Getting Things Done

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; This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson 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 access and think about when you need to, your brain can’t give up the job. You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you’ve come to the conclusions you need to, and whether you’ve put the resulting outcomes and action reminders in a place that can be trusted to resurface appropriately within your conscious mind.* If you haven’t done those things, it won’t quit working overtime. Even if you’ve already decided on the next step you’ll take to resolve a problem, your mind can’t let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look. It will keep pressuring you about that untaken next step, usually when you can’t do anything about it, which will just add to your stress.

Before you can achieve any of that, though, you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that, as we’ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all: you don’t 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, 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.

There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with.

Still others have good systems but don’t (4) reflect on the contents consistently enough to keep them functional. They may have lists, plans, and various checklists available to them (created by capturing, clarifying, and organizing), but they don’t keep them current or access them to their advantage. Many people don’t look ahead at their own calendars consistently enough to stay current about upcoming events and deadlines, and they consequently become victims of last-minute craziness.

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.

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.

Minute-to-minute and day-to-day you don’t have time to think. You need to have already thought.

Is your purpose clear and specific enough? If you’re truly experiencing the benefits of a purpose focus—motivation, clarity, decision-making criteria, alignment, and creativity—then your purpose probably is specific enough. But many purpose statements are too vague to produce such results. “To have a good team,” for example, might be too broad or vague a goal. After all, what constitutes a “good team”? Is it a group of people who are highly motivated, collaborating in healthy ways, and taking initiative? Or is it a team that comes in under budget? In other words, if you don’t really know when you’ve met your purpose or when you’re off track, you don’t have a viable directive. The question, “How will I know when this is off purpose?” must have a clear answer.

A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: “I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they . . .” As long as they what?

Things you name, you own. Collected but unnamed stuff owns you.

Reference materials need to be contained and organized within their own discrete boundaries—physically and digitally—so that they don’t cloud other categories in your system, are available for a specific purpose, and can be accessed efficiently.

You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-tray, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander to another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to you because you know right away what to do with it—and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmph” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.

Many people find that getting into the habit of following the two-minute rule creates a dramatic improvement in their productivity. One vice president of a large software company told me that it gave him an additional hour a day of quality discretionary time!

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness. —Jean de La Bruyère

Distributing action triggers in a folder, on lists, and/or in an e-mail system is perfectly OK, as long as you review all of the categories to which you’ve entrusted your triggers equally, as required. You don’t want things lurking in the recesses of your systems and not being used for their intended purpose: reminding you.

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. You actually won’t be working off of the Projects list during your moment-to-moment activities; for the most part, your calendar, action lists, and any unexpected tasks that come up will constitute your tactical and immediate focus. Remember, you can’t do a project; you can only do the action steps it requires. Being aware of the horizon represented by your projects, however, is critical for extending your comfort with your control and focus into longer reaches of time.

The real value of the Projects list lies in the complete review it can provide (at least once a week), ensuring 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. You’ll also know that you have an inventory available to you (and to others) whenever it seems advisable to evaluate workload(s).

the Weekly Review is the critical success factor for marrying your larger commitments to your day-to-day activities. And a complete Projects list remains the linchpin for that orientation. Ensuring weekly that you’re OK about what you’re doing (or not doing) with a dog for your kids, along with what you’re doing (or not doing) about next year’s conference, is an essential practice. But that Projects list must already be there, in at least a somewhat recent form, before you have the capability to think about things from that perspective.

To return to the previous example of moving into a new residence, you could have a folder labeled “Upgrades—37 Pinkerton Place” containing all the plans and details and notes about the patio and kitchen and office area. In your Weekly Review, when you came to “Upgrade new residence” on your Projects list, you’d pull out the file for that project and thumb through all your notes to ensure that you weren’t missing any possible next actions. Those actions would then get done, delegated, or deferred to your action lists, and the folder would be refiled until you needed it again for doing the actions or for your next Weekly Review.

The value of someday/maybe disappears if you don’t put your conscious awareness back onto it with some consistency.

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.

Very simply, the Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again and get oriented for the next couple of weeks. It’s going through the steps of workflow management—capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding commitments, intentions, and inclinations—until you can honestly say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”

If you have the luxury of an office or work space that can be somewhat isolated from the people and interactions of the day, and if you have anything resembling a typical five-day workweek, I recommend that you block out two hours early in the afternoon of your last workday for the review.

How long does it take to change a goal or picture of what you want? Not much time, if any. How long will it take you to feel confident that you can deliver to yourself the outcomes you commit to? My experience is that it will be at least two years of implementing and habituating this methodology to get to that level of self-confidence. That’s not bad news—it’s just news.

Which brings us to the ultimate point and challenge of all this personal capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reflecting methodology: It’s 9:22 a.m. Wednesday morning—what do you do?

A second real benefit accrues from organizing action reminders by appropriate context: in itself that forces you to make the all-important determination about the next physical action on your stuff. All of my action lists are set up this way, so I have to decide on the very next physical action before I can know which list to put an item on. (Is this something that requires the computer? A phone? Being in a store? Talking in real time with my wife?) People who give themselves a Miscellaneous action list (i.e. one not specific in context) often let themselves slide in the next-action decision, too.

This is one of the best reasons for having very clean edges to your personal management system: it makes it easy to continue doing productive activity when you’re not in top form.

These first three criteria for choosing action (context, time, and energy) bespeak the need for a complete next-action reminder system. Much of the time you won’t be in a mode to do that kind of coordinated and organized thinking; it needs to have already been done. If it is, you can operate much more “in your zone” and choose from delineated actions that fit the situation.

These are all understandable judgment calls. But the angst begins to mount when the other actions on your lists are not reviewed and renegotiated by you or between you and everyone else. The constant sacrifices of not doing the work you have defined on your lists can be tolerated only if you know what you’re not doing. That requires regular processing of your in-tray (defining your work) and consistent review of complete lists of all your predetermined work.

Another reason people consider unexpected demands or requests negative is because they don’t trust their own system and behaviors to be able to put a “bookmark” on any resulting action that needs to be taken, or on the work they’re doing at the moment. They know they need do something about the new work that just showed up, but they don’t trust that a simple note in their own in-tray will ensure it is handled with proper timing. So they stop their previous work and immediately go do what was just requested or required of them, complaining about the interruption that just disturbed their life. There are no interruptions, really—there are simply mismanaged occurrences.

Research has now proven that you can’t actually multitask, i.e. put conscious focused attention on more than one thing at a time; and if you are trying to, it denigrates your performance considerably. If your head is your only system for placeholding, you will experience an attempted multitasking internally, which is psychologically impossible and the source of much stress for many people. If you have established practices for parking still-incomplete items midstream, however, your focus can shift cleanly from one to the next and back again, with the precision of a martial artist who appears to fight four people at once, but who in reality is simply rapidly shifting attention.

And to achieve the most pristine level of “mind like water” (nothing on your mind except what’s present in the moment), Horizon 1 is the level that seems to incorporate some of the most interesting challenges. For all of us, there are situations and circumstances that emerge that bother, interest, or distract us, but with which it is not immediately obvious or evident how to engage. Your son has a problem with his math teacher; you are frustrated with how long it takes to implement a procedure in your company; you have a concern about the person running your fund-raising committee; you keep thinking you ought to be rekindling your interest in painting; etc. Quieting that subtle noise requires identifying objective outcomes for each of those (a project), with accompanying next actions placed into your trusted system. Playing consistently at this level of the stress-free productivity game is a hallmark of its mastery.

Some of the projects that have your attention right now will require you to do your own free-form thinking; this is especially true of those for which you were not clear about what the next action would be when you made that decision. These should all have a next action, such as “Draft ideas re X.”

The key is to get comfortable with having and using your ideas. And to acquire the habit of focusing your energy constructively, on intended outcomes and open loops, before you have to.

The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.

But what are all those things in your in-tray? Agreements you’ve made or at least implicitly accepted with yourself—things you somehow have told yourself you should deal with in some way. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and then don’t—voila! anxious and overwhelmed.

In my experience, anything that is held only in your head will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important; it’s that it’s not. Incompletions, uncaptured, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

I especially notice this when I walk around organizations where in-trays are either nonexistent or overflowing and obviously long unprocessed. These cultures usually suffer from serious “interrupt-itis” because they can’t trust putting communications into the system. I come across executives whose calendars are insanely overbooked but who, when they begin to give timely responses to their e-mails, experience a dramatic relief from that pressure. When their staff and others are getting what they need in terms of appropriate feedback and decisions through that virtual medium, they no longer need the kind of face-to-face time they previously tried to get with meetings.

People often grimace when I tell them that my wife and I put things in each other’s in-trays, even when we’re sitting within a few feet of each other; to them it seems cold and mechanical. Aside from being an act of politeness intended to avoid interrupting the other’s work in progress, the practice actually fosters more warmth and freedom between us, because mechanical things are being handled in the system instead of tying up our attention on the relationship.

If you have truly captured all the things that have your attention during the mind sweep, go through the list again now and decide on the single very next action to take on every one of them.

In following up with people who have begun to implement this methodology, I’ve discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. They’re still ahead of most people because they’re actually writing things down, but they often find themselves stuck, and procrastinating,

Is this extra work? Is figuring out the next action on your commitments additional effort that you don’t need to expend? No, of course not. If you need to get your car tuned, for instance, you’re going to have to figure out that next action at some point anyway. The problem is that most people wait to do it until the next action is “Call the Auto Club for tow truck!”

When you make plans (implementation intentions) ahead of time and decide what actions will be carried out in which contexts, the proper behavior is nearly automatically enacted instead of being drawn from your limited reserve of willpower.

The good news is that it’s as easy to get back into your productive groove as it may have been to get knocked out of it. It simply requires revisiting the basics: get a pen and paper and empty your head again; clean up your lists of actions and projects; identify and add new projects and next actions to bring your lists current; clean up what’s leaked outside your system. This cycle of getting off track and getting back on again happens to almost everyone—particularly during this first level of mastering the basics of the game. In my experience it can easily take as long as two years to finally get this stage of practice fully integrated into one’s life and work style, and consistently maintained.

Another piece of good news is that even if a person has gleaned only a few concepts from this material, or has not implemented the system regularly, it can bring marked improvement. If you “get” nothing more than the two-minute rule, it will be worth its weight in gold. If you just write down a few more things on your mind than you would have previously, you’ll sleep better. If you clean up e-mail to zero at least every once in a while, you will have great cause for celebration. And if you simply ask, “What’s the next action?” of yourself or anyone else when you might not have otherwise, it will add to your stress-free productivity.

A signpost of GTD mastery at this stage—and, indeed, life mastery!—is when one recognizes anything that has his or her attention (concerns, worries, problems, issues, tensions) and translates them into achievable outcomes (projects), to be executed with concrete next actions. Most people resist acknowledging issues and opportunities until they know they can be handled successfully, not realizing that exploring, looking into, or in some way accepting or putting something to bed because there is no solution is an appropriate outcome (project) itself.

You actually do a Weekly Review in the middle of the week because you need that kind of elevated focus to recalibrate your work, instead of reverting back to latest-and-loudest as your priority criterion.

Once you really know and trust you can and will execute effectively anything that lands in your in-tray, you will have the freedom to toss anything into your own in-tray, whether it’s your next crazy idea, a possible new technology to research, a book you might want to write, or an NGO Web site that almost brought you to tears that you’d like to support. The power to produce produces powerful possibilities.

Software technology will continue to advance the automation of workflow, with CRMs and other applications programmed to trigger action reminders, etc. In theory this would reduce the need for individual tracking of such items. In practice, each person still must engage with the work he or she is accountable for, generated by the software, and managing that within his or her holistic system. Additionally, the variables in our engagements and their activities are often so subtle and fast changing, even the most sophisticated technology will fall short of being totally trusted for such detailed direction in the foreseeable future.