Getting Things Done (7 page)

Any less-than-two-minute actions that you perform, and all other actions that have already been completed, do not, of course, 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).

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 type of reminder.

Three things go on your calendar:

Time-Specific Actions
This is a fancy name for appointments. Often the next action to be taken on a project is attending a meeting that has been set up to discuss it. Simply tracking that on the calendar is sufficient.

 

Day-Specific Actions
These are things that you need to do
sometime
on a certain day, but not necessarily at a
specific
time. Perhaps you told Mioko you would call her on Friday to check that the report you’re sending her is OK. She won’t have the report until Thursday, and she’s leaving the country on Saturday, so Friday is the time window for taking the action—but anytime Friday will be fine. That should be tracked on the calendar for Friday but not tied to any particular time slot—it should just go on the day. It’s useful to have a calendar on which you can note both time-specific and day-specific actions.

 

Day-Specific Information
The calendar is also the place to keep track of things you want to
know
about on specific days—not necessarily
actions
you’ll have to take but rather
information
that may be useful on a certain date. This might include directions for appointments, activities that other people (family or staff) will be involved in then, or events of interest. It’s also helpful to put short-term “tickler” information here, too, such as a reminder 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! I know this is heresy to traditional time-management training, which has almost universally taught that the “daily to-do list” is key. But such lists don’t work, for two reasons.

First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time. Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment. Trying to keep a list in writing on the calendar, which must then be rewritten on another day if items don’t get done, is demoralizing and a waste of time. The “Next Actions” lists I advocate will hold all of those action reminders, even the most time-sensitive ones. And they won’t have to be rewritten daily.

Second, if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely
have
to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly
do
. If I
have
to call Mioko on Friday because that’s the only day I can reach her, but then I add five other, less important or less time-sensitive calls to my to-do list, when the day gets crazy I may never call Mioko. My brain will have to take back the reminder that that’s the one phone call I won’t get another chance at. That’s not utilizing the system appropriately. The way I look at it, 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.

So where do all your 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. “Call Jim Smith re budget meeting,” “Phone Rachel and Laura’s moms about sleepaway camp,” and “Draft ideas re the annual sales conference” are all the kinds of action reminders that need to be kept in appropriate lists, or buckets, to be assessed as options for what we will do at any point in time.

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 most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150. In that case it makes sense to subdivide your “Next Actions” list into categories, such as “Calls” to make when you’re at a phone or “Project Head Questions” to be asked at your weekly briefing.

You need well-organized, discrete systems to handle the items that require no action as well as the ones that do. No-action systems fall into three categories:
trash, incubation,
and
reference
.

Trash
should be self-evident. Throw away anything that has no potential future action or reference value. If you leave this stuff mixed in with other categories, it will seriously undermine the system.

There are two other groups of things besides trash that require no immediate action, but this stuff you will want to
keep
. Here again, it’s critical that you separate nonactionable from actionable items; otherwise you will tend to go numb to your piles, stacks, and lists and not know where to start or what needs to be done.

Say you pick up something from a memo, or read an e-mail, that gives you an idea for a project you
might
want to do someday, but not now. You’ll want to be reminded of it again later so you can reassess the option of doing something about it in the future. For example, a brochure arrives in the mail for the upcoming season of your local symphony. On a quick browse, you see that the program that really interests you is still four months away—too distant for you to move on it yet (you’re not sure what your travel schedule will be that far out), but if you
are
in town, you’d like to go. What should you do about that?

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

 

“Someday/Maybe”
It can be useful and inspiring to 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.

Get a bass-fishing boat

Learn Spanish

Take a watercolor class

Get a sideboard for the kitchen

Build a lap pool

Get Kathryn a scooter

Take a balloon ride

Build a wine cellar

Take a trip through Montana

Learn Photoshop software capabilities

Set up a not-for-profit foundation

Create promotional videos of staff

Find Stafford Lyons

Get a digital video camera

Northern Italy trip

Apprentice with my carpenter

Spotlight our artwork

Build a koi pond

Digitize old photos and videos

Have a neighborhood party

Set up remote-server access at home

 

 

 

You’ll probably have some subcategories in your master “Someday/Maybe” list, such as

You must review this list periodically if you’re going to get the most value from it. I suggest you include a scan of the contents in your Weekly Review (see page 46).

 

“Tickler” File
The most elegant version of holding for review is the “tickler” file, sometimes also referred to as a “suspended” or “follow-on” 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. You might remind yourself on your calendar for March 15, for example, that your taxes are due in a month; or for September 12, that
Swan Lake
will be presented by the Bolshoi at the Civic Auditorium in six weeks.

For further details, refer to chapter 7.

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—anything from the menu for a local take-out deli to the plans, drawings, and vendor information for a landscape project—is best stored in efficient physical-retrieval systems. These can range from pages in a loose-leaf planner or notebook, for a list of favorite restaurants or the phone numbers of the members of a school committee, to whole file cabinets dedicated to the due-diligence paperwork for a corporate merger.

Electronic storage can include everything from networked database information to ad hoc reference and archive folders located in your communication software.

The most important thing to remember here is that reference should be exactly that—information that can be
easily
referred to when required. Reference systems generally take two forms: (1) topic- and area-specific storage, and (2) general-reference files. The first types usually define themselves in terms of how they are stored—for example, a file drawer dedicated to contracts, by date; a drawer containing only confidential employee-compensation information; or a series of cabinets for closed legal cases that might need to be consulted during future trials.

 

General-Reference Filing
The second type of reference system is one that everyone needs close at hand for storing ad hoc information that doesn’t belong in some predesignated category. You need somewhere to keep the instruction manual for your cell phone, the notes from the meeting about the Smith project, and those few yen that you didn’t get to change at the end of your last trip to Tokyo (and that you’ll use when you go back there).

The lack of a good general-reference file can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal action-management system. If filing isn’t easy and fast (and even fun!), you’ll tend to stack things instead of filing them. If your reference material doesn’t have a nice clean edge to it, the line between actionable and nonactionable items will blur, visually and psychologically, and your mind will go numb to the whole business. Establishing a good working system for this category of material is critical to ensuring stress-free productivity; we will explore it in detail in chapter 7.

It’s one thing to write down that you need milk; it’s another to be at the store and
remember
it. Likewise, writing down that you need to call a friend for the name of an estate attorney is different from remembering it when you’re at a phone and have some discretionary time.

You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels. For most people the magic of workflow management is realized in the consistent use of the review phase. This is where you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops, at what I call the 10,000-foot level (see page 51), 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.

If you set up a personal organization system structured as I recommend, 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 probably review most frequently is your calendar, which will remind you about the “hard landscape” for the day—that is, what things will die if you don’t do them. This doesn’t mean that the things written on there are the most “important” in some grand sense—only that they have to get done. At at any point in time, knowing what
has
to get done, and when, creates a terrain for maneuvering. It’s a good habit, as soon as you conclude an action on your calendar (a meeting, a phone call, the final draft of a report), 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 (“At Home,” “At Computer,” “In Meeting with George”), 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.

Everything that might potentially require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding. In order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some more elevated level. In my experience (with thousands of people), that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review.