standard.

Do

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Three Models for Making Action Choices

If you have collected, processed, organized, and reviewed all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgement with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work and values.

Three models will be helpful to you to incorporate in your decision-making about what to do. They won’t tell you answers but they will assist you in framing your options more intelligently.

1. The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment

There are four criteria you can apply, in this order:

• Context
  
• Time available
  
• Energy available
  
• Priority

Context: A few actions can be done anywhere, but most require a specific location or having some productivity tool at hand. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment.

Time Available: When do you have to do something else ?

Energy Available: How much energy do you have ? Some actions require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy. Some don’t.

Priority: Given your context, time, and energy available, what action will give you the highest payoff ? This is where you need to access your intuition and begin to rely on your judgement call in the moment.

2. The Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work

When you’re getting things done, there are three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in:

• Doing predefined work
  
• Doing work as it shows up
  
• Defining your work

Doing Predefined Work: When you’re doing predefined work, you’re working off your “Next Actions” lists – completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, managing your workflow.

Doing Work as It Shows Up: Often things come up ad hop – unsuspected, unforseen – that you either have to or choose to respond to as they occur. When you follow these leads, you’re deciding by default that these things are more important than anything else you have to do.

Defining Your Work: Defining your work entails clearing up your in-basket, your e-mail, your voice mail and your meeting notes and breaking down new projects into actionable steps. As you process your inputs, you’ll no doubt be taking care of some less-than-two-minute actions and tossing and filing numerous things. A good portion of this activity will consist of identifying things that ned to get done sometimes, but not right away.You’ll be adding to all of your lists as you go along.

Once you have defined all your work, you can trust yhat your lists of things to do are complete. And your context, time, and energy available still allow you the option of more than one thing to do. The final thing to consider is the nature of your work, and its goals and standards.

3. The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work

In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is. And there are at least six different perspectives from which to define that.

• 50.000+ feet: Life
  
• 40.000 feet: Three to five-year vision
  
• 30.000 feet: One to two-year goals
  
• 20.000 feet: Areas of responsibility
  
• 10.000 feet: Current projects
  
• Runway: Current actions
  

Let’s start from the bottom up:

Runway: Current Actions: This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take

10.000 Feet: Current Projects: These are the relatively short-term outcomes you want to achieve

20.000 Feet: Areas of Responsibility: These are the key areas within which you want to achieve results and maintain standards. Your job may entail at least implicit commitments for things like strategic planning, market research. And your personal life has an equal number of such focus arenas: health, family, finances, etc. Listing and reviewing these responsabilities gives you a morecomprehensive framework for evaluating your inventory of projects.

30.000 Feet: One to Two-Year Goals: What you want to be experiencing in the various areas of your life and work one to two years from now.

40.000 Feet: Three to Five-Year Vision: The same as above, but with bigger categories. Decisions at this altitude could easily change what your work might look like on many levels.

50.000+ Feet: Life: This is the “big picture” view. The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its “work” really is. It is the ultimate job description. All the goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it.

They can provide a useful framework to remind you of the multilayered nature of your “job” and resulting commitments and tasks.

“Setting priorities” in the traditional sense of focusing on your long-term goals and values, through obviously a necessary core focus, does not provide a practical framework for a vast majority of the decisions and tasks you must engage in day to day. Mastering the flow of your work at all the levels you experience that work provides a much more holisticway to get things done, and feel good about it.

3. Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning

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The key ingredients of relaxed control are

• clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure
  
• reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is horizontal focus.

Enhancing “Vertical” Focus

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Horizontal focus is all you’ll need in most situations. Sometimes you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been determined. This is where vertical focus comes in.

This kind of thinking doesn’t have to be elaborate. Most of the thinking you’ll need to do is informal, what I call back-of-the-envelope planning. This tends to be the most productive kind of planning you can do in terms of your output relative to the energy you put into it.

There is a productive way to think about projects, situations, and topics that creates maximum value with minimal expenditure of time and effort.

The Natural Planning Model

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Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task:

• Defining purpose and principles
  
• Outcome visioning
  
• Brainstorming
  
• Organizing
  
• Identifying next actions

Natural Planning is Not Necessarily Normal

You can try it for yourself right now if you like. Choose one project that is new or stuck or that could simply use some improvement. Think of your purpose. Think of what a successful outcome would look like: where would you be physically, financially, in terms of reputation, or whatever ? Brainstorm potential steps. Organize your ideas. Decide on the next actions. Are you any clearer about where you want to go and how to get there ?

Natural Planning Techniques: The Five Phases

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Purpose

It never hurts to ask the “why ?” question. Almost anything you’re currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at this top level of focus.

The Value of Thinking About “Why”

Here are just some of the benefits of asking “why ?”:

• It defines success
  
• It creates decision-making criteria
  
• It aligns resources
  
• It motivates
  
• It clarifies focus
  
• It expands options

Let’s take a closer look at each of these in turn.

It Defines Success: If you’re not totally clear about the purpose of what you’re doing, you have no chance of wining. Purpose defines success.

It Aligns Resources: The answer depends on what we’re really trying to accomplish – the why.

It Motivates: Let’s face it: if there’s no good reason to be doing something, it’s not worth doing.

It Clarifies Focus: When you land on the real purpose for anything you’re doing, it makes things clearer.

It Expands Options: Paradoxically, even as purpose brings things into pinpoint focus, it opens up creative thinking about wider possibilities.

Principles

Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold
And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress. If you do, some constructive conversation about and clarification of principles could align the energy and prevent unnecessary onflict. You may want to begin by asking yourself, “What behavior might undermine what I’m doing, and how can I prevent it ?” That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards.

Another great reason for focusing on principles is the clarity and reference point they provide for positive Conduct. Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of behavior.

Vision / Outcome

In order most productively to access the conscious and unconscious resources available to you, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like. Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the “what ?” instead of the “why ?”.

The Power of Focus

When you focus on something, that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.

Clarifying Outcomes

There is a simple but profound principle that emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work: you won’t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it.

It’s easy to envision something happening if it has happened before or you have had experience with similar successes. It can be quite a challenge, however, to identify with images of success if they represent new and foreign territory.

One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes. We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we’re trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks completed as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Outcome / vision can range from a simple statement of the project, such as “Finalize computer-system implementation” to a completely scripted movie depicting the future scene in all its glorious detail. Here are three basics teps for developing a vision:

• View the project from beyond the completion date
  
• Envision “WILD SUCCESS” ! (Suspend “Yeah, but…”)
  
• Capture features, aspects, qualities you imagine in place

When I get people to focus on a successful scenario of their project, they usually experience heightened enthusiasm and think of something unique and positive about it that hadn’t occurred to them before.

Brainstorming

Once you know what you want to have happen, and why, the “how” mechanism is brought into play. Ideas begin to pop into your head in somewhat random ordr – little ones, big ones, not-so-good ones, good ones. This process usually goes on internally for most people about most things, and that’s often sufficient. But there are many other instances when writing things down, or capturing them in some external way, can give a tremendous boost to productive output and thinking.

Capturing Your Ideas

The most popular of these techniques is called mind-mapping. In mind-mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it. You could do this kind of mind-mapping on Post-its that could be stuck on a whiteboard, or you could input ideas into a word processor or outlining program on the computer.

Brainstorming Keys

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basic principles, however, can be summed up as follows:

• Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize
  
• Go for quantity, not quality
  
• Put analysis and organization in the background

Don’t Judge, Challenge, Evaluate, or Criticize: It’s easy for the unnatural planning model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critique of ideas.The primary criterion must be expansion, not contraction.

Go for Quantity, Not Quality: Going for quantity keeps your thinking expansive. The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background: Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative out-of-the-box thinking. But in the brainstorming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that makes up the next stage.

Organizing

If you’ve done a through job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you’ll notice that a natural organization is emerging. Once you get all the adeas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you’ll automatically notice natural relationships and structure.

Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences or events, and / or priorities. This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points, scribbled literally on the back of an envelope, to project-planning software.

Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to “fill in the blanks”. Identifying three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up.

The Basics of Organizing

The key steps here are:

• Identify the significant pieces
  
• Sort by (one or more):
  
• components
  
• sequences
  
• priorities
  
• Detail to the required degree
  

Next Actions

The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving. The question to ask here is, “What’s the next action ?”.

The Basics

• Decide on next actions for each of the current moving parts of the project
  
• Decide on the next action in the planning process, if necessary

Activating the “Moving Parts”: A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component’s having to be completed first. If the project has multiple components, each of them should be assessed appropriately by asking, “Is there something that anyone could be doing on this right now ?”

In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that. So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

More to Plan?: What if there’s still more planning to be done before you can feel comfortable with what’s next ? There’s still an action step – it is just a process action. What’s the next step in the continuation of planning ?

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

When the Next Action Is Someone Else’s…: If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the “Waiting For” action list). In a group planning situation, it isn’t necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of theproject. Often all that’s required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces. This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity.

How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do ?

How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail ? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind.

In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and the action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and / or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and sollutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.

Most projects need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind. I estimate that 80 percent of projects are of that nature. You’ll still be doing the full planning model on all of them, but only in your head, and just enough to figure out next actions and keep them going until they’re complete. Another 15 percent or so of projects might require at least some external form of brainstorming. A final 5 percent of projects might need the deliberate application of one or more of the five phases of the natural planning model.

Need More Clarity ?

If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale.

Need More to Be Happening ?

If more action is what’s needed, you need to move down the model.

The fundamentals remain true – you must be responsible for collecting all your open loops, applying a front-end thought process to each of them, and managing the results with organization, review, and action.

For all those situations that you have any level of commitment to complete, there is a natural planning process that goes on to get you from here to there. Leveraging that five-phase model can often make the evolution easier, faster, and more productive.

Part 2: Practicing Stress-Free Productivity

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4. Getting Started: Setting up the Time, Space, and Tools

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In Part 2 we’ll move from a conceptual framework and limited application of workflow mastery to full-scale implementation and best practices. Going through this program often gives people a level of relaxed control they may never have experienced before, but it usually requires the catalyst of step-by-step procedures to get there.

Implementation – Whether All-Out or Casual – Is a Lot About “Tricks”

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Much of learning how to manage workflow in a “black belt” way is about laying out the gear and practicing the moves so that the requisite thinking happens more automatically and it’s a lot easier to get engaged in the game. The suggestions that follow about getting time, space, and tools in place are all trusted methods for making things happen at a terrific new level.

If you’re sincere about making a major leap forward in your personal management systems, I recommend that you pay close attention to the details and follow through on the suggestions provided bellow in their entirety. The whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. You’ll also discover that the execution of this program will produce real progress on real things that are going on in your life right now. We’ll get lots done that you want to get done, in new and efficient ways that may amaze you.

Setting Aside the Time

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I recommend that you create a block of time to initialize this process and prepare a workstation with the appropriate space, furniture and tools. If your space is properly set up and streamlined, it can reduce your unconscious resistance to dealing with your stuff and even make it attractive for you to sit down and crank through your input and your work. An ideal time frame for most people is two days, back to back.

Setting Up the Space

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You’ll need a physical location to serve as a central cockpit of control. If you already have a desk and office space set up where you work, that’s probably the best place to start.

The basics for a work space are just a writing surface and room for an in-basket. The writing surface will of course expand for most professionals, to include a phone, a computer, stacking trays, working file drawers, reference shelves. Some may feel the need for a fax, a printer, a VCR, and/or multimedia conferencing equipment.

A functional work space is critical. If you don’t already have a dedicated work space and in-basket, get them now. Everyone must have a physical locus of control from which to deal with everything else.

Getting the Tools You’ll Need

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There are some basic supplies and equipment that you’ll need to get you started. As you go along, you’re likely to dance between using what you’re used to and evaluating the possibilities for new and different gear to work with. Note that good tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive.

The Basic Processing Tools

If you start from scratch, in addition to a desktop work space, you’ll need:

• Paper-holding trays (at least three)
  
• A stack of plain letter-size paper
  
• A pen / pencil
  
• Post-its (3 X 3s)
  
• Paper clips
  
• Binder clips
  
• A stapler and staples
  
• Scotch tape
  
• Rubber bands
  
• An automatic labeler
  
• File folders
  
• A calendar
  
• Wastebasket / Recycling bin

Paper-Holding Trays

These will serve as your in-basket and out-basket, with one or two others for work-in-progress support papers and/or your “read and review” stack.

Plain Paper

Putting one thought on one full-size sheet of paper can have enormous value. It’s important to have plenty of letter-size writing paper or tablets around to make capturing ad hoc input easy.

Post-its, Clips, Stapler, Etc.

Post-its, clips, stapler, tape, and rubber bands will come in handy for routing and storing paper-based materials.

The Labeler

The labeler is a surprisingly critical tool in pur work. The labeler will be used to label your file folders, binder spines, and numerous other things.

Get the least expensive one that sits on a desk and has an AC adapter. Also, get a large supply of cassettes of label tape – black letters on white tape (instead of clear) are much easier to read and allow you to relabel folders you misht want to reuse.

File Folders

You’ll need plenty of file folders (get letter size if you can). Plain manila folders are fine – color-coding is a level of complexity that’s hardly ever worth the effort. Your general reference filing system should just be a simple library.

Calendar

The calendar should be used not to hold action lists but to track the “hard landscape” of things that have to get done on a specific day or at a specific time. Calendar systems range from pocket week-at-a-glance booklets, to loose-leaf organizers with day-, week-, month-, and year-at-a-glance options, to single-user software organizers.

The calendar has often been the central tool that people rely on to “get organized”. It’s certainly a critical component in managing particular kinds of data and reminders of the commitments that relate to specific times and days. There are many reminders and some data that you will want a clendar for, but you won’t be stopping there: your calendar will need to be integrated with a much more comprehensive system that will emerge as you apply this method.

You may wonder what kind of calendar would be best for you to use. After you develop a feel for the whole systematic approach, you’ll have a better reference point for deciding about graduating to a different tool.

Do You Need an Organizer ?

Whether or not you’ll need an organizer will depend on a number of factors. Are you already commited to using one ? How do you want to see your reminders of actions, agendas, and projects ? Where and how often might you need to review them ? You could maintain everything in a purely low-tech fashion, by keeping pieces of paper in folders. Or you could even use a paper-based notebook or planner, or a digital version thereof. Or you could even employ some combination of these.

All of the low-tech gear listed in the previous section is used for various aspects of collecting, processing, and organizing. You’ll use a tray and random paper for collecting. As you process your in-basket, you’ll complete many less-than-two-minute actions that will require Post-its, a stapler, and paper clips. The magazines, articles, and long memos that are your longer-than-two-minute reading will go in another of the trays. And you’ll probably have quite a bit just to file. What’s left – mantaining a project inventory, logging calendar items and actions and agenda reminders, and tracking the things you’re waiting for – will require some form os lists, or reviewable groupings of similar items.

Lists can be managed simply in a low-tech way, as pieces of paper kept in a file folder (e.g., separate sheets/notes for each person you need to call in a “calls” file), or they can be arranged in a more “mid-tech” fashion, in loose-leaf notebooks or planners (a page titled “Calls” with the names listed down the sheet). Or they can be high-tech, digital versions of paper lists (such as “Calls” category in the “To Do” section of a PDA).

When considering whether to get and use an organizer, and if so, which one, keep in mind that all you really need to do is manage lists. You’ve got to be able to create a list on the run and review it easily and as regularly as you need to. Once you know what to put on the lists, and how to use them, the medium really doesn’t matter. Just go for simplicity, speed, and fun.

The Critical Factor of a Filing System

A simple and highly functional personal reference system is critical to this process. The lack of a good general-reference system can be one of the greatest obstacles to implementing a personal management system.

We’re concerned here mostly with general-reference filing – as distinct from discrete filing systems devoted to contracts, financial information, or othercategories of data that deserve their own place and indexing. General-reference files should hold articles, brochures, pieces of paper, notes, printouts, faxes – basically anything that you want to keep for its interesting or useful data and that doesn’t fit into your specialized filing systems and won’t stand up by itself on a shelf (as will large software manuals and seminar binders).

Success actors for Filing

I strongly suggest that you maintain your own personal, at-hand filing system. It should take you less than one minute to pick something up out of your in-basket or print it from e-mail, decide it needs no action but has some potential future value, and finish storing it in a trusted system. If it takes you longer than a minute to complete that sequence of actions, you have a significant improvement opportunity, since you probably won’t file the document; you’ll stack it or stuff it instead. Besides being fast, the system needs to be fun and easy, current and complete. Otherwise you’ll unconsciously resist emptying your in-basket because you know there’s likely to be something in there that ought to get filed and you won’t even want to look at the papers.

Whatever you need to do to get your reference system to that quick and easy standard for everything it has to hold, do it. I highly recommend that you consider incorporating all of the following guidelines to really make reference filing automatic.

Keep Your General-Reference Files at Hand’s Reach: Filing has to be instantaneous and easy. If you have to get up every time to have some ad-hoc piece of paper you want to file, you’ll tend to stack it instead of filing it, and you’re also likely to just resist the whole in-basket process.

One Alpha System: I have one A-Z alphabetical filing system, not multiple systems. One simple alpha system files everything by topic, project, person, or company, so it can be in only three or four places if you forget exactly where you put it. Currently I have four file drawers for my general-reference files, and each is clearly marked on the outside – “A-E”, “F-L”, and so on – so I don’t have to think about where something goes once it’s labeled.

Every once in a while someone has such a huge amount of reference material on one topic or project that it should be put in its own discrete drawer or cabinet. But if it is less than a half a file drawer’s worth, I recommend including it in the single general alphabetical system.

Have Lots of Fresh Folders: Nothing is worse than having something to file and not having an abundance of folders to grab from to make the process easy.

Keep the Drawer Less Than Three-Quarters Full: Always try to keep your file drawers less than three-quarters full. If they’re stuffed, you’ll unconsciously resist putting things in there, and reference materials will tend to stack up instead.

You may need to create another tier of reference storage to give yourself sufficient working room with your general-reference files at hand. Material such as finished project notes and “dead” client files may still be need to be kept, but can be stored off-site or at least out of your work space.

Label Your File Folders with an Auto Labeler Labeled files feel comfortable on a boardroom table; everyone can identify them; you can easily see what they are from a distance and in your briefcase; and when you open your file drawers, you can get to see that looks almost like a printed index of your files in alphabetical order.

Get High-Quality Mechanics File cabinets are not the place to skimp on quality. Nothing is worse than trying to open a heavy file drawer and hearing that awful screech!

Get Rid of Hanging Files If You Can Totally do away with the hanging-file hardware and just use plain folders standing up by themselves in the file drawer, held up by the movable metal plate in the back.

Purge Your Files at Least Once a Year Cleaning house in your files regularly keeps them from going stale and seeming like a black hole, and it also gives you the freedom to keep anything on a whim “in case you might need it”.

One Final Thing to Prepare…

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If you’ve decided to commit a certain amount of time to setting up your workflow system, there’s one more thing that you’ll need to do to make it maximally effective: you must clear the decks of any other commitments for the duration of the session.

5. Collection: Corralling Your “Stuff”

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The collection phase usually takes between one and six hours. It can take longer than you think if you are committed to a full-blown capture that will include everything at work and everything else. That means going through every storage area and every nook and cranny in every location, including cars, boats, and other homes, if you have them.

Ready, Set…

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There are very practical reasons to gather everything before you start processing it:

• It’s helpful to have a sense of the volume of stuff you have to deal with
  
• It lets you know where the “end of the tunnel” is
  
• When you’re processing and organizing, you don’t want to be distracted phychologically by an amorphous mass of stuff that might still be “somewhere”. Once you have all the things that require your attention gathered in one place, you’ll automatically be operating from a state of enhanced focus and control.

It can be dauting to capture into one location, at one time, all the things that don’t belong where they are. It may even seem a little counterintuitive, because for the most part, most of that stuff was not, and is not, “that important”; that’s why it’s still lying around. These are the kinds of things that nag at you but you haven’t decided either to deal with or to drop entirely from your list of open loops. But because you think there still could be something important in there, that “stuff” is controlling you and taking up more psychic energy than it deserves.

So it’s time to begin. Grab your in-basket and a half-inch stack of plain paper for your notes, and let’s…

…Go !

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Physical Gathering

The first activity is to search your physical environment for anything that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is, permanently, and put it into your in-basket. You’ll be gathering things that are incomplete, things that have some decition around potential action tied to them. They all go into “in”, so they’ll be available for later processing.

What Stays Where It Is

The best way to create a clean decision about whether something should go into the in-basket is to understand clearly what shouldn’t go there. Here are the four categories of things that can remain where they are, the way they are, with no action tied to them:

• Supplies
  
• Reference material
  
• Decoration
  
• Equipment

Supplies…: include anything you need to keep because you use it regularly. Stationary, business cards, stamps, staples, Post-it pads, legal pads, paper clips, etc.

Reference Material…: is anything you simply keep for information as needed, such as manuals for your software, the local takeout deli menu, or your kid’s soccer schedule. This category includes your telephone and address information, any material relevant to projects, themes, and topics, and sources such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs.

Decoration…: means pictures of family, artwork, and fun and inspiring things pinned to your bulletin board. You also might have plaques, mementos, and/or plants.

Equipment…: is obviously the telephone, computer, fax, printer, wastebasket, furniture, and/or VCR.

Everything else goes into “in”. But many of the things you might initially interpret as supplies, reference, decoration, or equipment could also have action asociated with them because they still aren’t exactly the way they need to be. In other words, supplies, reference materials, decoration, and equipment may need to be tossed into the in-basket if they’re not just where they should be, the way they should be.

Issues About Collecting

As you engage in the collecting phase, you may run into one or more of the following:

• You’ve got a lot more than will fit into one in-basket
  
• You’re likely to get derailed into purging and organizing
  
• You may have some form of stuff already collected and organized
  
• You’re likely to run across some critical things that you want to keep in front of you

What If An Item Is Too Big To Go in the In-Basket?: If you can’t physically put something in the in basket, write a note on a piece of letter-size plain paper to represent it. Be sure to date it too. It’s also just a great habit to date everything you hand-write.

What If the Pile Is Too Big to Fit into the In-Basket?: Just create stacks around the in-basket, and maybe even on the floor underneath it. Ultimately you’ll be emptying the in-stacks, as you process and organize everything. In the meantime though, make sure that there’s some obvious visual distinction between the stacks that are “in” and everything else.

Instant Dumping: If it’s immediately evident that something is trash, go ahead and toss it when you see it. If you’re not sure what something is or whether it’s worth keeping, go ahead and put it into “in”. The objective for the collection process is to get everything into “in” as quickly as possible so you’ve appropriately retrenched and “drawn the battle lines”.

Be Careful of the Purge-and-Organize Bug!: If it happens to you, it’s OK, so long as you have a major open window of time to get through the whole process. What you don’t want to do is let yourself get caught running down a rabbit trail cleaning up some piece of your work and then not be able to get through the whole action-management implementation process.

What About Things That Are Already on Lists and in Organizers?: I recommend that you treat those lists as items still to be processed, like everything else in “in”. You’ll want your system to be consistent, and it’ll be necessary to evaluate everything from the same viewpoint to get it that way.

“But I Can’t Lose That Thing… ”: If that happens to you, first ask yourself if it’s something that really has to be handled before you get through this initial implementation time. If so, best deal with it immediately so you get it off your mind. If not, go ahead and put it into “in”. You’re going to get all that processed and emptied soon anyway, so it won’t be lost.

If you can’t deal with the action in the moment, and tou still just have to have the reminder right in front of you, go ahead and create an “emergency” stack somewhere close at hand. It’s not an ideal solution, but it’ll do.

Start with Your Desktop

Start piling those things on your desk into “in”. Often there’ll be numerous things right at hand that need to go in there. Typical items will be:

• Stacks of mail and memos
  
• Phone slips
  
• Collected business cards
  
• Notes from meetings

Resist the urge to say, as almost everyone does initially, “Well, I know what’s in that stack, and that’s where I want to leave it.”. That’s exactly what hasn’t worked before, and it all needs to go into the in-basket. As you go around your desktop, ask yourself if you have any intention of changing any of the tools or equipment there.

Desk Drawers

Next tackle the desk drawers, if you have them, one at a time. Any attention on anything in there ? Any actionable items ? Is there anything that doesn’t belong there ? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, put the actionable item into “in” or write a note about it.

Countertops

Often there will be stacks of reading material, mail, miscellaneous folders and support material for actions and projects. Collect it all.

Inside the Cabinets

These are perfect areas for stashing large supplies and reference materials, and equally seductive for holding deeper levels of stuff. Again, if some of these areas are out of control and need purging and organizing, write that on a note and toss it into “in”.

Floors, Walls, and Shelves

If there are issues, just scoop them over next to the in-basket to add to the inventory.

Equipment, Furniture, and Fixtures

If there are actionable items, you know what to do: make a note and put it in “in”.

Other Locations

Depending on the scope of what you’re addressing in this process, you may want to do some version of the same kind of gathering anywhere else you keep stuff. If you’re determined to get to a really empty head, it’s imperative that you do it everywhere.

Mental Gathering: The Mind-Sweep

Once you feel you’ve collected all the physical things in your environment that need processing, you’ll want to collect anything else that may be residing in your psychic RAM. What has your attention that isn’t represented by something already in the in-basket ?

This is where the stack of plain paper really comes into play. I recommend that you write out each thought, eac idea, each project or thing that has your attention, on a separate piece ofpaper. You could make one long list on a pad, but given how you will later be processing each item individually, it’s actually more effective to put everything on separate sheets.

It will probably take you between twenty minutes and an hour to clear your head onto separate notes, after you’ve gathered everything else. You’ll find that things will tend to occur to you in somewhat random fashion – little things, big things, personal things, professional things, in no particular order. In this instance, go for quantity. It’s much better to overdo this process than to risk missing something. You can always toss the junk later.

The “In” Inventory

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If your head is empty of everything, personally and professionally, then your in-basket is probably quite full, and likely spilling over.

But “In” Doesn’t Stay in “In”

When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to take the next step. You don’t want to leave anything in “in” for an indefinite period of time, because then it would without fail creep back into your psyche again, since your mind would know you weren’t dealing with it.

6. Processing: Getting “In” to Empty

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Assuming that you have collected everything that has your attention, you job now is to actually get to the bottom of “in”. Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve collected. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.

When you’ve finished processing “in”, you will have

• trashed what you don’t need
  
• completed any less-than-two-minute actions
  
• handed off to others anything that can be delegated
  
• sorted into your own organizing system reminders of actions that require more than two minutes
  
• identified any larger commitments (projects) you now have, based on the input

I recommend that you read through this chapter and the next one, on organizing your actions, before you actually start processing what you’ve collected in “in”. It may save you some steps.

If you’re not sure yet what you’re going to be using as a personal reminder system, don’t worry. You can begin very appropriately with the low-tech initial process of notes on pieces of paper. You can always upgrade your tools later, once you have your system in place.

Processing Guidelines

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The best way to learn this model is by doing. But there are a few basic rules to follow:

• Process the top item first
  
• Process one item at a time
  
• Never put anything back into “in”

Top Item First

Even if the second item down is a personal note to you from the president of your country, and the top item is a piece of junk mail, you’ve got to process the junk mail first ! The principle is an important one: everything gets processed equally. The verb “process” does not mean “spend time on”. It just means “decide what the thing is and what action is required, and then dispatch it accordingly”. You’re going to get to the bottom of the basket as soon as you can anyway, and you don’t want to avoid dealing with anything in there.

Emergency Scanning Is Not Processing

“Emergency scanning” is fine and necessary sometimes. But that’s not processing your in-basket; it’s emergency scanning. When you’re in processing mode, you must get into the habit of starting at one end and just cranking through items one at a time, in order.

LIFO or FIFO ?

Theoretically, you should flip your in-basket upside down and process first the thing that came in. As long as you go from one end clear through to the other within a reasonable period of time, though, it won’t make much difference.

One Item at a Time

Put back everything but the one item on top. The focus on just one thing forces the requisite attention and decision-making to get through all your stuff.

The Multitasking Exception

There’s a subtle exception to the one-item-at-a-time rule. Some personality types really need to shift their focus away from something for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it. Remember, multitasking is an exception – and it works only if you hold to the discipline of working through every item in short order, and never avoid any decision for longer than a minute or two.

Nothing Goes Back Into “In”

There’s a one-way path out of “in”. The first time you pick something up from your in-basket, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in “in”.

The Key Processing Question: “What’s the Next Action ?”

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This may sound easy – and it is – but it requires you to do some fast, hard thinking. Much of the time the action will not be self-evident; it will need to be determined.

What If There Is No Action ?

It’s likely that a portion of your in-basket will require no action. There will be three types of things in this category:

• Trash
  
• Items to incubate
  
• Reference material

Trash

It’s likely that you will have put stacks of material into “in” that include things you don’t need anymore. So don’t be surprised if there’s still a lot more to throw away as you process your stuff.

It’s likely that at some point you’ll come up against the question of whether or not to kkep something for future reference. I have two ways of dealing with that:

• When in doubt, throw it out
  
• When in doubt, keep it

Take your pick. I think either approach is fine. You just need to trust your intuition and be realistic about your space.

Make the distinction about whether something is actionable or not. Once it’s clear that no action is needed, there’s room for lots of options.

Incubate

There will probably be things in your in-basket about which you will say to yourself, “There’s nothing to do on this now, but there might be later.”

What do you do with these kinds of things ? There are two options that could work:

• Write them on a “Someday / Maybe” list
  
• Put them on your calendar or in a “tickler” file

The point of all of these incubation procedures is that they give you a way to get the items off your mind right now and let you feel confident that some reminder of the possible action will resurface at an appropriate time. For now, just put a Post-it on such items, and label them “maybe” or “remind on October 17”, and set them aside in a “pending” category you will be accumulating for later sorting.

Reference

Many of the things you will uncover in “in” will need no action but may have value as potentially useful information about projects and topics. As you come across material in your in-basket and e-mail that you’d like to keep for archival or support purposes, file it.

A less-than-sixty-second, fun-to-use general-reference filing system within arm’s reach of where you sit is a mission-critical component of full implementation of this methodology.

Whenever you come across something you want to keep, make a label for it, put it in a file folder, and tuck that into your filing drawer.

And If There Is an Action… What Is It ?

If there’s something that needs to be done about the item in “in”, then you need to decide what exactly that next action is. “Next Actions” again, means the next physical, visible activity that would be required to move the situation toward closure.

The next action should be easy to figure out, but there are often some quick analyses and several planning steps that haven’t occurred yet in your mind, and these have to happen before you can determine precisely what has to happen to complete the item, even if it’s a fairly simple one.

The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to Do. Remember that these are physical, visible activities. Decide. If you don’t decide now, you’ll still have to decide at some other point, and what this process is designed to do is actually get you to finish the thinking exercise about this item. If you haven’t identified the next physical action required to kick-start it, there will be a psychological gap every time you think about it even vagualy. You’ll tend to resist noticing it.

There’s always some physical activity that can be done to facilitate your decision-making. Ninety-nine percent of the time you just need more information before you can make a decision. That additional information can come from external sources or from internal thinking. Either way, there’s still a next action to be determined in order to move the project forward.

Once You Decide What the Action Step Is

You have three options once you decide what the next action really is.

• Do it (if the action takes less than two minutes)
  
• Delegate it (if you’re not the most appropriate person to do the action)
  
• Defer it into your organization system as an option for work to do later

Do It

If the next action can be done in two minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. Even if the item is not a “high priority” one, do it now if you’re ever going to do it at all. The rationale for the two-minute rule is that that’s more or less the point where it starts taking longer to store and track an item than to deal with it the first time it’s in your hands – in other words, it’s the efficiency cutoff. If the thing’s not important enough to be done, throw it away. If it is, and if you’re going to do it sometime, the efficiency factor should come into play.

Getting into the habit of following the two-minute rule creates a dramatic improvement in productivity.
Two minutes is in fact just a guideline. If you have a long open window of time in which to process your in-basket, you can extend the cutoff for each item to five or ten minutes. If you’ve got to get to the bottom of all your input rapidly, in order to figure out how best to use your afternoon, then you may want to shorten the time to one minute, or even thirty seconds, so you can get through everything a little faster. It’s not a bad idea to time yourself for a few of these while you’re becoming familiar with the process.

There’s nothing you really need to track about your two-minute actions – you just do them. If, however, you take an action and don’t finish the project with that one action, you’ll need to clarify what’s next on it, and manage that according to the same criteria.

Adhere to the two-minute rule and see how much you get done in the process of clearing out your “in” stacks. Many people are amazed by how many two-minute actions are possible, often on some of their most critical current projects.

Delegate It

If the next action is going to take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, “Am I the best person to be doing it ?”. If not, hand if off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format. Delegation is not always downstream. A “systematic format” could be any of the following:

• Send the appropriate party an e-mail
  
• Write a note or an overnote on paper and route the item “out” to that person
  
• Leave him or her a voice-mail
  
• Add it as an agenda item on a list for your next real-time conversation with that person
  
• Talk to him or her directly, either face-to-face or by phone

Although any of these options can work, I would recommend them in the above order, top to bottom.

Tracking the Handoff: If you do delegate an action to someone else, and if you care at all whether something happens as a result, you’ll need to track it. As you develop your own customized system, what you eventually hand off and then track could look like a list in a planner, a file folder holding separate papers for each item, and / or a list categorized as “Waiting For” in your software. For now, if you don’t have a trusted system set up already, just put a note on a piece of paper – “W/F: reply from Bob” – and put that into a “Pending” stack of notes in a separate pile or tray that may result from your processing.

What If the Ball Is Already in Someone Else’s Court?: In such situations you will also want to track the action as a delegated item, or as a “Waiting For”. It’s important that you record the date on everything you hand off to others. This, of all the categories in your personal system, is the most crucial one to keep tabs on. The few times you will actually want to refer to that information will make it worth establishing this as a lifelong habit.

Defer It

It’s likely that most of the next actions you determine for things in “in” will be yours to do and will take longer than two minutes to complete. These actions will have to be written down somewhere and organized in the appropriate categories so you can access them when you need to. For the moment, go ahead and put Post-its on the pieces of paper in “in”, with the action written on them, and add these to the “Pending” stack of papers that have been processed.

The “Pending” Things That Are Left

If you follow the instructions in this chapter, you’ll dump a mes of things, file a bunch, do a lot of two-minute actions, and hand off a number of items to other people. You’ll also wind up with a stack of items that have actions associated with them that you still need to do – soon, someday, or on a specific date – and reminders of things you’re waiting on from other people. This “Pending” group is made up of the actions you’ve delegated or deferred. It is what still needs to be organized in some fashion in your personal system. It will be covered in detail in the next chapter.

Identifying the Projects You Have

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This last step in getting to the bottom of “in” requires a shift in perspective from the single-action details to the larger picture – your projects.

Again, I define a “project” as any outcome you’re committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete. If you look through an inventory of actions that you have already been generating you’ll no doubt recognize a number of things that are largen than the single action you’ve defined.

If the action step you’ve identified will not complete the commitment, then you’ll need some stake in the ground to keep reminding you of actions you have pending until you have closure. You need to make a list of projects. A “Projects” list may include anything from “Give holiday party” to Divest the Widget product line” to “Finalize compensation package”. The purpose of this list is not to reflect your priorities but just to ensure that you’ve got placeholders for all those open loops.

Whether you draw up your “Projects” list while you’re initially processing your in-basket or after you’ve set up your action lists doesn’t really matter. It just needs to be done at some point, and it must be maintained, as it’s the key driver for reviewing where you are and where you want to be.

7. Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets

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Your organization system is not something that you’ll necessarily create all at once, in a vacuum. It will evolve as you process your stuff and test out whether you have put everything in the best place for you.

The Basic Categories

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There are seven primary types of things that you’ll want to keep track of and manage from an organizational perspective:

• A “Projects” list
  
• Project support material
  
• Calendared actions and information
  
• “Next Actions” lists
  
• A “Waiting For” list
  
• Reference material
  
• A “Someday / Maybe” list

The Importance of Hard Edges

It’s critical that all of these categories be kept pristinely distinct from one another. They each represent a discrete type of agreement we make with ourselves, and if they lose their edges and begin to blend, much of the value of organizing will be lost.

All You Really Need Is Lists and Folders

Once you know what to keep track of (covered in the precious chapter, on Processing), all you really need is lists and folders for reference and support materials. Your lists (which could also be items in folders) will keep track of projects and someday/maybes, ads well as the actions you’ll need to make on your active open loops. Folders will be required to hold your reference material and the support information for active projects. Once you know what goes on the lists, things get much easier; then you just need a way to manage them.

You shouldn’t bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you’ll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change. The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review.

When I refer to a “list”, keep in mind that I mean nothing more than a grouping of items with some similar characteristic. A list could look like one of three things:

• a file folder with separate paper notes for the items within the category
  
• an actual list on a titled piece of paper (often within a loose-leaf organizer or planner)
  
• an inventory in a software program or on a digidal assistant

Organizing Action Reminders

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If you’ve emptied your in-basket, you’ll undoubtedly have created a stack of “Pending” reminders for yourself, representing longer-than-two-minute actions that cannot be delegated to someone else. You’ll also have accumulated reminders of things that you’ve handed off to other oepople, and peraps some things that need to be placed in your calendar or a “Someday / Maybe” kind of holder.

You’ll want to sort all of this into groupings that make sense to you so you can review them as options for work to do when you have time. You’ll also want to decide on the most appropriate way physically to organize those groups, whether as items in folders or on lists, either paper-based or digital.

The Actions That Go on Your Calendar

For the purposes of organization, there are two basic kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and / or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get to them, around your other calendared items. Calendared action items can be either time-specific or day-specific.

As you were processing your in-basket, you probably came across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed up. Writing the appointment into your calendar as you made it would then have been common sense.

What many people want to do, however, based on old habits of writing daily-to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that then actually might not, and that might then have to be taken over to following days. Resist this impulse. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run. That’ll be much easier if the only things in there are those that you absolutely have to get done on that day. When the calendar is relegated to its proper role in organizing, the majority of the actions that you need to do are left in the category of “as soon as possible, against all the other things I have to do.”

Organizing As-Soon-As-Possible Actions by Context

The best way to be reminded of an “as soon as I can” action is by the particular context required for that action – that is, either the tool or the location or the person needed to complete it.

How discrete these categories will need to be will depend on

• how many actions you actually have to track
  
• how often you change the contexts within which to do them

If you are that rare person who has only twenty-five next actions, a single “Next Actions” list might suffice. If, however, you have fifty or a hundred next actions pending, keeping all of those on one big list would make it too difficult to see what you needed to see.

Another productivity factor that this kind of organization supports is leveraging your energy when you’re in a certain mode. It takes more energy than most people realize to unhook out of one set of behaviors and get into another kind or rhythm and tool set.

The Most Common Categories of Action Reminders

You’ll probably find that at least a few of the following common list headings for next actions will make sense for you:

• “Calls”
  
• “At Computer”
  
• “Errands”
  
• “Office Actions” or “At Office” (miscellaneous)
  
• “At Home”
  
• “Agendas” (for people and meetings)
  
• “Read/Review”

“Calls”: This is the list of all the phone calls you need yo make; you can work off it as long as you have a phone available. The more mobile you are, the more useful you’ll find it to have one single list of all your calls ; those strange little windows of time that you wind up with when you’re off-site or traveling offer a perfect opportunity to work down your list. I suggest that you take the time to write the phone number itself alongside each item. There are many situations in which you would probably make the call if the number was already there in front of you but not if you had to look it up.

“At Computer”: If you work with a computer, it can be helpful to group all those actions that you need to do when it’s on and running.

“Errands”: It makes a lot of sense to group together in one place reminders of all the things you need to do when you’re “out and about”. This list could, of course, be nothing more elaborate than a Post-it that you keep in your planner somewhere, or a screen in an “Errands” category of the “To Do” section or your Palm organizer. It’s often helpful to track sublists within individual “Errands” items.

“Office Actions” / “At Office”: If you work in an office, there will be certain things that you can do only there, and a list of those will be a useful thing to have in front of your eyes then.

“At Home”: Many actions can be done only at home, and it makes sense to keep a list specific to that context.

“Agendas”: Invariably you’ll find that many of your next actions need to either occur in a real-time interraction with someone or be brought up in a committee, team, or staff meeting. These next actions should be put on separate “Agenda” lists for each of those people and for that meeting (assuming that you attend it regularly). I recommend that separate files or lists be kept for bosses, partners, assistants, spouses, and children. You should also keep the same kind of list for your attorney, financial adviser, accountant, and/or computer consultant, as well as for anyone else with whom you might have more than one thing to go over the next time you talk on the phone.

If you participate in standing meetings – staff meetings, project meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, whatever – they too, deserve their own files, in which you can collect things that will need to be addressed on those occasions. Often you’ll want to keep a running list of things to go over with someone you’ll be interacting with only for a limited period of time.

Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add “Agendas” ad hoc, as needed, quickly and simply.

“Read/Review”: You will no doubt have discovered in your in-basket a number of things for which your next action is to read. I hope you will have held the two-minute rule and dispatched a number of those quick-skim items already – tossing, filing, or routing them forward as appropriate.

To-read items that you know will demand more than two minutes of your time are usually best managed in a separate physical stack-basket labeled “Read / Review”. This is still a “list” by my definition, but one that’s more efficiently dealt with by grouping the documents and magazines themselves in a tray and/ or portable folder.

For many people, the “Read / Reivew” stack can get quite large. That’s why it’s critical that the pile be reserved only for those longer-than-two-minute things that you actually want to read when you have time.

It’s practical to have that stack of reading material at hand and easy to grab on the run when you’re on your way to a meeting that may be late starting, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, or a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting to get your teeth cleaned. Those are all great opportunities to crank through that kind of reading.

Organizing “Waiting For”

Like reminders of the actions you need to do, reminders of all the things that you’re waiting to get back from or get done by others have to be sorted and grouped. You won’t necessarily be tracking discrete action steps here, but more often final deliverables or projects that others are responsible for. When the next action on something is up to someone else, you don’t need an action reminder, just a trigger about what you’re waiting for from whom. Your role is to review that list as often as you need to and assess whether you ought to be taking an action such as checking the status or lighting a fire under the project.

It works best to keep this “Waiting For” list close at hand, in the same system as your own “Next Actions” reminder lists. The responsibility for the next step may bounce back and forth many times before a project is finished.

You’ll get a great feeling when you know that your “Waiting For” list is the complete inventory of everything you care about that other people are supposed to be doing.

Using the Original Item as Its Own Action Remindr

The most efficient way to track your action reminders is to add them to lists or folders as they occur to you. There are some exceptions to this rule, however. Certain kinds of input will most efficiently serve as their own reminders of required actions, rather than you having to write something about them on a list. This is particularly true for some paper-based materials and some e-mails.

Managing Paper-Based Workflow

Some things are their own best reminders of work to be done. The category of “Read / Review” articles, publications, and documents is the most common example.

The specific nature of your work, your input, and your workstation may make it more efficient to organize other categories using only the original paper itself.

Whether it makes more sense to write reminders on a list or to use the originating documents in a basket or folder will depend to a great extent on logistics. Could you use those reminders somewhere other than at your desk ? If so, the portability of the material should be considered. If you couldn’t possibly do that work anywhere but at your desk, then managing reminders of it solely at your workstation is the better choice.

Whichever option you select, the reminders should be in visibly discrete categories based upon the next action required.

Managing E-mail-Based Workflow

Like some paper-based materials, e-mails that need action are sometimes best as their own reminders – in this case within the tracked e-mail system itself. This is especially likely to be true if you get a lot of e-mail and spend a lot of your work time with your e-mail software booted up. E-mails that you need to act on may then be stored within the system instead of having their embeded actions written on a list.

Set up two or three unique folders. True, most folders in e-mail should be used for reference or archived materials, but it’s also possible to set up a workable system that will keep your actionable messages discretely organized, outside of the “in” area itself.

I recommend that you create one folder for any longer-than-two-minute e-mails that you need to act on. The folder name should begin with a prefix letter or a symbol so that it looks different from your reference folders and it sits at the top of your folders in the navigator bar. Use something like the “@” sign or the dash (“-“). Create @ACTION, @WAITING FOR.

Organizing Project Reminders

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Creating and maintaining one list of all your projects (that is, again, every commitment or desired outcome that may require more than one action step to complete) can be a profound experience ! You probably have more of them than you think. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend that initially you make a “Projects” list in a very simple format, similar to the ones you you’ve used for your lists of actions: it can be a category in a digital organizer, a page in a loose-leaf planner, or even a single file folder labeled “PROJECTS”, with either a master list or separate sheets of paper for each one.

The “Projects” List(s)

The “Projects” list is not meant to hold plans or details about your projects themselves, nor should you try to keep it arranged by priority or size or urgency – it’s just a comprehensive index of your open loops. The real value of the “Projects” list lies in the complete review it can provide (at least once a week), allowing you to ensure that you have action steps defined for all of your projects, and that nothing is slipping through the cracks. A quick glance at this list from time to time will enhance your underlying sense of control.

One List, or Subdivided ?

One list is the best way to go because it serves as a master inventory rather than a daily prioritizing guideline. The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your open loops and options so your mind can more easily make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter how many different lists of projects you have, so long as you look at the contents of all of them as often as you need to, since for the most part you’ll do that in one fell swoop during your Weekly Review.

Some Common Ways to Subsort Projects

There are some situations in which it makes good sense to sub-sort a “Projects” list. Let’s look at these one by one.

Personal/Professional Many people feel more comfortable seeing their lists divided up between personal and professional projects. If you’re among them, be advised that your “Personal” list will need to be reviewed as judiciously as your “Professional” one, and not just saved for weekends. Many actions on personal things will need to be handled on weekdays, exactly like everything else.

Delegated Projects

While you could, of course, put them on your “Waiting For” list, it might make better sense to create a “Projects—Delegated” list to track them: your task will be simply to review the list regularly enough to ensure that everything on it is moving along appropriately.

Specific Types of Projects

Some professionals have as part of their work several different projects of the same type, which in some instances it maybe valuable to group together as a sublist of “Projects.”

Just realize that this approach will work only if it represents a complete set of all of those situations that require action, and only if you review them regularly along with the rest of your projects, keeping them current and conscious.

What About Subprojects?

Some of your projects will likely have major subprojects, each of which could in theory be seen as a whole project.

Actually, it won’t matter, as long as you review all the components of the project as frequently as you need to to stay productive. If you make the large project your one listing on your “Projects” list, you’ll want to keep a list of the subprojects and/or the project plan itself as “project support material” to be reviewed when you come to that major item. I would recommend doing it this way if big pieces of the project are dependent on other pieces getting done first. In that scenario you might have subprojects with no next actions attached to them because they are in a sense “waiting for” other things to happen before they can move forward.

Don’t be too concerned about which way is best. If you’re not sure, I’d vote for putting your Big Projects on the “Projects” list and holding the subpieces in your project support material, making sure to include them in your Weekly Review, If that arrangement doesn’t feel quite right, try including the active and independent subprojects as separate entries on your master list.

There’s no perfect system for tracking all your projects and subprojects the same way. You just need to know you have projects and, if they have associated components, where to find the appropriate reminders for them.

Project Support Materials

Project support materials are not project actions, and they’re not project reminders. They’re resources to support your actions and thinking about your projects.

Don’t Use Support Material for Reminding Typically, people use stacks of papers and thickly stuffed file folders as reminders that (1) they’ve got a project, and (2) they’ve got to do something about it. They’re essentially making support materials serve as action reminders.

If you’re in this kind of situation, you must first add the project itself to your “Projects” list, as a reminder that there’s an outcome to be achieved. Then the action steps and “Waiting For” items must be put onto their appropriate action reminder lists. Finally, when it’s time to actually do an action, like making a call to someone about the project, you can pull out all the materials you think you might need to have as support during the conversation.

To reiterate, you don’t want to use support materials as your primary reminders of what to do—that should be relegated to your action lists. If, however, the materials contain project plans and overviews in addition to ad hoc archival and reference information, you may want to keep them a little more visibly accessible than you do the pure reference materials in your filing cabinet.

Organizing Ad Hoc Project Thinking

In chapter 3, I suggested that you will often have ideas that you’ll want to keep about projects but that are not necessarily next actions. Those ideas fall into the broad category of “project support materials,” and may be anything from a notion about something you might want to do on your next vacation to a clarification of some major components in a project plan. What do you do with that kind of material?

My recommendation here is that you consider where you’re keeping tabs on the project or topic itself, how you might add information to it in that format, and where you might store any more extensive data associated with it.

Attached Notes Most organizing software allows you to attach a digital “note” to a list or calendar entry. This is an excellent way to capture “back-of-the-envelope” project thinking. If your “Projects” list is paper-based, you can attach a Post-it note next to the item on your master list or, if you’re a low-tech type, on the item’s separate sheet.

E-mail and Databases E-mails that might contain good information related to your projects can be held in a dedicated e-mail folder. You may also find it worthwhile, if you don’t have one already, to set up a more rigorous kind of digital database for organizing your thinking on a project or topic.

Paper-Based Files Having a separate file folder devoted to each project makes a lot of sense when you’re accumulating paper-based materials; it may be low-tech, but it’s an elegant solution nonetheless. Simplicity and ease of handling make for a good general-reference filing system—one that lets you feel comfortable about creating a folder for scraps of paper from a meeting.

Pages in Notebooks A great advantage of paper-based loose-leaf notebooks is that you can dedicate a whole page or group of pages to an individual project.

Each of the methods described above can be effective in organizing project thinking. The key is that you must consistently look for any action steps inherent in your project notes, and review the notes themselves as often as you think is necessary, given the nature of the project.

You’ll also want to clear out many of your notes once they become inactive or unreal, to keep the whole system from catching the “stale” virus.

Organizing Nonactionable Data

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Interestingly, one of the biggest problems with most people’s personal management systems is that they blend a few actionable things with a large amount of data and material that has value but no action attached. Having good, consistent structures with which to manage the nonactionable items in our work and lives is as important as managing our action and project reminders. When the nonactionable items aren’t properly managed, they clog up the whole process.

Unactionable items fall into two large categories: reference materials and reminders of things that need no action now but might at a later date.

Reference Materials

There’s no action required, but it’s information that you want to keep, for a variety of reasons. Your major decisions will be how much to keep, how much room to dedicate to it, what form it should be stored in, and where. Much of that will be a personal or organizational judgment call based upon legal or logistical concerns or personal preferences. The only time you should have attention on your reference material is when you need to change your system in some way because you have too much or too little information, given your needs or preferences.

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it’s still “stuff”—that is, they haven’t decided what’s actionable and what’s not. Once you’ve made a clean distinction about which is which, what’s left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it’s just your library. Your only decision then is how big a library you want.

The Variety of Reference Systems

There are a number of ways to organize reference material, and many types of tools to use. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the most common.

• General-reference filing—paper and e-mail
  
• Large-category filing
  
• Rolodexes and contact managers
  
• Libraries and archives

General-Reference Filing

As I’ve said, a good filing system is critical for processing and organizing your stuff. You need to feel comfortable storing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later, and your system must be informal and accessible enough that it’s a snap to file it away in your alphabetized general-reference system, right at hand where you work. If you’re not set up that way yet, look back at chapter 4 for help on this topic.

Large-Category Filing

Any topic that requires more than fifty file folders should probably be given its own section or drawer, with its own alpha-sorted system.

Bear in mind that if your “area of focus” has support material that could blend into other “areas of focus,” you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files. As a general rule, it’s best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

Rolodexes and Contact Managers

Much of the information that you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You need to track contact information of all sorts—home and office phone numbers and addresses, cell-phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you may want to maintain information about birthdays, names of friends’ and colleagues’ family members, hobbies, favorite wines and foods, and the like. In a more rigorous professional vein, you may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates, goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff development purposes.

The telephone/address section of most of the organizers sold in the last fifty years is probably (along with the calendar) their most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track of phone numbers. It’s instructive to note that this is purely and simply reference material. No action is required—this is just information that you might need to access in the future.

So there’s no big mystery about how to organize it, aside from the logistics for your individual needs. Again, the only problem comes up when people try to make their Rolodexes serve as tools for reminding them about things they need to do. That doesn’t work. As long as all the actions relative to people you know have been identified and tracked in your action reminder lists, there’s no role for telephone and address systems to fill other than being a neutral address book.

The only issue then becomes how much information you need to keep and where and in what equipment you need to keep it in order to have it accessible when you want it.

Libraries and Archives: Personalized Levels

Information that might be useful lives at many levels. You could probably find out pretty much anything if you were willing to dig deep enough. The question of how much to keep, how close, and in what form, will be a changing reality, given the variables of your needs and your particular comfort levels with data. Relative to your personal organization and productivity, this is not a core issue, so long as all of your projects and actions are in a control system that you work with regularly. Reference material in all its forms then becomes nothing more or less than material to capture and create access to according to your particular proclivities and requirements.

Some degree of consistency will always make things easier. What kinds of things do you need with you all the time? Those must go into your ubiquitous planner or PDA. What do you need specifically for meetings or off-site events? That should be put into your briefcase, pack, satchel, or purse. What might you need when you’re working in your office? That should be put into your personal filing system or your networked computer. What about rare situations relative to your job? Material needed for those could be archived in departmental files or off-site storage. What could you find anytime you might need it, on the Web? You don’t need to do anything with that information, unless you need it when you’re away from a Web connection, in which case you should print the data out when you’re online and store it in a file you can take with you.

Distinguishing actionable things from nonactionable ones is the key success factor in this arena. Once you’ve done that, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want.

Someday/Maybes

The last thing to deal with in your organization system is how to track things that you may want to reassess in the future. For a full implementation of this model you’ll need some sort of “back burner” or “on hold” component.

There are several ways to stage things for later review, all of which will work to get them off your current radar and your mind. You can put the items on various versions of “Someday/Maybe” lists or trigger them on your calendar or in a paper-based “tickler” system.

“Someday/Maybe” List

It’s highly likely that if you did a complete mind-sweep when you were collecting things out of your psychic RAM, you came up with some things you’re not sure you want to commit to. “Learn Spanish,” “Get Marcie a horse,” “Climb Mt, Washington,” and “Build a guest cottage” are typical projects that fall into this category.

If you haven’t already done it, I recommend that you create a “Someday/Maybe” list in whatever organizing system you’ve chosen. Then give yourself permission to populate that list with all the items of that type that have occurred to you so far.

Make an Inventory of Your Creative Imaginings What are the things you really might want to do someday if you have the time, money, and inclination? Write them on your have “Someday/Maybe” list. Typical categories include:

• Things to get or build for your home
  
• Hobbies to take up
  
• Skills to learn
  
• Creative expressions to explore
  
• Clothes and accessories to buy
  
• Toys (gear!) to acquire
  
• Trips to take
  
• Organizations to join
  
• Service projects to contribute to
  
• Things to see and do

Reassess Your Current Projects

Now’s a good time to review your “Projects” list from a more elevated perspective (that is, the standpoint of your job and goals) and consider whether you might transfer some of your current commitments to “Someday/Maybe.” If on reflection you realize that an optional project doesn’t have a chance of getting your attention for the next months or more, move it to this list.

Special Categories of “Someday/Maybe”

More than likely you have some special interests that involve lots of possible things to do. It can be fun to collect these on lists. For instance:

• Food—recipes, menus, restaurants, wines
  
• Children—things to do with them
  
• Books to read
  
• CDs to buy
  
• Videos to buy/rent
  
• Cultural events to attend
  
• Gift ideas
  
• Garden ideas
  
• Web sites to surf
  
• Weekend trips to take
  
• Meeting ideas
  
• Party ideas
  
• Ideas—Misc. (meaning you don’t know where else to put them!)

These kinds of lists can be a cross between reference and “Someday/Maybe”—reference because you can just collect and add to lists of good wines or restaurants or books, to consult as you like; “Someday/Maybe” because you might want to review the listed items on a regular basis to remind yourself to try one or more of them at some point.

The Danger of “Hold and Review” Files and Piles

I personally don’t recommend this particular kind of subsystem, because in virtually every case I have come across, the client “held” but didn’t “review,” and there was numbness and resistance about the stack. The value of “someday/maybe” disappears if you don’t put your conscious awareness back on it with some consistency.

Using the Calendar for Future Options

Your calendar can be a very handy place to park reminders of things you might want to consider doing in the future. Most of the people I’ve coached were not nearly as comfortable with their calendars as they could have been; otherwise they probably would have found many more things to put in there. One of the three uses of a calendar is for day-specific information. This category can include a number of things, but one of the most creative ways to utilize this function is to enter things that you want to take off your mind and reassess at some later date.

Here are a few of the myriad things you should consider inserting:

• Triggers for activating projects
  
• Events you might want to participate in
  
• Decision catalysts

Triggers for Activating Projects

If you have a project that you don’t really need to think about now but that deserves a flag at some point in the future, you can pick an appropriate date and put a reminder about the project in your calendar for that day. It should go in some day-specific (versus time-specific) calendar slot for the things you want to be reminded of on that day; then when the day arrives, you see the reminder and insert the item as an active project on your “Projects” list. Typical candidates for this treatment are:

• Special events with a certain lead time for handling (product launches, fund-raising drives, etc.)
  
• Regular events that you need to prepare for, such as budget reviews, annual conferences, planning events, or meetings (e.g., when should you add next year’s “annual sales conference” to your “Projects” list?)
  
• Key dates for significant people that you might want to do something about (birthdays, anniversaries, holiday gift-giving, etc.)

Events You Might Want to Participate In. Figure out when that “closer” time is and put a trigger in your calendar on the appropriate date—for example:

• “Chamber of Commerce breakfast tomorrow?”
  
• “Tigers season tickets go on sale today”
  
• “PBS special on Australia tonight 8:00 P.M.”
  
• “Church BBQ next Saturday”

If you can think of any jogs like these that you’d like to put into your system, do it right now.

Decision Catalysts

Once in a while there may be a significant decision that you need to make but can’t (or don’t want to) make right away. That’s fine, as long as you’ve concluded that the additional information you need has to come from an internal rather than an external source. But in order to move to a level of OK-ness about not deciding, you’d better put out a safety net that you can trust to get you to focus on the issue appropriately in the future. A calendar reminder can serve that purpose.

Some typical decision areas in this category include:

• Hire/fire
  
• Merge/acquire/sell/divest
  
• Change job/career

Go ahead and ask yourself, “Is there any major decision for which I should create a future trigger, so I can feel comfortable just ‘hanging out’ with it for now?” If there is, put some reminder in your calendar to revisit the issue.

The “Tickler” File

One elegant way to manage nonactionable items that may need an action in the future is the “tickler” file.* A three-dimensional version of a calendar, it allows you to hold physical reminders of things that you want to see or remember—not now, but in the future. It can be an extremely functional tool, allowing you to in effect set up your own post office and “mail” things to yourself for receipt on a designated future date.

Essentially the tickler is a simple file-folder system that allows you to distribute paper and other physical reminders in such a way that whatever you want to see on a particular date in the future “automatically” shows up that day in your in-basket.

Then every day of the week, that day’s folder is pulled and reviewed.

If you can integrate it into your life-style, you maintain your own tickler file. There are many useful functions it can perform, at least some of which you may want to avail yourself of outside the pale of your assistant’s responsibilities.

Bottom line: the tickler file demands only a one-second-per-day new behavior to make it work, and it has a payoff value logarithmically greater than the personal investment.

Setting Up a Tickler File

You need forty-three folders—thirty-one daily files labeled “1” through “31,” and twelve more labeled with the names of the months of the year. The daily files are kept in front, beginning with the file for tomorrow’s date (if today is October 5, then the first file would be “6”). The succeeding daily files represent the days of the rest of the month (“6” through “31”). Behind the “31” file is the monthly file for the next month (“November”), and behind that are the daily files “1” though “5.” Following that are the rest of the monthly files (“December” through “October”). The next daily file is emptied into your in-basket every day, and then the folder is refiled at the back of the dailies (at which point, instead of October 6, it represents November 6). In the same way, when the next monthly file reaches the front (on October 31 after you empty the daily file, the “November” file will be the next one, with the daily files “1” through “31” behind it), it’s emptied into the in-basket and refiled at the back of the monthlies to represent November a year from now. This is a “perpetual” file, meaning that at any given time it contains files for the next thirty-one days and the next twelve months.

The big advantage of using file folders for your tickler system is that they allow you to store actual documents (the form that needs to be filled out on a certain day, the memo that needs to be reviewed then, the telephone note that needs action on a specific date, etc.).

In order for the system to work, you must update it every day. If you forget to empty the daily file, you won’t trust the system to handle important data, and you’ll have to manage those things some other way. If you leave town (or don’t access the file on the weekend), you must be sure to check the folders for the days you’ll be away, before you go.

Checklists: Creative Reminders

The last topic in personal system organization that deserves some attention is the care and feeding of checklists, those recipes of potential ingredients for projects, events, and areas of value, interest, and responsibility. The most creative checklists are often generated at the back end of a good consulting process with a team or company. Good ones also show up as areas of focus for training staff or hiring into job slots.

What should you do with these “fuzzier” kinds of internal commitments and areas of attention?

First, Clarify Inherent Projects and Actions

For much of this kind of “stuff,” there is still a project and/or an action that needs to be defined. “Exercise more regularly” really translates for many people into “Set up regular exercise program” (project) and “Call Sally for suggestions about personal trainers” (real action step). In such cases, inherent projects and actions still need to be clarified and organized into a personal system. But there are some things that don’t quite fit into that category.

Blueprinting Key Areas of Work and Responsibility

Objectives like “Maintain good physical conditioning” or “Physical health and vitality” may still need to be built into some sort of overview checklist that will be reviewed regularly. You have multiple layers of outcomes and standards playing on your psyche and your choices at any point in time, and knowing what those are, at all the different levels, is always a good idea. I suggested earlier that there are at least six levels of your “work” that could be defined, and that each level deserves its own acknowledgment and evaluation. A complete inventory of everything you hold important and are committed to on each of those levels would represent an awesome checklist. It might include:

• Career goals
  
• Service
  
• Family
  
• Relationships
  
• Community
  
• Health and energy
  
• Financial resources
  
• Creative expression

And then moving down a level, within your job, you might want some reminders of your key areas of responsibility, your staff, your values, and so on. A list of these might contain points like:

• Team morale
  
• Processes
  
• Timelines
  
• Staff issues
  
• Workload
  
• Communication

All of these items could in turn be included on the lists in your personal system, as reminders to you, as needed, to keep the ship on course, on an even keel.

The More Novel the Situation, the More Control Is Required

If you’ve been doing what you’re doing for a long time, and there’s no pressure on you to change in that area, you probably need minimal external personal organization to stay on cruise control.

Many times you’ll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you’re more familiar with what you’re doing. And if you’ve just been hired into a new position, with new responsibilities that are relatively unfamiliar to you, you’ll want a framework of control and, structure, if only for the first few months.

Checklists at All Levels

Be open to creating any kind of checklist as the urge strikes you. The possibilities are endless—from “Core Life Values” to “Things to Take Camping.” Making lists, ad hoc, as they occur to you, is one of the most powerful yet subtlest and simplest procedures that you can install in your life.

Get comfortable with checklists, both ad hoc and more permanent. Be ready to create and eliminate them as required. Appropriately used, they can be a tremendous asset in personal productivity. If in fact you have now collected everything that represents an open loop in your life and work, processed each one of those items in terms of what it means to you and what actions are required, and organized the results into a complete system that holds a current and complete overview—large and small—of all your present and “someday” projects, then you’re ready for the next phase of implementation in the art of stress-free productivity—the review process.

8. Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional

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THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you’re doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are pre-requisites for that kind of control.

All of this means your system cannot be static. In order to support appropriate action choices, it must be kept up to date. And it should trigger consistent and appropriate evaluation of your life and work at several horizons.

There are two major issues that need to be handled at this point:

• What do you look at in all this, and when?
  
• What do you need to do, and how often, to ensure that all of it works as a consistent system, freeing you to think and manage at a higher level?

A real review process will lead to enhanced and proactive new thinking in key areas of your life and work. Such thinking emerges from both focused concentration and serendipitous brainstorming, which will be triggered and galvanized by a consistent personal review of your inventory of actions and projects.

What to Look At, When

Your personal system and behaviors need to be established in such a way that you can see all the action options you need to see, when you need to see them.

When you have access to a phone and any discretionary time, you ought to at least glance at the list of all the phone calls you need to make, and then either direct yourself to the best one to handle or give yourself permission to feel OK about not bothering with any of them. When you’re about to go in for a discussion with your boss or your partner, take a moment to review the outstanding agendas you have with him or her, so you’ll know that you’re using your time most effectively. When you need to pick up something at the dry cleaner’s, first quickly review all the other errands that you might be able to do en route.

“How much time do you spend looking at your system?” My answer is simply, “As much time as I need to to feel comfortable about what I’m doing.” Assuming that you’ve completely collected, processed, and organized your stuff, you’ll most likely take only a few brief moments here and there to access your system for day-to-day reminders.

Looking at Your Calendar First

Your most frequent review will probably be of your daily calendar, and your daily tickler folder if you’re maintaining one, to see the “hard landscape” and assess what has to get done. You need to know the time-and-space parameters first. Knowing that you have wall-to-wall meetings from 8:00 A.M. through 6:00 P.M., for example, with barely a half-hour break for lunch, will help you make necessary decisions about any other activities.

… Then Your Action Lists

After you review all your day- and time-specific commitments and handle whatever you need to about them, your next most frequent area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context. If you’re in your office, for instance, you’ll look at your lists of calls, computer actions, and in-office things to do. This doesn’t necessarily mean you will actually be doing anything on those lists; you’ll just evaluate them against the flow of other work coming at you to ensure that you make the best choices about what to deal with. You need to feel confident that you’re not missing anything critical. Frankly, if your calendar is trustworthy and your action lists are current, they may be the only things in the system you’ll need to refer to more than every couple of days.

The Right Review in the Right Context

You may need to access any one of your lists at any time. It will be highly functional for you to have your “Projects” list up to date and your “Agenda” list right at hand.

Updating Your System

The real trick to ensuring the trustworthiness of the whole organization system lies in regularly refreshing your psyche and your system from a more elevated perspective. That’s impossible to do, however, if your lists fall too far behind your reality.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all.

The Power of the Weekly Review

If you’re like me and most other people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you’re going to have the world come at you faster than you can keep up.

That whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, reevaluation, and reprocessing time to keep you in balance. There is simply no way to do this necessary regrouping while you’re trying to get everyday work done.

The Weekly Review will also sharpen your intuitive focus on your important projects as you deal with the flood of new input and potential distractions coming at you the rest of the week. You’re going to have to learn to say no—faster, and to more things—in order to stay afloat and comfortable. Having some dedicated time in which to at least get up to the project level of thinking goes a long way toward making that easier.

What Is the Weekly Review?

Very simply, the Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again. It’s going through the five phases of workflow management—collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding involvements—until you can honestly say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”

From a nitty-gritty, practical standpoint, here is the drill that can get you there:

Loose Papers Pull out all miscellaneous scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and so on that have crept into the crevices of your desk, clothing, and accessories. Put it all into your in-basket for processing.

Process Your Notes Review any journal entries, meeting notes, or miscellaneous notes scribbled on notebook paper. List action items, projects, waiting-fors, calendar events, and someday/ maybes, as appropriate. File any reference notes and materials.

Stage your “Read/Renew” material. Be ruthless with yourself, processing all notes and thoughts relative to interactions, projects, new initiatives, and input that have come your way since your last download, and purging those not needed.

Previous Calendar Data Review past calendar dates in detail for remaining action items, reference information, and so on, and transfer that data into the active system. Be able to archive your last week’s calendar with nothing left uncaptured.

Upcoming Calendar Look at future calendar events (long- and short-term). Capture actions about arrangements and preparations for any upcoming events.

Empty Your Head Put in writing (in appropriate categories) any new projects, action items, waiting-fors, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured.

Review “Projects” (and Larger Outcome) Lists Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that at least one current kick-start action for each is in your system.

Review “Next Actions” Lists

Review “Waiting For” List

Review Any Relevant Checklists

Review “Someday/Maybe” List

Review “Pending” and Support Files

Be Creative and Courageous

The Right Time and Place for the Review

The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it. Once your comfort zone has been established for the kind of relaxed control that Getting Things Done is all about, you won’t have to worry too much about making yourself do your review—you’ll have to to get back to your personal standards again.

Until then, do whatever you need to, once a week, to trick yourself into backing away from the daily grind for a couple of hours—not to zone out, but to rise up at least to “10,000 feet” and catch up.

I recommend that you block out two hours early every Friday afternoon for the review. Three factors make this an ideal time:

• The events of the week are likely to be still fresh enough for you to be able to do a complete postmortem (“Oh, yeah, I need to make sure I get back to her about…”).
  
• When you (invariably) uncover actions that require reaching people at work, you’ll still have time to do that before they leave for the weekend.
  
• It’s great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.

You may be the kind of person, however, who doesn’t have normal weekends.

Whatever your life-style, you need a weekly regrouping ritual. You likely have something like this (or close to it) already. If so, leverage the habit by adding into it a higher-altitude review process.

The “Bigger Picture” Reviews

Yes, at some point you must clarify the larger outcomes, the long-term goals, the visions and princi- ples that ultimately drive and test your decisions.

What are your key goals and objectives in your work? What should you have in place a year or three years from now? How is your career going? Is this the life-style that is most fulfilling to you? Are you doing what you really want or need to do, from a deeper and longer-term perspective?

The explicit focus of this book is not at those “30,000-” to “50,000+-foot” levels. Urging you to operate from a higher perspective is, however, its implicit purpose—to assist you in making your total life expression more fulfilling and better aligned with the bigger game we’re all about. As you increase the speed and agility with which you clear the “runway” and “10,000-foot” levels of your life and work, be sure to revisit the other levels you’re engaged in, now and then, to maintain a truly clear head.

How often you ought to challenge yourself with that type of wide-ranging review is something only you can know. The principle I must affirm at this juncture is this: You need to assess your life and work at the appropriate horizons, making the appropriate decisions, at the appropriate intervals, in order to really come clean.

Which brings us to the ultimate point and challenge of all this personal collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing methodology: It’s 9:22 A.M. Wednesday morning—what do you do?