Getting Things Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

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

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. To that end, I'll provide a logical sequence of things to do, to make it as easy as possible for you to get on board and glean the most value from these techniques.

If you're not sure you're committed to an all-out implementation of these methods, let me assure you that a lot of the value people get from this material is good "tricks." Sometimes just one good trick can make it worthwhile to range through this information: I've had people tell me, for example, that the best thing they got from my two-day seminar was advice on setting up and using a tickler file. Tricks are for the not-so-smart, not-so-conscious part of us. To a great degree, the highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives. I know that's true of me. The smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part responds to almost automatically, creating behavior that produces high-performance results. We trick our-selves into doing what we ought to be doing.

For instance, if you're a semiregular exerciser like me, you probably have your own little tricks to get you to exercise. My best trick is costume—the clothing I put on or take off. If I put on exercise gear, I'll start to feel like exercising; if I don't, I'm very likely to feel like doing something else. Let's look at an example of a real productivity trick. You've probably taken work home that you had to bring back the next day, right? It was mission-critical that you not forget it the next morning. So where did you put it the night before? Did you put it in front of the door, or on your keys, so you'd be sure to take it with you? For this you got a higher education? What a sophisticated piece of self-management technology you've installed in your life! But actually that's just what it is. The smart part of you the night before knows that the not-so-smart part of you first thing in the morning may barely be conscious. "What's this in front of the door!? Oh, that's right, I've got to take this with me!" What a class act. But really, it is. It's a trick I call Put It in Front of the Door. For our purposes the "door" is going to be the door of your mind, not your house. But it's the same idea.

If you were to take out your calendar right now and look closely at every single item for the next fourteen days, you'd probably come up with at least one "Oh-that-reminds-me-I-need-to_____________." If you then captured that value-added thought into some place that would trigger you to act, you'd feel better already, have a clearer head, and get more positive things done. It's not rocket science, just a good trick.

If you take out a clean sheet of paper right now, along with your favorite writing instrument, and for three minutes focus solely on the most awesome project on your mind, I guarantee you'll have at least one "Oh, yeah, I need to consider __." Then capture what shows up in your head on the piece of paper and put it where you might actually use the idea or information. You won't be one ounce smarter than you were ten minutes ago, but you'll have added value to your work and life.

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 below 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.

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 whole days, back to back. (Don't be put off by that if you don't have that long to spend, though: doing any of the activities I suggest will be useful, no matter how much or how little time you devote to them. Two days are not required to benefit from these techniques and principles — they will start to pay off almost instantly.) Implementing the full collection process can take up to six hours or more, and processing and deciding on actions for all the input you'll want to externalize and capture into your system can easily take another eight hours. Of course you can also collect and process your stuff in chunks, but it'll be much easier if you can tackle that front-end portion in one fell swoop.

The ideal time for me to work with a professional is on a weekend or holiday because the chance of outside disturbance is minimal then. If I work with someone on a typical workday, we first make sure that no meetings are scheduled and only emergency interruptions are allowed; phone calls are routed to voice-mail, or logged by secretaries for review and handling during a break. I don't recommend using "after hours" for this work. It usu ally means seriously reduced horsepower and a big tendency to get caught up in "rabbit trails."[4]

For many of the executives I work with, holding the world back for two contiguous days is the hardest part of the whole process— the perceived necessity to be constantly available for meetings and communications when they're "at work" is difficult for them to let go of. That's why we often resort to weekends. If you work in an open cubicle or office, it will be even more of a challenge to isolate sufficient time blocks on a regular workday during office hours.

It's not that the procedure itself is so "sacred"; it's just that it takes a lot of psychic energy to collect and process such a large inventory of open loops, especially when they've been "open," "undecided," or "stuck" for way too long. Interruptions can double the time it takes to get through everything. If you can get to ground zero in one contained time period, it gives you a huge sense of control and accomplishment and frees up a reservoir of energy and creativity. Later on you can maintain your system in shorter spurts around and "between the lines" of you regular day.

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. If you work from a home office, obviously that will be your prime location. If you already have both, you'll want to establish identical, even inter-changeable systems in both places.

The basics for a work space are just a writing surface and room for an in-basket. Some people, such as a foreman in a machine shop, an intake nurse on a hospital floor, or your children's nanny, won't need much more than that. The writing sur face 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. The seriously self-contained will also want gear for exercise, leisure, and hobbies.

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

If I had to set up an emergency workstation in just a few minutes, I would buy a door, put it on top of two two-drawer filing cabinets (one at each end), place three stack-baskets on it, and add a legal pad and pen. That would be my home base (if I had time to sit down, I'd also buy a stool!). Believe it or not, I've been in several executive offices that wouldn't be as functional.

If You Go to an Office, You'll Still Need a Space at Home

Don't skimp on work space at home. As you'll discover through this process, it's critical that you have at least a satellite home system identical to the one in your office. Many people I've worked with have been somewhat embarrassed by the degree of chaos that reigns in their homes, in contrast to their offices at work; they've gotten tremendous value from giving themselves permission to establish the same setup in both places.

If you're like many of them, you'll find that a week-end spent setting up a home workstation can make a revolutionary change in your ability to organize your life.

An Office Space in Transit

If you move around much, as a business traveler or just as a person with a mobile life-style, you'll also want to set up an efficiently organized micro-office-in-transit. More than likely this will consist of a briefcase, pack, or satchel with appropriate folders and portable workstation supplies.

Many people lose opportunities to be productive because they're not equipped to take advantage of the odd moments and windows of time that open up as they move from one place to another, or when they're in off-site environments. The combination of a good processing style, the right tools, and good interconnected systems at home and at work can make traveling a highly leveraged way to get certain kinds of work done.

Don't Share Space! It

is imperative that you have your own work space — or at least your own in-basket and a physical place in which to process paper. Too many married couples I've worked with have tried to work out of a single desk at home, and it always makes light-years of difference when they expand to two workstations. Far from being the "separation" they expect, the move in fact relieves them of a subtle stress in their relationship about managing the stuff of their shared lives. One couple even decided to set up an additional mini-workstation in the kitchen for the stay-at-home mom, so she could process work while keeping an eye on their infant in the family room.

Some organizations are interested in the concept of "hoteling" — that is, having people create totally self-contained and mobile workstation capabilities so they can "plug in" anywhere in the company, at any time, and work from there. I have my doubts about how well that concept will work in practice. A friend who was involved in setting up an "office of the future" model in Washington, D.C., for the U.S. government, claimed that hoteling tended to fall apart because of the "Mine!" factor — people wanted their own stuff. I suggest there's a deeper reason for the failure: there needs to be zero resistance at the less-than-conscious level for us to use the systems we have. Having to continually reinvent our in-basket, our filing system, and how and where we process our stuff can only be a source of incessant distraction.

You can work virtually everywhere if you have a clean, compact system and know how to process your stuff rapidly and portably. But you'll still need a "home base" with a well-grooved set of tools and sufficient space for all the reference and support material that you'll want somewhere close at hand-when you "land." Most people I work with need at least four file drawers for their general-reference and project-support types of paper-based materials — and it's hard to imagine that all of that could ever be totally and easily movable.

If you're committed to a full implementation of this workflow process, 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. Often, on the low-tech side, the more "executive" something looks, the more dysfunctional it really is.

The Basic Processing Tools

Let's assume you're starting 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 (3X3s)

• Paper clips

• Binder clips

• A stapler and staples

• Scotch tape

• Rubber bands

• An automatic labeler

• File folders

• A calendar

• Wastebasket/recycling bins

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. The most functional trays are the side-facing letter or legal stackable kinds, which have no "lip" on them to keep you from sliding out a single piece of paper.

Plain Paper

You'll use plain paper for the initial collection process. Believe it or not, putting one thought on one full-size sheet of paper can have enormous value. Although most people will wind up processing their notes into some sort of list organizer, a few will actually stick with the simple piece-of-paper-per-thought system. In any case, 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. We're not finished with paper yet (if you haven't noticed!), and the simple tools for managing it are essential.

The Labeler

The labeler is a surprisingly critical tool in our work. Thousands of executives and professionals and homemakers I have worked with now have their own automatic labelers, and my archives are full of their comments, like, "Incredible — I wouldn't have believed what a difference it makes!" The labeler will be used to label your file folders, binder spines, and numerous other things.

At this writing, I recommend the Brother labeler — it's the most user-friendly. Get the least expensive one that sits on a desk and has an AC adapter (so you won't have to worry about batter ies). 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 might want to reuse.

You can get software and printer sheets to make computer-generated labels, but I prefer the stand-alone tool. If you have to wait to do your filing or labeling as a batch job, you'll most likely resist making files for single pieces of paper, and it'll add the formality factor, which really puts the brakes on this system.

File Folders

You'll need plenty of file folders (get letter size if you can, legal size if you must). You may also need an equal number of Pendaflex-style file-folder hangers, if your filing system requires them. 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

Although you may not need a calendar just to collect your incomplete items, you'll certainly come up with actions that need to be put there, too. As I noted earlier, 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.

Most professionals these days already have some sort of working calendar system in place, ranging 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, to group-ware calendars used company wide, like Out-look or Lotus Notes.

The calendar has often been the central tool that people rely on to "get organized." It's certainly a critical component in man-aging 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 calendar 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, and I'll discuss that in more detail in the next chapter. For now, just keep using the one you've got. 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.

Wastebasket/Recycling Bins

If you're like most people, you're going to toss a lot more stuff than you expect, so get ready to create a good bit of trash. Some executives I have coached have found it extremely useful to arrange for a large Dumpster to be parked immediately outside their offices the day we work together!

Do You Need an Organizer?

Whether or not you'll need an organizer will depend on a number of factors. Are you already committed 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? Because your head is not the place in which to hold things, you'll obviously need something to manage your triggers externally. 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 — maintain ing a project inventory, logging calendar items and action and agenda reminders, and tracking the things you're waiting for— will require some form of 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 per-son 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 a "Calls" category in the "To Do" section of a Palm PDA or in Microsoft Outlook "Tasks").

In addition to holding portable reference material (e.g., telephone/address info), most organizers are designed for managing lists. (Your calendar is actually a form of a list — with time-and day-specific action reminders listed chronologically.) Probably thousands of types of organizers have been on the market since the 1980s, from the early rash of pocket Day-Timers to the current flood of high-tech personal digital assistants (PDAs) and PC-based software products like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.

Should you implement the Getting Things Done process into what you're currently using, or should you install something new? The answer is, do whichever one will actually help you change your behavior so you'll use the tools appropriately. There are efficiency factors to consider here, too. Do you get a lot of digital information that would be easier to track with a digital tool? Do you need a paper-based calendar for all the appointments you have to make and change rapidly on the run? Do you need reminders of things like calls you have to make when it's not easy to carry file folders? And so on. There are also the aesthetic and enjoyment factors. I've done some of my best planning and updating for myself when I simply wanted some excuse to use (i.e., play with) my Palm organizer while waiting for dinner in a restaurant!

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 filing system at hand is the first thing I assess before beginning the workflow process in anyone's office. As I noted in chapter 2, the lack of a good general-reference sys tern can be one of the greatest obstacles to implementing a personal management system, and for most of the executives I have personally coached, it represents one of the biggest opportunities for improvement. Many times I have driven to the local office-supply store with a client and bought a filing cabinet, a big stock of file folders, and a labeler, just so we could create an appropriate place in which to put two-thirds of the "stuff" lying around his/her desk and credenza and even on the office floors.

We're concerned here mostly with general-reference filing— as distinct from discrete filing systems devoted to contracts, financial information, or other categories 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).

If you have a trusted secretary or assistant who maintains that system for you, so you can put a "File as X" Post-it on the document and send it "out" to him or her, great. But ask yourself if you still have some personally interesting or confidential support material that should be accessible at any moment, even when your assistant isn't around. If so, you'll still need your own system, either in your desk or right beside it somewhere.

Success Factors 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. Take heart: I've seen people go from resisting to actually enjoying sorting through their stacks once their personal filing system is set up and humming.

You must feel equally comfortable about filing a single piece of paper on a new topic — even a scribbled note — in its own file as you would about filing a more formal, larger document. Because it requires so much work to make and organize files, people either don't keep them or have junked-up cabinets and drawers full of all sorts of one-of-a-kind items, like a menu for the local take-out cafe or the current train schedule.

Whatever you need to do to get your reference system to that quick and easy standard for everything it has to hold, do it. My system works wonderfully for me and for many others who try it, and 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 you 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 (because you subconsciously know there's stuff in there that might need filing!). Many people I have coached have redesigned their office space so they have four general-reference file drawers literally in "swivel distance," instead of across their room.

One Alpha System I have one A — Z alphabetical filing system, not multiple systems. People have a tendency to want to use their files as a personal organization system, and therefore they attempt to organize them by projects or areas of focus. This magnifies geometrically the number of places something isn't when you forget where you filed it. 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. You can usually put at least one subset of topics on each label, like "Gardening— pots" and "Gardening — ideas." These would be filed under G.

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 recommended including it in the single general alphabetical system.

Have Lots of Fresh Folders I keep a giant stack of fresh, new file folders instantly at hand and reachable from where I sit to process my in-basket. Nothing is worse than having something to file and not having an abundance of folders to grab from to make the process easy. At any given time I want to have an inventory of almost half a file drawer full of unused or reusable folders. Rule of thumb: reorder when the number drops below a hundred.

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. If a drawer is starting to get tight, I may purge it while I'm on hold on the phone.

I know almost no one who doesn't have overstuffed file drawers. If you value your cuticles, and if you want to get rid of your unconscious resistance to filing, then you must keep the drawers loose enough that you can insert and retrieve files without effort.

Some people's reaction to this is "I'd have to buy more file cabinets!" as if that were something horrible. Help me out here. If the stuff is worth keeping, it's worth keeping so that it's easily accessible, right? And if it's not, then why are you keeping it? It's said that we're in the Information Age; if there's any validity to that, and if you're doing anything that hinders your usage of it… not smart.

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 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 Typeset labels change the nature of your files and your relationship to them. 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 brief-case; and when you open your file drawers, you get to see what looks almost like a printed index of your files in alphabetical order. It makes it fun to open the drawer to find or insert things.

Perhaps later in this new millennium the brain scientists will give us some esoteric and complex neurological explanation for why labeled files work so effectively. Until then, trust me. Get a labeler. And get your own. To make the whole system work without a hitch, you'll need to have it at hand all the time, so you can file something whenever you want. And don't share! If you have something to file and your labeler's not there, you'll just stack the material instead of filing it. The labeler should be as basic a tool as your stapler.

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! that happens when you wrestle with the roller bearings on one of those $29.95 "special sale" cabinets. You really need a file cabinet whose drawer, even when it's three-quarters full, will glide open and click shut with the smoothness and solidity of a door on a German car. I'm not kidding.

Get Rid of Hanging Files If You Can At the risk of seriously offending a lot of people who are already using hanging files, I recommend that you totally do away with the hanging-file hard-ware and use just plain folders standing up by themselves in the file drawer, held up by the movable metal plate in the back. Hanging folders are much less efficient because of the effort it takes to make a new file ad hoc and the formality that imposes on the filing system.

Here's an e-mail I received recently from a senior manager who actually took my advice after avoiding it for a couple of years because of his investment in the hanging hardware:

Your system is FANTASTIC!! I've completely redone my files at home and at work — it only took a combined four days to do it, but I've done away with Pendaflex and have gone to the manila folder system, with A-Z and nothing else. WOW! It's so much easier. My desk for some reason is a lot neater, too, without those stacks of "to be filed" stuff hanging around!

But If You Can't . . Many people are stuck with the hanging-file system, at least at work, because side-opening hanging-folder filing cabinets have become standard corporate issue. If you have to work with hanging files, then I recommend that you:

• Label the files, not the hangers. That lets you carry the file folders for meetings and when traveling, without taking the hanger.

• Use only one file folder per hanger.This will keep the drawer visually neat and prevent the weirdness that results when multiple files make a hanger uneven. Having to recalibrate files in an alpha system every time a folder gets full is too much trouble.

• Keep a big supply of plain hangers and new file folders in the front of your first file drawer so you can make new files and store them in a flash.

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." You know everything will be reassessed within a few months anyway, and you can redecide then what's worth keeping and what isn't. As I say, I purge my files while I'm on hold on the phone (or marking time on a conference call that's dragging on and on!).

I recommend that all organizations (if they don't have one already) establish a Dumpster Day, when all employees get to come to work in sneakers and jeans, put their phones on do-not-disturb, and get current with all their stored stuff.[5] Dumpsters are brought in, and everyone has permission to spend the whole day in purge mode. A personal Dumpster Day is an ideal thing to put into your tickler file, either during the holidays, at year's end, or around early-spring tax-preparation time, when you might want to tie it in with archiving the previous year's financial files.

You've blocked off some time, you've gotten a work area set up, and you've got the basic tools to start implementing the methodology. Now what?

If you've decided to commit a certain amount of time to set ting 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.

If there's someone you absolutely need to call, or something your secretary has to handle for you or you have to check with your spouse about, do it now. Or make an agreement with your self about when you will do it, and then put some reminder of that where you won't miss it. It's critical that your full psychic attention be available for the work at hand.

Almost without exception, when I sit down to begin coaching people, even though they've blocked out time and committed significant money to utilize me as a resource for that time, they still have things they're going to have to do before we quit for the day, and they haven't arranged for them yet in their own systems. "Oh, yeah, I've got to call this client back sometime today," they'll say, or "I have to check in with my spouse to see if he's gotten the tickets for tonight." It bespeaks a certain lack of awareness and maturity in our culture, I think, that so many sophisticated people are ignoring those levels of responsibility to their own psyche, on an ongoing operational basis.

So have you handled all that? Good. Now it's time to gather representatives of all of your open loops into one place.

5. Collection: Corralling Your "Stuff"

IN CHAPTER 2 I described the basic procedures for collecting your work. This chapter will lead you in more detail through the process of getting all your incompletes, all your "stuff," into one place — into "in." That's the critical first step in getting to the state of "mind like water." Just gathering a few more things than you currently have will probably create a positive feeling for you. But if you can hang in there and really do the whole collection process, 100 percent, it will change your experience dramatically and give you an important new reference point for being on top of your work.

When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did take all of twenty hours with one person (finally I told him, "You get the idea"). It can take longer than you think if you are committed to a full-blown capture that will include everything at work and everywhere 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.

Be assured that if you give yourself at least a couple of hours to tackle this part, you can grab the major portion of things out-standing. And you can even capture the rest by creating relevant placeholding notes — for example, "Purge and process boat storage shed" and "Deal with hall closet."

In the real world, you probably won't be able to keep your stuff 100 percent collected all of the time. If you're like most people, you'll move too fast and be engaged in too many things during the course of a week to get all your ideas and commitments captured outside your head. But it should become an ideal standard that keeps you motivated to consistently "clean house" of all the things about your work and life that have your attention.

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

1. it's helpful to have a sense of the volume of stuff you have to deal with;

2. it lets you know where the "end of the tunnel" is; and

3. when you're processing and organizing, you don't want to be distracted psychologically 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 daunting 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. It wasn't an urgent thing when it first showed up, and probably nothing's blown up yet because it hasn't been dealt with. It's the business card you put in your wallet of somebody you thought you might want to contact sometime. It's the little piece of techno-gear in the bottom desk drawer that you're missing a part for. It's the printer that you keep telling yourself you're going to move to a better location in your office. These are the kinds of things that nag at you but that 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. Keep in mind, you can feel good about what you're not doing, only when you know what you're not doing.

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

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 decision about 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 in. 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. Stationery, business cards, stamps, staples, Post-it pads, legal pads, paper clips, ballpoint refills, batteries, forms you need to fill out from time to time, rubber bands — all of these qualify. Many people also have a "personal supplies" drawer at work containing dental floss, Kleenex, breath mints, and so on.

Reference Material … is anything you simply keep for information as needed, such as manuals for your software, the local take-out 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.

You no doubt have a lot of things that fall into these four categories — basically all your tools and your gear, which have no actions tied to them. Everything else goes into "in." But many of the things you might initially interpret as supplies, reference, decoration, or equipment could also have action associated with them because they still aren't exactly the way they need to be.

For instance, most people have, in their desk drawers and on their credenzas and bulletin boards, a lot of reference materials that either are out of date or need to be organized somewhere else. Those should go into "in." Likewise, if your supplies drawer is out of control, full of lots of dead or unorganized stuff, that's an incomplete that needs to be captured. Are the photos of your kids current ones? Is the artwork what you want on the wall? Are the mementos really something you still want to keep? Is the furniture precisely the way it should be? Is the computer set up the way you want it? Are the plants in your office alive? 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; and/or

• 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, then write a note on a piece of letter-size plain paper to represent it. For instance, if you have a poster or other piece of artwork behind the door to your office, just write "Artwork behind door" on a letter-size piece of paper and put the paper in the in-basket.

Be sure to date it, too. This has a couple of benefits. If your organization system winds up containing some of these pieces of paper representing something else, it'll be useful to know when the note was created. It's also just a great habit to date everything you hand-write, from Post-it notes to your assistant, to voice-mails you download onto a pad, to notes you take on a phone call with a client. The 3 percent of the time that this little piece of information will be extremely useful makes it worth developing the habit.

What If the Pile Is Too Big to Fit into the In-Basket? If you're like 98 percent of my clients, your initial gathering activity will collect much more than can be comfortably stacked in an in-basket. If that's the case, 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 mean-time, 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. For some of my clients, this marks the first time they have ever cleaned their center desk drawer!

If you're not sure what something is or whether it's worth keeping, go ahead and put it into "in." You'll be able to decide about it later, when you process the in-basket. What you don't want to do is to let yourself get wrapped up in things piece by piece, trying to decide this or that. You'll do that later anyway if it's in "in," and it's easier to make those kinds of choices when you're in processing mode. 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! Many people get hit with the purge-and-organize virus as they're going through various areas of their office (and their home). If that happens to you, it's OK, so long as you have a major open window of time to get through the whole process (like at least a whole week ahead of you). Otherwise you'll need to break it up into chunks and capture them as little projects or actions to do, with reminders in your system, like "Purge four-drawer cabinet" or "Clean office closet." 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. It may take longer than you think, and you want to go for the gold and finish processing all your stuff and set ting up your system as soon as possible.

What About Things That Are Already on Lists and in Organizers'? You may already have some lists and some sort of organization system in place. But unless you're thoroughly familiar with this workflow-processing model and have implemented it previously, 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. .!" Often in the collection process someone will run across a piece of paper or a document that causes her to say, "Oh, my God! I forgot about that! I've got to deal with that!" It could be a phone slip with a return call she was supposed to handle two days before, or some meeting notes that remind her of an action she was supposed to take weeks ago. She doesn't want to put whatever it is into the huge stack of other stuff in her in-basket because she's afraid she might lose track of it again.

If that happens to you, first ask yourself if it's something that really has to be handled before you get though 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 you 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. Keep in mind that some potential anxiousness is going to surface as you make your stuff more conscious to you than it's been. Create whatever supports you need.

Start with Your Desktop

Ready now? OK. Start piling those things on your desk into "in."Often there'll be numerous things right at hand that need to go in there. Many people use their whole desktop as "in"; if you're one of them, you'll have several stacks around you to begin your "in" collection with. Start at one end of your work space and move around, dealing with everything on every cubic inch. 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. Is your phone OK? Your computer? The desk itself? If anything needs changing, write a note about it and toss it into "in."

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. Again, whether you use this opportunity to clean and organize the drawers or simply make a note to do it later will depend on how much time you have and how much stuff is in there.

Counter tops

Continue working your way around your office, collecting every-thing sitting on the tops of credenzas or counters or cabinets that doesn't belong there permanently. Often there will be stacks of reading material, mail, and miscellaneous folders and support material for actions and projects. Collect it all.

Maybe there is reference material that you've already used and just left out. If that's so, and if you can return it to the file cabinet or the bookshelf in just a second, go ahead and do that. Be careful to check with yourself, though, about whether there is some potential action tied to the material before you put it away. If there is, put it into "in" so you can deal with it later in the process.

Inside the Cabinets

Now look inside the cabinets. What's in there? These are perfect areas for stashing large supplies and reference materials, and equally seductive for holding deeper levels of stuff. Any broken or out-of-date things in there? Often I'll find collectibles and nostalgia that aren't meaningful to my clients any longer. One general manager of an insurance office, for example, wound up tossing out at least a small Dumpster's worth of "recognition" awards he had accumulated over the years.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

Anything on bulletin boards that needs action? Anything tacked onto the walls that doesn't belong there? Any attention on your pictures, artwork, plaques, or decorations? How about the open shelves? Any books that need to be read or donated? Any catalogs, manuals, or three-ring binders that are out of date or have some potential action associated with them? Any piles or stacks of things on the floor? Just scoot them over next to your in-basket to add to the inventory.

Equipment, Furniture, and Fixtures

Is there anything you want to do to or change about any of your office equipment or furniture or the physical space itself? Does everything work? Do you have all the lighting you need? 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.

Some executives I work with find it immensely valuable to take me home with them and have me walk them through this process there as well. Often they've allowed the "not so important" trap to ensnare them in their home life, and it has gnawed away at their energy.

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 your in-basket?

This is where the stack of plain paper really comes into play. I recommend that you write out each thought, each idea, each project or thing that has your attention, on a separate sheet of paper. 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. You will likely not keep these pieces of paper (unless you decide that low-tech is your best organizing method), but it'll be handy to have them as discrete items to deal with as you're processing.

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. Your first idea may be "Save the ozone layer," and then you'll think, "I need cat food!" Grab them all. Don't be surprised if you discover you've created quite a stack of paper in "in" during this procedure.

"Trigger" List

To assist in clearing your head, you may want to review the following "Incompletion Triggers" list, item by item, to see if you've forgotten anything. Often you'll just need a jog to unearth something lurking in a corner of your mind. Remember, when something occurs to you, write it on a piece of paper and toss it into "in."

"Incompletion Triggers" List

Professional

Projects started, not completed

Projects that need to be started

Commitments/promises to others

Boss/partners

Colleagues

Subordinates

Other people in organization

"Outside" people

Customers

Other organizations

Professionals

Communications to make/get

Internal/External

Initiate or respond to:

Phone calls

Voice-mail

E-mail

Pages

Faxes

Letters

Memos

Other writing to finish/submit

Reports

Evaluations/reviews

Proposals

Articles

Promotional materials

Manuals/instructions

Rewrites and edits

Meetings that need to be set/requested

Who needs to know about what decisions?

Significant read/review

Financial

Cash flow

Statistics

Budgets

Forecasts/projections

P&Ls

Balance sheet

Credit line

Planning/organizing

Formal planning (goals, targets, objectives)

Current projects (next stages)

Upcoming projects

Business/marketing plans

Organizational initiatives

Upcoming events

Meetings

Presentations

Organizational structuring

Changes in facilities

Installation of new systems/equipment

Travel

Banks

Receivables

Payables

Petty cash

Administration

Legal issues

Insurance

Personnel

Policies/procedures

Customers

Internal

External

Marketing

Promotion

Sales

Customer service

Systems

Phones

Computers

Office equipment

Other equipment

Utilities

Filing

Storage

Inventories

Supplies

Office/site

Office organization

Furniture

Decorations

Waiting for…

Information

Delegated tasks/projects

Completions critical to projects

Replies to:

Letters

Memos

Calls

Proposals

Requisitions

Reimbursements

Petty cash

Insurance

Ordered items

Items being repaired

Tickets

Decisions of others

Professional development

Training/seminars

Things to learn

Things to look up

Skills to practice/learn especially re:

computers

Tape/video training

Resumes

Outside education

Research — need to find out about…

Professional wardrobe

Personal

Projects started, not completed

Projects that need to be started

Commitments/promises to others

Spouse

Children

Family

Friends

Professionals

Borrowed items

Projects: other organizations

Service

Civic

Volunteer

Communications to make/get

Family

Friends

Professional

Initiate or respond to:

Phone calls

Letters

Cards

Upcoming events

Special occasions

Birthdays

Anniversaries

Weddings

Graduations

Holidays

Travel

Weekend trips

Vacations

Social events

Cultural events

Sporting events

R&D — things to do

Places to go

People to meet/invite

Local attractions

Administration

Financial

Bills

Banks

Investments

Loans

Taxes

Insurance

Legal affairs

Filing

Waiting for. .

Mail order

Repair

Reimbursements

Loaned items

Medical data

RSVPs

Home/household

Landlords

Property ownership

Legal

Real estate

Zoning

Taxes

Builders/contractors

Heating/air-conditioning

Plumbing

Electricity

Roofing

Landscape

Driveway

Walls/floors/ceilings

Decoration

Furniture

Utilities

Appliances

Lightbulbs/wiring

Kitchen things

Washer/dryer/vacuum

Areas to organize/clean

Computers

Software

Hardware

Connections

CD-ROM

E-mail/Internet

TV

VCR

Music/CDs/tapes

Cameras/film

Phones

Answering machine

Sports equipment

Closets/clothes

Garage/storage

Vehicle repair/maintenance

Tools

Luggage

Pets

Health care

Doctors

Dentists

Specialists

Hobbies

Books/records/tapes/disks

Errands

Hardware store

Drugstore

Market

Bank

Cleaner

Stationer

Community

Neighborhood

Schools

Local government

Civic issues

If your head is empty of everything, personally and professionally, then your in-basket is probably quite full, and likely spilling over. In addition to the paper-based and physical items in your in-basket, your inventory of "in" should include any resident voice-mails and all the e-mails that are currently staged in the "in" area of your communication software. It should also include any items on your organizer lists for which you have not yet determined next actions.

I usually recommend that clients download their voice-mails onto paper notes and put those into their in-baskets, along with their whole organizer notebooks, which usually need significant reassessment. If you've been using something like a Palm PDA or Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Organizer for anything other than calendar and telephone/address functionality, I suggest you print out any task and to-do lists and put them, too, into your in-basket. E-mails are best left where they are, because of their volume and the efficiency factor of dealing with them within their own mini system.

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. Of course, one of the main factors in people's resistance to collecting stuff into "in" is the lack of a good processing and organizing methodology to handle it.

That brings us to the next chapter: "Getting In' to Empty."

6. Processing: Getting "In" to Empty

ASSUMING THAT YOU have collected everything that has your attention, your 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

1. trashed what you don't need;

2. completed any less-than-two-minute actions;

3. handed off to others anything that can be delegated;

4. sorted into your own organizing system reminders of actions that require more than two minutes; and

5. identified any larger commitments (projects) you now have, based on the input.

To get an overview of this process, you may find it useful here to refer to the Workflow Diagram on page 120. The center column illustrates all the steps involved in processing and deciding your next actions.

This chapter focuses on the components in the diagram's center column, the steps from "in" to next action. You'll immediately see the natural organization that results from following this process for each of your open loops. For instance, if you pick up something from "in" and realize, "I've got to call Andrea about that, but I've got to do it on Monday, when she's in her office," then you'll defer that action immediately and enter it into your calendar for Monday.

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. When I coach clients through this process, it invariably becomes a dance back and forth between the simple decision-making stage of processing the open loops and the trickier task of figuring out the best way to enter these decisions in a client's particular organization system.

Many of my coaching clients, for example, are eager to get set up personally on a PDA organizer that will synchronize with Microsoft Outlook, which their company is using for e-mail and scheduling. The first thing we have to do (after we've collected the in-basket) is make sure all their hardware and software are working. Then we clean up (print out and erase, usually) everything they have previously tried to organize in their Outlook task lists and put it all into "in." Then we establish some working categories such as "Calls," "Errands," "Agendas," "At Computer," and so on. As we begin to process the in-basket, the client can go immediately to his computer and type his action steps directly into the system he will ultimately depend on.

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.

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! That's an exaggeration to make a point, but 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

Most people get to their in-basket or their e-mail and look for the most urgent, most fun, or most interesting stuff to deal with first."Emergency scanning" is fine and necessary sometimes (I do it, too). Maybe you've just come back from an off-site meeting and have to be on a long conference call in fifteen minutes. So you check to make sure there are no land mines about to explode and to see if your client has e-mailed you back OK'ing the big proposal.

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. As soon as you break that rule, and process only what you feel like processing, and in whatever order, you'll invariably begin to leave things unprocessed. Then you will no longer have a functioning funnel, and it will back up all over your desk and office.

LIFO or FIFO?

Theoretically, you should flip your in-basket upside down and process first the first 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. You're going to see it all in short order anyway. And if you're going to attempt to clear up a big backlog of e-mails staged in "in," you'll actually discover it's more efficient to process the last-in first because of all the discussion threads that accumulate on top of one another.

One Item at a Time

You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to your psyche 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 "hmppphhh" stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.

Most people also want to take a whole stack of things out of the in-basket at once, put it right in front of them, and try to crank through it. Although I empathize with the desire to "deal with a big chunk," I constantly remind clients to put back every-thing 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. And if you get interrupted (which is likely), you won't have umpteen parts of "in" scattered around outside the tray and out of control again.

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 some-thing for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it.When I see this going on with someone, I let him take two or sometimes three things out at once as he's processing. It's then easier and faster for him to make a choice about the action required.

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." This is actually what was meant by the old admonition to "handle things once," though handling things just once is in fact a bad idea. If you did that, you'd never have a list, because you would finish everything as soon as you saw it. You'd also be highly ineffective and inefficient, since most things you deal with are not to be acted upon the first time you become aware of them. Where the advice does hold is in eliminating the bad habit of continually picking things up out of "in," not deciding what they mean or what you're going to do about them, and then just leaving them there. A better admonition would be, "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."

You've got the message. You're going to deal with one item at a time. And you're going to make a firm next-action decision about each one. 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.

On that first item, for example, do you need to call someone? Fill something out? Get information from the Web? Buy something at the store? Talk to your secretary? E-mail your boss? What? If there's an action, its specific nature will determine the next set of options. But what if you say, "There's really nothing to do with this"?

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

If you've been following my suggestions, you'll no doubt already have tossed out a big pile of stuff. It's also 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 throwaway as you process your stuff.

Processing all the things in your world will make you more conscious of what you are going to do and what you should not be doing. One director of a foundation I worked with discovered that he had allowed way too many e-mails (thousands!) to accumulate— e-mails that in fact he wasn't ever going to respond to anyway. He told me that using my method forced him to "go on a healthy diet" about what he would allow to hang around his world as an incompletion.

It's likely that at some point you'll come up against the question of whether or not to keep 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. Most people have some angst about all of this because their systems have never really been totally functional and clear-edged before. If you make a clean distinction between what's reference and supplies and what requires action, and if your reference system is simple and workable, you can easily keep as much material as you can accommodate. Since no action is required on it, it's just a matter of physical space and logistics.

Filing experts can offer you more detailed guidelines about all this, and your CPA can provide record-retention timetables that will tell you how long you should keep what kinds of documentation. My suggestion is that you 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." Examples of this would be:

• A flier announcing a chamber of commerce breakfast with a guest speaker you might want to hear, but it's two weeks away, and you're not sure yet if you'll be at home then or out of town on a business trip.

• An agenda for a board meeting you've been invited to attend in three weeks. No action is required on it, other than your briefing yourself a day ahead of the meeting by reading the agenda.

• An advertisement for the next Quicken software upgrade for your personal finances. Do you really need this next version? You don't know.. you'd rather sleep on it for another week.

• An idea you had about something you might want to do for next year's annual sales meeting. There's nothing to do on this now, but you'd like to be reminded when the time comes to start planning for it.

• A note to yourself about taking a watercolor class, which you have zero time for right now.

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. I'll elaborate on these in more detail in the next chapter, on organizing. 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.[6]

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. Ideally, you have already set up a workable filing system (as described in chapter 4) for your reference and support information. 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.

You'll probably discover that there are lots of miscellaneous kinds of things that you want to keep but have piled up in stacks or stuffed into drawers because your reference system was too formal or just plain nonexistent. Let me remind you here that 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. In the "battle zone" of real life, if it's not easy, fast, and fun to file, you'll stack instead of organizing. And then it will become much more difficult to keep things processed.

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. Or put a Post-it on it instructing your secretary or assistant to do the same. In my early days of coaching I used to give my clients permission to keep a "To File" pile. No longer. I discovered that if you can't get it into your system immediately, you're probably not ever going to. If you won't do it now, you likely won't do it later, either.

And If There Is an Action. . What Is It?

This is the biggie. 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.

This is both easier and more difficult than it sounds.

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.

Let's look at a sample list of the things that a person might typically have his attention on.

• Clean the garage

• Do my taxes

• Conference I'm going to

• Bobby's birthday

• Press release

• Performance reviews

• Management changes

Although each of these items may seem relatively clear as a task or project, determining the next action on each one will take some thought.

• Clean the garage

… Well, I just have to get in there and start. No, wait a minute, there's a big refrigerator in there that I need to get rid of first. I should find out if John Patrick wants it for his camp. I should…

• Call John re refrigerator in garage

What about. .

• Do my taxes

… but I actually cant start on them until I have my last K-l back. Can't do any thing until then. So I'm…

• Waiting for K-l from Acme Trust

And for the. .

• Conference I'm going to

… I need to find out whether Sandra is going to prepare a press kit for us. I guess I need to. .

• E-mail Sandra re press kits for the conference

. . and so forth. The action steps—"Call John," "Waiting for K-l," "E-mail Sandra" — are what need to be decided about everything that is actionable in your in-basket.

The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to Do

Remember that these are physical, visible activities. Many people think they've determined the "next action" when they get it down to "set meeting." But that's not the next action, because it's not descriptive of physical behavior. How do you set a meeting? Well, it could be with a phone call or an e-mail, but to whom? 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 vaguely. You'll tend to resist noticing it.

When you get to a phone or to your computer, you want to have all your thinking completed so you can use the tools you have and the location you're in to more easily get things done, having already defined what there is to do. What if you say to yourself, "Well, the next thing I need to do is decide what to do about this?" That's a tricky one. Deciding isn't really an action, because actions take time, and deciding doesn't. 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 ("Call Susan to get her input on the proposal") or from internal thinking ("Draft ideas about new reorganization"). 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. If the memo requires just a thirty-second reading and then a quick "yes"/"no"/other response on a Post-it back to the sender, do it now. If you can browse the catalog in just a minute or two to see if there might be anything of interest in it, browse away, and then toss it, route it, or reference it as required. If the next action on something is to leave a quick message on someone's voice-mail, make the call now.

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.

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! He was one of those 300-e-mails-a-day high-tech executives, highly focused for most of the workday on three key initiatives. Many of those e-mails were from people who reported to him — and they needed his eyes on something, his comments and OKs, in order to move forward. But because they were not on a topic in his rifle sights, he would just stage the e-mails in "in," to get to "later." After several thousand of them piled up, he would have to go in to work and spend whole weekends trying to catch up. That would have been OK if he were twenty-six, when everything's an adrenaline rush anyway, but he was in his thirties and had young kids. Working all weekend was no longer acceptable behavior. When I coached him we went through all 800-plus e-mails he currently had in "in." It turned out that a lot could be dumped, quite a few needed to be filed as reference, and many others required less-than-two-minute replies that he whipped through. I checked with him a year later, and he was still current! He never let his e-mails mount up beyond a screenful anymore. He said it had changed the nature of his division because of the dramatic decrease in his own response time. His staff thought he was now made of Teflon!

That's a rather dramatic testimonial, but it's an indication of just how critical some of these simple processing behaviors can be, especially as the volume and speed of the input increase for you personally.

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. Most clients I work with have difficulty estimating how long two minutes actually is, and they greatly underestimate how long certain actions are likely to take. For instance, if your action is to leave someone a message, and you get the real person instead of his or her voice-mail, the call will usually take quite a bit longer than two minutes.

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. For instance, if you act to replace the cartridge in your favorite pen and discover that you're out of cartridge refills, you'll want to decide on the next action about getting them ("Buy refills at the store") and do, delegate, or defer it appropriately.

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.

Let me make one more observation regarding the two-minute rule, this time as it relates to your comfort with typing e-mails. If you're in a large-volume e-mail environment, you'll greatly improve your productivity by increasing your typing speed and using the shortcut keyboard commands for your operating system and your common e-mail software. Too many sophisticated professionals are seriously hamstrung because they still hunt and peck and try to use their mouse too much. More work could be dispatched faster by combining the two-minute rule with improved computer skills. I've found that many executives aren't resisting technology, they're just resisting their keyboards!

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 it off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format.

Delegation is not always downstream. You may decide, "This has got to get over to Customer Service," or "My boss needs to put his eyes on this next," or "I need my partner's point of view on this."

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. E-mail is usually the fastest mode into the system; it provides an electronic record; and the receiver gets to deal with it at his or her convenience. Written notes are next because they too can get into the system immediately, and the recipient then has a physical particle to use as an organizational reminder. If you're passing on paper-based material as part of the handoff, a written communication is obviously the way to go; as with e-mail, the person you hand it off to can then deal with it on his or her own schedule. Voice-mail can be efficient, and many professionals live by it; the downside is that tracking becomes an additional requirement for both you and the recipient, and what you say is not always what gets heard. Next would be saving the communication on an agenda list or in a folder for your next regular meeting with the person. Sometimes this is necessary because of the sensitive or detailed nature of the topic, but it then must wait to get moving until that meeting occurs. The least preferable option would be to interrupt what both you and the person are doing to talk about the item. This is immediate, but it hampers workflow for both of you and has the same downside as voice-mail: no written record.

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 I will walk you through in the next chapter, about organizing, you'll see that a significant category to manage is "Waiting For."

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 the example cited above about waiting for the last K-l to come in so you can do your taxes, the next action is currently on someone else's plate. In such situations you will also want to track the action as a delegated item, or as a "Waiting For." On the paper that says "Do my taxes," write something like "Waiting for K-l from Acme Trust" and put that into your "Pending" stack.

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 ("But I called and ordered that on March 12") 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. A call you need to make to a customer; an e-mail you need to spend a little time thinking about and drafting to your team; a gift you need to buy for your brother at the stationery store; a piece of software you need to download from the Web and try out; a conversation you must have with your spouse about an investment you think you should make — all of these fit that description.

These actions will have to be written down somewhere and then 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 mess 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, a topic I'll cover in step-by-step detail in the next chapter.

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—"Call Frank about the car alarm"; "E-mail Bernadette re conference materials" — you'll no doubt recognize a number of things that are larger than the single action you've defined. There's still going to be something about "car alarm" to do after the call to Frank, and there will still be something to handle about the conference after the e-mail to Bernadette.

7. Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets

HAVING A total and seamless system of organization in place gives you tremendous power because it allows your mind to let go of lower-level thinking and graduate to intuitive focusing, undistracted by matters that haven't been dealt with appropriately. But your physical organization system must be better than your mental one in order for that to happen.

In this chapter I'll lead you through the organizing steps and tools that will be required as you process your in-basket. As you initially process "in," you'll create lists and groupings of things you want to organize and you'll invariably think of additional items to include. In other words, 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 outer ring of the Workflow Diagram (opposite) shows the main groupings into which things will go as you decide what they are and what needs to be done about them.

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.

If you put reference materials in the same pile as things you still want to read, for example, you'll go numb to the stack. If you put items on your "Next Actions" lists that really need to go on the calendar, because they have to occur on specific days, then you won't trust your calendar and you'll continually have to reassess your action lists. If you have a project that you're not going to be doing anything about for some time, it must go onto your "Someday/Maybe" list so you can relate to the "Projects" list with the rigorous action-generating focus it needs. And if something you're "Waiting For" is included on one of your action lists, you'll continually get bogged down by nonproductive rethinking.

All You Really Need Is Lists and Folders

Once you know what you need to keep track of (covered in the previous chapter, on Processing), all you really need is lists and folders for reference and support materials. Your lists (which, as I've indicated, could also be items in folders) will keep track of projects and someday/maybes, as well as the actions you'll need to take on your active open loops. Folders (digital or paper-based) will be required to hold your reference material and the support information for active projects.

Lots of people have been making lists for years but have never found the procedure to be particularly effective. There's rampant skepticism about systems as simple as the one I'm recommending. But most list-makers haven't put the appropriate things on their lists, or have left them incomplete, which has kept the lists themselves from being very functional. Once you know what goes on the lists, however, things get much easier; then you just need a way to manage them. As I've said, 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. Attempting to impose such scaffolding has been a big source of frustration in many people's organizing. You'll be prioritizing more intuitively as you see the whole list, against quite a number of shifting variables. 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: (1) a file folder with separate paper notes for the items within the category; (2) an actual list on a titled piece of paper (often within a loose-leaf organizer or planner); or (3) an inventory in a software program or on a digital assistant, such as Microsoft Outlook task categories or a category on a hand held PDA.

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 probably have anywhere from twenty to sixty or seventy or more such items. You'll also have accumulated reminders of things that you've handed off to other people, and perhaps some things that need 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, as I've said, 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 (e.g., "4:00—5:00 meet with Jim") or day-specific ("Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she got the proposal").

As you were processing your in-basket, you probably came across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed up. You may have realized that the next action on getting a medical checkup, for example, was to call and make the appointment, and so (since the action required two minutes or less) you actually did it when it occurred to you. 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

Over many years I have discovered that 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. For instance, if the action requires a computer, it should go on an "At Computer" list. If your action demands that you be out in your car driving around (such as stop-ping by the bank or going to the hardware store), the "Errands" list would be the appropriate place to track it. If the next step is to talk about something face-to-face with your partner Emily, putting it into an "Emily" folder or list makes the most sense.

How discrete these categories will need to be will depend on (1) how many actions you actually have to track; and (2) 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. It could include items as diverse as "Buy nails" and "Talk to boss about staff changes" and "Draft ideas about off-site meeting." 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; each time you got any window of time to do some-thing, you'd have to do unproductive resorting. If you happened to be on a short break at a conference, during which you might be able to make some calls, you'd have to identify the items that were calls among a big batch of unrelated items. When you went out to do odds and ends, you'd probably want to pick out your errands and make another list.

Another productivity factor that this kind of organization supports is leveraging your energy when you're in a certain mode. When you're in "phone mode," it helps to make a lot of phone calls — just crank down your "Calls" list. When your computer is up and running and you're cruising along digitally, it's useful to get as much done on-line as you can without having to shift into another kind of activity. It takes more energy than most people realize to unhook out of one set of behaviors and get into another kind of rhythm and tool set. And obviously, when a key person is sitting in front of you in your office, you'd be wise to have all the things you need to talk about with him or her immediately at hand.

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"

• "Errand's"

• "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 to make;you can work off it as long as you have a phone available. The more mobile you are (especially if you have a cell phone), 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 — on a break or waiting for a plane,maybe — offer a perfect opportunity to work down your list. Having a discrete "Calls" list makes it much easier to focus and intuitively pick the best call to make in the moment.

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 — particularly if you move around with a laptop or have a PC at work and another one at home — it can be helpful to group all those actions that you need to do when it's on and running. This will allow you to see all your options for computer work to do, reminding you of all the e-mails you need to send, the documents you need to draft or edit, and so on.

Because I fly a lot, I even maintain an "Online" action list, separate from my "At Computer" one. When I'm on a plane, I can't easily connect to the Web or to my server, as many actions require. So instead of having to rethink what I can and can't do whenever I look at my "At Computer" list, I can trust that none of my "At Computer" actions require that I be connected, which frees my mind to make choices based on other criteria.

If you have a computer only at work, you may not need a separate "At Computer" list; "Office Actions" may cover those actions because the office is the only place you can do them anyway. (Similarly, if you have a computer only at home, and it's not a laptop, you may be able to put computer-specific actions on your "At Home" list.)

"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." When you know you need to get in your car and go some-where, it's great to be able to look at the list while you're on the road. Actions like "Get stock certificates from safety-deposit box," "Pick up pictures at framers," and "Buy petunias at nursery" would all go here.

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 on your Palm organizer. It's often helpful to track sublists within individual "Errands" items. For instance, as soon as you realize you need something from the hardware store, you might want to make "Hardware Store" the list item and then append a sublist of all the things you want to pick up there, as you think of them. On the low-tech end, you could create a "Hardware Store" Post-it; on the high-tech side, if you were using a digital list, you could attach a "note" to "Hardware Store" on your list and input the details there.

Because I travel in major metropolitan areas so much, I keep two "Errands" lists — "Errands — Ojai" (where I live) and "Errands — Anywhere," for all those other things I can pick up even when I'm on the road. "T-connectors for irrigation" would go on "Errands — Ojai," but "Get dress socks" would go on "Errands — Anywhere."

"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 you then — though obviously, if you have a phone and a computer in your office, and you have" Calls" and "At Computer" as separate lists, they'll be in play as well. I'd use an "Office Actions" or "At Office" list for anything that required an Internet connection available only, or even most conveniently, in the office — for example, a reminder to download a large software program from the Web would go on this list for me.

"At Home" Many actions can be done only at home, and it makes sense to keep a list specific to that context. I'm sure you've got numerous personal and around-the-house projects, and often the next thing to do on them is just to do them. "Hang new print," "Organize CDs," and "Switch closets to winter clothes" would be typical items for this grouping.

If you have an office at home, as I do, anything that can be done only there goes on the "At Home" list. (If you work only at home and don't go to another office, you won't need an "Office Actions" list at all — the "At Home" list will suffice.)

"Agendas" Invariably you'll find that many of your next actions need to either occur in a real-time interaction with someone or be brought up in a committee, team, or staff meeting. You have to talk to your partner about an idea for next year; you want to check with your spouse about his schedule for the spring; you need to delegate a task to your secretary that's too complicated to explain in an e-mail. And you must make an announcement at the Monday staff meeting about the change in expense-report policies.

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). Professionals who keep a file folder to hold all the things they need to go over with their boss already use a version of this method. If you're conscientious about deter-mining all your next actions, though, you may find that you'll need somewhere between three and fifteen of these kinds of lists. 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. For instance, if you have a contractor doing a significant piece of work on your house or property, you can create a list for him for the duration of the project. As you're walking around the site after he's left for the day, you may notice several things you need to talk with him about, and you'll want that list to be easy to capture and to access as needed.

Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add "Agendas" ad hoc, as needed, quickly and simply. For example, inserting a page for a person or a meeting within an "Agenda" section in a loose-leaf notebook planner takes only seconds, as does adding a dedicated "Memo" in a PDA's "Agenda" category.

"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 to 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/Review" 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. That can be daunting enough in itself, but things get seriously out of control and psychologically numbing when the edges of this category are not clearly defined. A pristine delineation will at least make you conscious of the inventory, and if you're like most people, having some type of self-regulating mechanism will help you become more aware of what you want to keep and what you should just get rid of.

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. People who don't have their "Read/Review" material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be processed.

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, such as the tickets you've ordered from the theater, the scanner that's coming for the office, the OK on the proposal from your client, and so on. 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.

You'll probably find 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. For example, you may need to make a call to a vendor to request a proposal for a piece of work (on your "Calls" list.) Having made the call, you then wait for the vendor to get back to you with the proposal (the proposal goes to your "Waiting For" list). When the proposal comes in, you have to review it (it lands in your "Read/Review" stack-basket). Once you've gone over it, you send it to your boss for her approval (now it's back on your "Waiting For" list). And soon.[7]

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 Reminder

The most efficient way to track your action reminders is to add them to lists or folders as they occur to you. The originating trigger won't be needed after you have processed it. You might take notes in the meeting with your boss, but you can toss those after you've pulled out any projects and actions associated with them. While some people try to archive voice-mails that they still need to "do something about," that's not the most effective way to manage the reminders embedded in them.

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 your 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. It would obviously be overkill to write "Review Fortune magazine" on some action list when you could just as easily toss the magazine itself into your "Read/Review" basket to act as the trigger.

Another example: people who find it easier to deal with bills by paying them all at one time and in one location will want to keep their bills in a folder or stack-basket labeled "Bills to Pay" (or, more generically, "Financial to Process"). Similarly, receipts for expense reporting should be either dealt with at the time they're generated or kept in their own "Receipts to Process" envelope or folder.[8]

The specific nature of your work, your input, and your work-station may make it more efficient to organize other categories using only the original paper itself. A customer-service professional, for instance, may deal with numerous requests that show up in a standard written form, and in that case maintaining a basket or file containing only those actionable items is the best way to manage them.

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. If the next action on a service order is to make a call, it should be in a "Calls" group; if the action step is to review information and input it into the computer, it should be labeled "At Computer." Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all the documents of one type (e.g., service requests) are kept in a single tray, even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone call, another needs data reviewed, and still another is waiting for someone to get back with some information — but they're all sorted together. This arrangement can cause a person's mind to go numb to the stack because of all the decisions that are still pending about the next-action level of doing.

My personal system is highly portable, with almost every-thing kept on lists, but I still maintain two categories of paper-based reminders. I travel with a "Read/Review" plastic file folder and another one labeled "Data Entry." In the latter I put anything for which the next action is simply to input data into my computer (business cards that need to get into my telephone/address list, quotes for my "Quotes" database, articles about restaurants I want to put on my "Travel — Cities" sublists, etc.).

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 embedded actions written out on a list.

Many of my clients have found it helpful to set up two or three unique folders on their e-mail navigator bars. 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 (which is where most people keep them).

I recommend that you create one folder for any longer-than-two-minute e-mails that you need to act on (again, you should be able to dispatch many messages right off the bat by following the two-minute rule). The folder name should begin with a prefix letter or symbol so that (1) it looks different from your reference folders and (2) it sits at the top of your folders in the navigator bar. Use something like the "@" sign in Microsoft or the dash ("-") in Lotus, which sort into their systems at the top. Your resulting "FACTION" folder will hold those e-mails that you need to do something about.

Next you can create a folder titled "@WAITING FOR," which will show up in the same place as the "@ACTION" folder. Then, as you receive e-mails that indicate that someone is going to do something that you care about tracking, you can drag them over into the "@WAITING FOR" file. It can also hold reminders for anything that you delegate via e-mail: when you forward something, or use e-mail to make a request or delegate an action, just save a copy into the "@WAITING FOR" file.[9]

Some applications (such as Lotus Notes) allow you to file a copy of an e-mail into one of your folders as you send it (with a "Send and File" button). Others (e.g., Outlook) will simultaneously save only into your universal "Sent Mail" folder. In the latter case, what seems to work best for many is to copy ("cc" or "bcc") themselves when they delegate via e-mail, and then to pull that copy into their "@WAITING FOR" folder. (It's relatively easy to program Outlook to automatically send any e-mail that you "cc" to yourself into a designated folder, which would replicate the process just described.)

Getting E-mail "In" to "Empty"

The method detailed above will enable you to actually get everything out of your e-mail in-basket, which will be a huge boon to your clarity about and control of your day-to-day work. You'll reclaim "in" as "in," so anything residing there will be like a message on your answering machine — a blinking light telling you you need to process some-thing! Most people use their e-mail "in" for staging still-undecided actionable things and reference, a practice that rapidly numbs the mind: they know they've got to reassess everything every time they glance at the screen. If you never had more than a screenful of e-mails, this approach might be reasonably functional, but with the volume most professionals are dealing with these days, that doesn't apply.

Again, getting "in" empty doesn't mean you've handled everything. It means that you've DELETED what you could, FILED what you wanted to keep but don't need to act on, DONE the less-than-two-minute responses, and moved into your reminder folders all the things you're waiting for and all your actionable e-mails. Now you can open the "@ACTION" file and review the e-mails that you've determined you need to spend time on. Isn't that process easier to relate to than fumbling through multiple screens, fearing all the while that you may miss some-thing that'll blow up on you?

A Caution About Dispersing Reminders of Your Actions

There's an obvious danger in putting reminders of things you need to do somewhere out of sight. The function of an organization system is primarily to supply the reminders you need to see when you need to see them, so you can trust your choices about what you're doing (and what you're not doing). Before you leave the office for the day, the actionable e-mails that you still have pending must be reviewed individually, just like your "Calls" or "At Computer" lists. In essence, "@ACTION" is an extension of your "At Computer" list and should be handled in exactly the same fashion. Your paper-based "Pending" workflow must likewise be assessed like a list if the paper materials are being used as your only reminders.

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.

In order to hang out with friends or take a long, aimless walk and truly have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. And you need to be able to do that in a few seconds, not days.

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'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. You actually won't be working off of the "Projects" list during your day-to-day activities; for the most part, your action lists and any ad hoc tasks that come up will constitute your tactical in-the-moment focus. Remember, you can't do a project, you can only do the action steps it requires.

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. You'll also know that you have an inventory available to you (and to others) whenever it seems advisable to evaluate workload(s).

One List, or Subdivided?

Most people find that one list is the best way to go because it serves as a master inventory rather than as 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 every-thing else. And often some of the greatest pressures on professionals stem from the personal aspects of their lives that they are letting slip.

Delegated Projects If you're a senior manager or executive, you probably have several projects that you are directly responsible for but have handed off to people who report to you. 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." For example, I maintain a separate category called "Projects to Deliver," a chronological listing of all the upcoming seminars, coaching, and consulting assignments I've committed to. These events are "projects" like the rest, in that I need to keep noting whether things are moving along on and in place for them until they're completed. But I find it helpful to see them all organized on one list, in the order in which they are coming up on my calendar, apart from my other projects.

If you are a real estate agent, sell consulting services, or develop proposals for a relatively small number of prospective clients in any profession, you will likely find it useful to see all of your outstanding "sales relationships in progress" in one view. This could be a separate list in your planner called "Client Projects in Development," or if you already have file folders for each in-progress project, it may suffice to group them all in one file stand on your credenza. 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. If you're moving into a new house, for instance, and are upgrading and changing much of the property, you may have a list of actionable items like" Finalize landscaping," "Renovate kitchen," "Rewire basement,"and so on, all of which could in themselves be considered separate projects. Do you make all of this one entry on your "Projects" list — say, "Finish new home renovations" — or do you write up each of the subprojects as an individual line item?

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. No external tool or organizing format is going to be perfect for sorting both horizontally across and vertically down through all your projects; you'll still have to be aware of the whole in some cohesive way (such as via your Weekly Review). 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. For instance, you might not be able to start on "Renovate kitchen" until you finish "Rewire basement." However, you might be able to proceed on "Finalize landscaping" independent of either of the other subprojects. You would therefore want a next action to be continually current on "Rewire basement" and "Finalize landscaping."

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. The problem is that next actions and "Waiting For" items on these projects have usually not been determined and are psychologically still embedded in the stacks and the folders— giving them the aura of just more "stuff" that repels its (un)organizer instead of attracting him or her to action. When you're on the run, in the heat of the activities of the day, files like that are the last thing you'll want to pick up and peruse for actions. You'll actually go numb to the files and the piles because they don't prompt you to do anything and they simply create more anxiety.

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 out-come 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. The latter place is fine for support stuff, too, so long as you have the discipline to pull out the file drawer and take a look at the plan every time you do your Weekly Review. If not, you're better off storing those kinds of project support files in a standing file holder or a separate "Pending" stack-basket on your desk or credenza.

To return to the previous example of moving into a new house, you could have a folder labeled "New House" containing all the plans and details and notes about the landscaping and the kitchen and the basement. In your Weekly Review, when you came to "Finish new home renovations" on your "Projects" list, you'd pull out the "New House" file 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 onto your action lists, and the folder would be refiled until you needed it again for doing the actions or for your next Weekly Review.

Many people who interact with prospects and clients have attempted to use client folders and/or contact-management software such as Act! to "manage the account." The problem here is that some material is just facts or historical data that needs to be stored as background for when you might be able to use it, and some of what must be tracked is the actions required to move the relationships forward. The latter can be more effectively organized within your action-lists system. Client in-formation is just that, and it can be folded into a general-reference file on the client or stored within a client-focused library. (I use Act! for the single great feature it offers of allowing me to cross-reference general company information and significant interactions with key people within the company. It's just a good client-centered database.) If I need to call a client, I don't want that reminder embedded anywhere but on my "Calls" list.

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 some-thing you might want to do on your next vacation to a clarification of some major components in a project plan. These thoughts could come as you're driving down the freeway listening to a news story on the radio, or reading a relevant article. 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. Most professionals will have several options for how to handle support materials, including attaching notes to a list item, organizing digital information in e-mail and/or databases, and maintaining paper-based files and notes in notebooks.

Attached Notes Most organizing software allows you to attach a digital "note" to a list or calendar entry. If you're keeping a "Projects" list within the software, you can go to the project you had a thought about, open or attach a "note" to it, and type in your idea. 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. In any case, you'll need to remember to look at the attachment when you review your project, to make use of the data.

E-mail and Databases E-mails that might contain good information related to your projects can be held in a dedicated e-mail folder (just follow the instructions on pages 152-53 for "@ACTION" and call it something like "@PROJECTS"). 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. If your company uses Lotus Notes, for example, you can create a project database either for your own private use on your PC or to be shared with others in your network.[10] It's worth looking into some of the other types of free-form databases that are on the market, too — even just for your own use. It's great to be able to cut and paste from the Web or from e-mails and drop data under a topic somewhere or type in your own thoughts. Be sure, also, to explore the technology and tools that you already have — just learning how to use all the lists and attachments in something like the Palm organizer may provide you with sufficient "back-of-the-envelope" capability.

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 comfort-able 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. For years I maintained a midsize notebook with a "Projects" list in front and a "Project Support" section toward the back, where I always had some blank pages to capture any random thinking or plans and details about projects on my list.

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. I've found a lot of value in capturing these types of thoughts, more for the way it consistently helps my thinking process than because I end up using every idea (most I don't!). But I try to make sure not to let my old thoughts stay around too long, pretending they're useful when they're not.

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

Much of what comes across your desk and into your life in general is reference material. 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. When you've fully implemented this action-management methodology, you can be as big a packrat as your space (physical and digital) will allow. As I've increased the size of the hard disk in my computer, I've kept that much more e-mail in my archives. The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned, since increasing the volume of pure reference material adds no psychic weight.

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. It's also a must for dealing with the sometimes huge volume of paper-based materials that are valuable for you for one reason or another. Ideally you will already have set up a general-reference filing system as you were processing "in." 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.

Most people seem to wind up with 200 to 400 paper-based general-reference files and 30 to 100 e-mail reference folders.

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. For instance, if you're managing a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paper-work, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at least a whole file drawer for those designated hobbies.

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. When you read a great article about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your "Garden" cabinet or in the general system with other information about home-related projects? 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. Nothing's perfect in that regard, but as the small digital tools become easier to use and connect to larger databases, you'll be able to have more information at hand with the same or less effort.

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.

Do you see how that personal organization of reference material is simply a logistical issue? 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. It's a highly individual decision that ought to be based on the ratio of the value received to the time and effort required to capture and maintain it.

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. These could range from a special trip you might want to take one day, to books you might want to read, to projects you might want to tackle in the next fiscal year, to skills and talents you might want to develop. 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. You'll probably discover that simply having the list and starting to fill it out will cause you to come up with all kinds of creative ideas.

You may also be surprised to find that some of the things you write on the list will actually come to pass, almost without your making any conscious effort to make them happen. If you acknowledge the power of the imagination to foster changes in perception and performance, it's easy to see how having a "Someday/Maybe" list out in front of your conscious mind could potentially add many wonderful adventures to your life and work. We're likely to seize opportunities when they arise if we've already identified and captured them as a possibility. That has certainly been my own experience: learning to play the flute and how to sail big boats both started in this category for me. In addition to your in-basket, there are two rich sources to tap for your "Some-day/Maybe" list: your creative imagination and your list of current projects.

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.

In any case, this is another great reason to have an organizing system that makes it easy to capture things that may add value and variety and interest to your life — without clogging your mind and work space with undecided, unfinished business.

The Danger of "Hold and Review" Files and Piles

Many people have created some sort of "Hold and Review" pile or file (or whole drawer) that vaguely fits within the category of "Someday/Maybe." They tell themselves, "When I have time, I may like to get to this," and a "Hold and Review" file seems a convenient place to put it. 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.

Also, there's a big difference between something that's man-aged well, as a "Someday/Maybe" list, and something that's just a catchall bucket for "stuff." Usually much of that stuff needs to be tossed, some of it needs to go into "Read/Review," some needs to be filed as reference, some belongs on the calendar or in a tickler file (see page 173) for review in a month or perhaps at the beginning of the next quarter, and some actually has next actions on it. Many times, after appropriately processing someone's "Hold and Review" drawer or file, I've discovered there was nothing left in it!

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 some-thing about (birthdays, anniversaries, holiday gift-giving, etc.)

Events You Might Want to Participate In

You probably get notices constantly about seminars, conferences, speeches, and social and cultural events that you may want to decide about attending as the time gets closer. So 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 (e.g., you need to sleep on it).

(Obviously, external data you need in order to make a decision should go on your "Next Actions" or "Waiting For" lists.) 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.[11]

Some typical decision areas in this category include:

• Hire/fire

• Merge/acquire/sell/divest

• Change job/career

This is a big topic to devote so little space to, I know, but 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.[12] 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. I myself have used a tickler file for years and can't imagine being without it.

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.

If you have a secretary or assistant, you can entrust at least a part of this task to him or her, assuming that he/she has some working version of this or a similar system. Typical examples would be:

• "Hand me this agenda the morning of the day I have the meeting."

• "Give this back to me on Monday to rethink, since it applies to a meeting on Wednesday."

• "Remind me about the Hong Kong trip two weeks ahead, and we'll plan the logistics."

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

While you can (and probably should) utilize staff to handle as much of this as is appropriate, I recommend that, 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. I use my tickler file to manage my travel tickets and confirmations; paper-based travel directions, agendas, and maps; reminders of event notifications that come in the mail; information about "might-want-to-buy" kinds of things I want to reconsider in the future; and so forth.

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.

FILE-FOLDER-STYLE SAMPLE SETUP (OCTOBER 5)

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.

When I'm clearing in-baskets with clients and reviewing other things they're concerned about, we often run across little "Memos to Self" like:

• Exercise more regularly.

• Make sure we have evaluation forms for each training.

• Spend more quality time with my kids.

• Do more proactive planning for the division.

• Maintain good morale with my team.

• Ensure we are in alignment with corporate strategy.

• Keep the client billing process up to date.

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 every-thing 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

The degree to which any of us needs to maintain checklists and external controls is directly related to our unfamiliarity with the area of responsibility. 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. You know when things must happen, and how to make them happen, and your system is fine, status quo. Often, though, that's not the case.

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. If your CEO suddenly disappeared, for example, and you had instantly to fill his shoes, you'd need some overviews and outlines in front of you for a while to ensure that you had all the mission-critical aspects of the job handled. 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.

There have been times when I needed to make a list of areas that I had to handle, temporarily, until things were under control. For instance, when my wife and I decided to create a brand-new structure for a business we'd been involved with for many years, I took on areas of responsibility I'd never had to deal with before— namely, accounting, computers, marketing, legal, and administration. For several months I needed to keep a checklist of those responsibilities in front of me to ensure that I filled in the blanks everywhere and managed the transition as well as I could. After the business got onto "cruise control" to some degree, I no longer needed that list.

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.

To spark your creative thinking, here's a list of some of the topics of checklists I've seen and used over the years:

• Personal Affirmations (i.e., personal value statements)

• Job Areas of Responsibility (key responsibility areas)

• Travel Checklist (everything to take on or do before a trip)

• Weekly Review (everything to review and/or update on a weekly basis)

• Training Program Components (all the things to handle when putting on an event, front to back)

• Clients

• Conference Checklist (everything to handle when putting on a conference)

• Focus Areas (key life roles and responsibilities)

• Key People in My Life/Work (relationships to assess regularly for completion and opportunity development)

• Organization Chart (key people and areas of output to manage and maintain)

• Personal Development (things to evaluate regularly to ensure personal balance and progress)

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: KeepingYour System Functional

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 prerequisites for that kind of control.

If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with all the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won't get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which, as you should know by now, it doesn't do very effectively.

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.

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. This is really just common sense, but few people actually have their processes and their organization honed to the point where they are as functional as they could be. 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.

People often ask me, "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." In actuality it's an accumulation of two seconds here, three seconds there. What most people don't realize is that my lists are in one sense my office. Just as you might have Post-its and stacks of phone slips at your workstation, so do I on my "Next Actions" lists. 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. There have been many days when I didn't need to look at any of my lists, in fact, because it was clear from the front end — my calendar — what I wouldn't be able to do.

The Right Review in the Right Context

You may need to access any one of your lists at any time. When you and your spouse are decompressing at the end of the day, and you want to be sure you'll take care of the "business" the two of you manage together about home and family, you'll want to

look at your accumulated agendas for him or her. On the other hand, if your boss pops in for a face-to-face conversation about current realities and priorities, it will be highly functional for you to have your "Projects" list up to date and your "Agenda" list for him or her right at hand.

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.

You won't be able to fool yourself about this: if your system is out of date, your brain will be forced to fully engage again at the lower level of remembering.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Once you've tasted what it's like to have a clear head and feel in control of everything that's going on, can you do what you need to to maintain that as an operational standard? The many years I've spent researching and implementing this methodology with countless people have proved to me that the magic key to the sustainability of the process is the Weekly Review.

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. Many of us seem to have it in our natures consistently to entangle ourselves in more than we have the ability to handle. We book ourselves back to back in meetings all day, go to after-hours events that generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits.

That whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, revaluation, 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 Mark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to capture.

Review "Waiting For" List Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items.

Review Any Relevant Checklists Is there anything you haven't done that you need to do?

Review "Someday/Maybe" List Check for any projects that may have become active and transfer them to "Projects." Delete items no longer of interest.

Review "Pending" and Support Files Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.

Be Creative and Courageous Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to your system?

This review process is common sense, but few of us do it as well as we could, and that means as regularly as we should to keep a clear mind and a sense of relaxed control.

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 Tilings 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.

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 Monday-to-Friday workweek, 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. I, for example, often have as much to do on Saturday and Sunday as on Wednesday. But I do have the luxury(?) of frequent long plane trips, which provide an ideal opportunity for me to catch up. A good friend and client of mine, an executive in the world's largest aerospace company, has his own Sunday-night ritual of relaxing in his home office and processing the hundreds of notes he's generated during his week of back-to-back meetings.

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 people who find it hardest to make time for this review are those who have constantly on-demand work and home environments, with zero built-in time or space for regrouping. The most stressed professionals I have met are the ones who have to be mission-critically reactive at work (e.g., high-level equities traders and chiefs of staff) and then go home to a couple of under-ten-year-old children and a spouse who also works. The more fortunate of them have a one-hour train commute.

If you recognize yourself in that picture, your greatest challenge will be to build in a consistent process of regrouping, when your world is not directly in your face. You'll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home.

Executive Operational Review Time I've coached many executives to block out two hours on their calendars on Fridays. For them the biggest problem is how to balance quality thinking and catch-up time with the urgent demands of mission-critical inter-actions. This is a tough call. The most senior and savvy of them, however, know the value of sacrificing the seemingly urgent for the truly important, and they create their islands of time for some version of this process.

Even the executives who have integrated a consistent reflective time for their work, though, often seem to give short shrift to the more mundane review and catch-up process at the "10,000-foot" level. Between wall-to-wall meetings and ambling around your koi pond with a chardonnay at sunset, there's got to be a slightly elevated level of reflection and regrouping required for operational control and focus. If you think you have all your open loops fully identified, clarified, assessed, and actionalized, you're probably kidding yourself.

Yes, at some point you must clarify the larger out-comes, the long-term goals, the visions and principles 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?

9. Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

WHEN IT COMES to your real-time, plow-through, get-it-done workday, how do you decide what to do at any given point?

As I've said, my simple answer is, trust your heart. Or your spirit. Or, if you're allergic to those kinds of words, try these: your gut, the seat of your pants, your intuition.

That doesn't mean you throw your life to the winds — unless, of course, it does. I actually went down that route myself with some vengeance at one point in my life, and I can attest that the lessons were valuable, if not necessarily necessary.[13]

As outlined in chapter 2 (pages 48–53), I have found three priority frameworks to be enormously helpful in the context of deciding actions:

• The four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment

• The threefold model for evaluating daily work

• The six-level model for reviewing your own work

These happen to be shown in reverse hierarchical order— that is, the reverse of the typical strategic top-down perspective. In keeping with the nature of the Getting Things Done methodology, I have found it useful to once again work from the bottom, up, meaning I'll start with the most mundane levels.

Remember that you make your action choices based on the following four criteria, in order:

1 | Context

2 | Time available

3 | Energy available

4 | Priority

Let's examine each of these in the light of how you can best structure your systems and behaviors to take advantage of its dynamics.

Context

At any point in time, the first thing to consider is, what could you possibly do, where you are, with the tools you have? Do you have a phone? Do you have access to the person you need to talk with face-to-face about three agenda items? Are you at the store where you need to buy something? If you can't do the action because you're not in the appropriate location or don't have the appropriate tool, don't worry about it.

As I've said, you should always organize your action reminders by context — "Calls," "At Home," "At Computer," "Errands," "Agenda for Joe," "Agenda for Staff Meeting," and so on. Since context is the first criterion that comes into play in your choice of actions, context-sorted lists prevent unnecessary reassessments about what to do. If you have a bunch of things to do on one to-do list, but you actually can't do many of them in the same context, you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.

If you're stuck in traffic, and the only actions you can take are calls on your cell phone, you want to be able to pull out just your "Calls" list. Your action lists should fold in or out, based on what you could possibly do at any time.

A second real benefit accrues from organizing all your actions by the physical context needed: that in itself 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?). People who give them-selves a "Misc." action list (i.e., one not specific to a context) often let themselves slide in the next-action decision, too.

I frequently encourage clients to structure their list categories early on as they're processing their in-baskets, because that automatically grounds their projects in the real things that need to get done to get them moving.

Time Available

The second factor in choosing an action is how much time you have before you have to do something else. If your meeting is starting in ten minutes, you'll most likely select a different action to do right now than you would if the next couple of hours were clear.

Obviously, it's good to know how much time you have at hand (hence the emphasis on calendar and watch). A total-life action-reminder inventory will give you maximum information about what you need to do, and make it much easier to match your actions to the windows you have. In other words, if you have ten minutes before that next meeting, find a ten-minute thing to do. If your lists have only the "big" or "important" things on them, no item listed may be possible to handle in a ten-minute period. If you're going to have to do those shorter action things anyway, the most productive way to get them done is to utilize the little "weird time" windows that occur throughout the day.

Energy Available

Although you can increase your energy level at times by changing your context and redirecting your focus, you can do only so much. The tail end of a day taken up mostly by a marathon budget-planning session is probably not the best time to call a prospective client or start drafting a performance-review policy. It might be better to call the airline to change a reservation, process some expense receipts, or skim a trade journal.

Just as having all your next-action options available allows you to take advantage of various time slots, knowing about every-thing you're going to need to process and do at some point will allow you to match productive activity with your vitality level.

I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you're in one of those low-energy states, do them. Casual reading (magazines, articles, and catalogs), telephone/address data that need to be inputted onto your computer, file purging, backing up your laptop, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler — these are some of the myriad things that you've got to deal with sometime anyway.

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. If you're in a low-energy mode and your reading material is disorganized, your receipts are all over the place, your filing system is chaotic, and your in-basket is dysfunctional, it just seems like too much work to do to find and organize the tasks at hand; so you simply avoid doing anything at all and then you feel even worse. One of the best ways to increase your energy is to close some of your loops. So always be sure to have some easy loops to close, right at hand.

These first three criteria for choosing action (context, time, and energy) bespeak the need for a complete next-action reminder system. Sometimes you won't be in a mode to do that kind of 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.

Priority

Given the context you're in and the time and energy you have, the obvious next criterion for action choice is relative priority: "Out of all my remaining options, what is the most important thing for me to do?"

"How do I decide my priorities?" is a question I frequently hear from people I'm working with. It springs from their experience of having more on their plate to do than they can comfortably handle. They know that some hard choices have to be made, and that some things may not get done at all.

At the end of the day, in order to feel good about what you didn't get done, you must have made some conscious decisions about your responsibilities, goals, and values. That process invariably includes an often complex interplay with the goals, values, and directions of your organization and of the other significant people in your life, and with the importance of those relationships to you.

Setting priorities assumes that some things will be more important than others, but important relative to what? In this context, the answer is, to your work — that is, the job you have accepted from yourself and/or from others. This is where the next two frameworks need to be brought to bear in your thinking. They're about defining your work. Keep in mind that though much of this methodology will be within the arena of your professional focus, I'm using "work" in the universal sense, to mean anything you have a commitment to making happen, personally as well as professionally.

These days, daily work activity itself presents a relatively new type of challenge to most professionals, something that it's helpful to understand as we endeavor to build the most productive systems. As I explained earlier, during the course of the workday, at any point in time, you'll be engaged in one of three types of activities:

• Doing predefined work

• Doing work as it shows up

• Defining your work

You may be doing things on your action lists, doing things as they come up, or processing incoming inputs to determine what work that needs to be done, either then or later, from your lists.

This is common sense. But many people let themselves get wrapped around the second activity — dealing with things that show up ad hoc — much too easily, and let the other two slide, to their detriment.

Let's say it's 10:26 A.M. Monday, and you're in your office. You've just ended a half-hour unexpected phone call with a prospective client. You have three pages of scribbled notes from the conversation. There's a meeting scheduled with your staff at eleven, about half an hour from now. You were out late last night with your spouse's parents and are still a little frayed around the edges (you told your father-in-law you'd get back to him about. . what?). Your assistant just laid six telephone messages in front of you. You have a major strategic-planning session coming up in two days, for which you have yet to formulate your ideas. The oil light in your car came on as you drove to work this morning. And your boss hinted as you passed her earlier in the hall that she'd like your thoughts on the memo she e-mailed you yesterday, before this afternoon's three o'clock meeting.

Are your systems set up to maximally support dealing with this reality, at 10:26 on Monday morning? If you're still keeping things in your head, and if you're still trying to capture only the "critical" stuff on your lists, I suggest that the answer is no.

I've noticed that people are actually more comfortable dealing with surprises and crises than they are taking control of processing, organizing, reviewing, and assessing that part of their work that is not as self-evident. It's easy to get sucked into "busy" and "urgent" mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your e-mail, and on your mind.

In fact, much of our life and work just shows up in the moment, and it usually becomes the priority when it does. It's indeed true for most professionals that the nature of their job requires them to be instantly available to handle new work as it appears in many forms. For instance, you need to pay attention to your boss when he shows up and wants a few minutes of your time. You get a request from a senior executive that suddenly takes precedence over anything else you thought you needed to do today. You find out about a serious problem with fulfilling a major customer's order, and you have to take care of it right away.

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-basket (defining your work) and consistent review of complete lists of all your predetermined work.

If choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, that's playing the game the best way you can. Most people, how-ever, have major improvements to make in how they clarify, man-age, and renegotiate their total inventory of projects and actions. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you're not dealing with, the result is frustration and anxiety. Too often the stress and lowered effectiveness are blamed on the "surprises." If you know what you're doing, and what you're not doing, surprises are just another opportunity to be creative and excel.

In addition, when the in-basket and the action lists get ignored for too long, random things lying in them tend to surface as emergencies later on, adding more ad hoc work-as-it-shows-up to fuel the fire.

Many people use the inevitablity of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It's easy to get seduced into not-quite-so-critical stuff that is right at hand, especially if your in-basket and your personal organization are out of control. Too often "managing by wandering around" is an excuse for getting away from amorphous piles of stuff.

This is where the need for knowledge-work athletics really shows up. Most people did not grow up in a world where defining the edges of work and managing huge numbers of open loops were required. But when you've developed the skill and, habits of processing input rapidly into a rigorously defined system, it becomes much easier to trust your judgment calls about the dance of what to do, what to stop doing, and what to do instead.

The Moment-to-Moment Balancing Act

At the black-belt level, you can shift like lightning from one foot to the other and back again. While you're processing your in-basket, for example, your assistant comes in to tell you about a situation that needs immediate attention. No sweat — your tray is still there, with everything still to be processed in one stack, ready to be picked up again when you can get back to it. While you're on hold on the phone, you can be reviewing your action lists and getting a sense of what you're going to do when the call is done. While you wait for a meeting to start, you can work down the "Read/Review" stack you've brought with you. And when the conversation you weren't expecting with your boss shrinks the time you have before your next meeting to twelve minutes, you can easily find a way to use that window to good advantage.

You can do only one of these work activities at a time. If you stop to talk to someone in his or her office, you're not working off your lists or processing incoming stuff. The challenge is to feel confident about what you have decided to do.

So how do you decide? This again will involve your intuitive judgments — how important is the unexpected work, against all the rest? How long can you let your in-basket go unprocessed and all your stuff unreviewed and trust that you're making good decisions about what to do?

People often complain about the interruptions that prevent them from doing their work. But interruptions are unavoidable in life. When you become elegant at dispatching what's coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of the "weird time" windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly. You can be processing e-mails while you're on hold on a conference call. But you must learn to dance among many tasks to keep a healthy balance of your workflow. Your choices will still have to be calibrated against your own clarity about the nature and goals of your work.

Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. But at a certain point, if you're not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness. And ultimately, in order to know whether you should stop what you're doing and do something else, you'll need to have to have a good sense of what your job requires and how that fits into the other contexts of your life. The only way you can have that is to evaluate your life and work appropriately at multiple horizons.

The six levels of work as we saw in chapter 2 (pages 51–53) maybe thought of in terms of altitude:

• 50,000+feet: Life

• 40,000 feet: Three-to five-year visions

• 30,000 feet: One-to two-year goals

• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility

• 10,000 feet: Current projects

• Runway: Current actions

It makes sense that each of these levels should enhance and align with the ones above it. In other words, your priorities will sit in a hierarchy from the top down. Ultimately, if the phone call you're supposed to make clashes with your life purpose or values, to be in sync with yourself you won't make it. If your job structure doesn't match up with where you need to be a year from now, you should rethink how you've framed your areas of focus and responsibilities, if you want to get where you're going most efficiently.

Let's look at that first example from the bottom up. The phone call you need to make (action) is about the deal you're working on (project), which would increase sales (responsibility). This particular deal would give you the opportunity to move up in the sales force (job goal) because of the new market your company wants to penetrate (organization vision). And that would get you closer to the way you want to be living, both financially and professionally (life).

Or, from the other direction, you've decided that you want to be your own boss and unlock some of your unique assets and talents in a particular area that resonates with you (life). So you create a business for yourself (vision), with some short-term key operational objectives (job goal). That gives you some critical roles you need to fulfill to get it rolling (responsibility), with some immediate outcomes to achieve (projects). On each of those projects you'll have things you need to do, as soon as you can do them (next actions).

The healthiest approach for relaxed control and inspired productivity is to manage all the levels in a balanced fashion. At any of these levels, it's critical to identify all the open loops, all the incompletions, and all the commitments that you have right now, as best you can. Without an acceptance and an objective assessment of what's true in the present, it's always difficult to cast off for new shores. What's on your answering machine? What are your projects relative to your kids? What are you responsible for in the office? What's pushing on you to change or attracting you to create in the next months or years? These are all open loops in your psyche, though often it takes deeper and more introspective processes to identify the bigger goals and subtler inclinations.

There is magic in being in the present in your life. I'm always amazed at the power of clear observation simply about what's going on, what's true. Finding out the exact details of your personal finances, clarifying the historical data about the company you're buying, or getting the facts about who really said what to whom in an interpersonal conflict can be constructive, if not downright healing.

Getting things done, and feeling good about it, means being willing to recognize, acknowledge, and appropriately manage all the things that have your consciousness engaged. Mastering the art of stress-free productivity requires it.

Working from the Bottom Up

In order to create productive alignment in your life, you could quite reasonably start with a clarification from the top down. Decide why you're on the planet. Figure out what kind of life and work and life-style would best allow you to fulfill that contract. What kind of job and personal relationships would support that direction? What key things would you need to put in place and make happen right now, and what could you do physically as soon as possible, to kick-start each of those?

In truth, you can approach your priorities from

any level, at any time. I always have something that could do constructively to enhance my awareness and focus on each level. I'm never lacking in more visions to elaborate, goals to reassess, projects to identify or create, or actions to decide on. The trick is to learn to pay attention to the ones you need to at the appropriate time, to keep you and your systems in balance.

Because everything will ultimately be driven by the priorities of the level above it, any formulation of your priorities would obviously most efficiently begin at the top. For example, if you spend time prioritizing your work and then later discover that it's not the work you think you ought to be doing, you may have "wasted" time and energy that could have been better spent defining the next job you really want. The problem is that without a sense of control at the implementation levels (current projects and actions), and without inner trust in your own ability to manage those levels appropriately, trying to manage yourself from the top down often creates frustration.

From a practical perspective, I suggest going from the bottom up instead. I've coached people from both directions, and in terms of lasting value, I can honestly say that getting someone in control of the details of his or her current physical world, and then elevating the focus from there, has never missed.

The primary reason to work from this bottom-up direction is that it clears the psychic decks to begin with, allowing your creative attention to focus on the more meaningful and elusive visions that you may need to challenge yourself to identify. Also, this particular method has a high degree of flexibility and freedom, and it includes a thinking and organizing practice that is universal and effective no matter what it's focused on. That makes it worth learning, no matter what the actual content you're dealing with at the moment may be. Change your mind, and this process will help you adjust with maximum speed. And knowing that you have that ability will give you permission to play a bigger game. It's truly empowering.

While the "50,000-foot level" is obviously the most important context within which to set priorities, experience has shown me that when we understand and implement all the levels of work in which we are engaged, especially the runway and 10,000-foot levels, we gain greater freedom and resources to do the bigger work that we're all about. Although a bottom-up approach is not a key conceptual priority, from a practical perspective it's a critical factor in achieving a balanced, productive, and comfortable life.

Runway The first thing to do is make sure your action lists are complete, which in itself can be quite a task. Those who focus on gathering and objectifying all of those items discover that there are many they've forgotten, misplaced, or just not recognized.

Aside from your calendar, if you don't have at least fifty next actions and waiting-fors, including all the agendas for people and meetings, I would be skeptical about whether you really had all of them. If you've followed through rigorously with the steps and suggestions in part 2, though, you may have them already. If not, and you do want to get this level up-to-date, set aside some time to work through chapters 4 through 6 in real implementation mode.

When you've finished getting this level of control current, you'll automatically have a more grounded sense of immediate priorities, which is almost impossible to achieve otherwise.

10,000 Feet Finalize your "Projects" list. Does it truly capture all the commitments you have that will require more than one action to get done? That will define the boundaries of the kind of week-to-week operational world you're in and allow you to relax your thinking for longer intervals.

If you make a complete list of all of the things you want to have happen in your life and work at this level, you'll discover that there are actions you need to do that you hadn't realized. Just creating this objective inventory will give you a firmer basis on which to make decisions about what to do when you have discretionary time. Invariably when people get their "Projects" list up-to-date, they discover there are several things that could be done readily to move things they care about forward.

Very few people have this clear data defined and available to themselves in some objective form. Before any discussion about what should be done this afternoon can take place, this information must be at hand.

Again, if you've been putting into practice the methodology of Getting Things Done, your "Projects" list will be where it needs to be. For most of our coaching clients, it takes ten to fifteen hours of collecting, processing, and organizing to get to the point of trusting the thoroughness of their inventory.

20,000 Feet This is the level of "current job responsibilities." What are the "hats" you wear? Professionally, this would relate to your current position and work. Personally, it would include the roles you've taken on in your family, in your community, and of course with yourself as a functioning person.

You may have some of these roles already defined and written out. If you've recently taken a new position and there's an agreement or contract about your areas of responsibility, that would certainly be a good start. If you've done any kind of personal goal-setting and values-clarifying exercises in the past and still have any materials you created then, add those to the mix.

Next I recommend that you make and keep a list called "Areas of Focus." You might like to separate this into "Professional" and "Personal" sublists, in which case you'll want to use them both equally for a consistent review This is one of the most useful checklists you can create for your own self-management. It won't require the kind of once-a-week recalibration that the "Projects" list will; more likely it will have meaning on a longer recursion cycle. Depending on the speed of change in some of the more important areas of your life and work, this should be used as a trigger for potential new projects every one to three months.

You probably have somewhere between four and seven key areas of responsibility in your work, and a similar number person-ally. Your job may include things like staff development, systems design, long-range planning, administrative support, marketing, and scheduling, or responsibility for facilities, fulfillment, quality control, asset management, and so on. If you're your own business, your attention will be on many more areas than if you have a very specialized function in a large organization. The rest of your life might entail areas of focus such as parenting, partnering, church, health, community service, home management, financial management, self-development, creative expression, and so forth.

The operational purpose of the "Areas of Focus" list is to ensure that you have all your projects and next actions defined, so you can manage your responsibilities appropriately. If you were to create an accounting of those and evaluate them objectively, in terms of what you're doing and should be doing, you'll undoubtedly uncover projects you need to add to your "Projects" list. You may, in reviewing the list, decide that some areas are just fine and are being taken care of. Then again, you may realize that something has been "bugging" you in one area and that a project should be created to shore it up. "Areas of Focus" is really just a more abstract and refined version of the "Triggers" list we covered earlier.

Every client I have coached in the last twenty years has uncovered at least one important gap at this level of discussion. For instance, a common "hat" a manager or executive wears is "staff development." Upon reflection, most realize they need to add a project or two in that area, such as "Upgrade our performance review process."

A discussion of "priorities" would have to incorporate all of these levels of current agreements between yourself and others. If you get this "job description" checklist in play and keep it current, you'll probably be more relaxed and in control than most people in our culture. It will certainly go a long way toward moving you from hope to trust as you make the necessary on-the-run choices about what to do.

30,000 to 50,000+ Feet Whereas the three lower levels have mostly to do with the current state of things — your actions, projects, and areas of responsibility — from here up the factors of the future and your direction and intentions are primary. There is still an inventory to take at these plateaus, but it's more about "What is true right now about where I've decided I'm going and how I'm going to get there?" This can range from one-year goals in your job ("30,000 feet") to a three-year vision for your career and personal net worth ("40,000 feet") to intuiting your life purpose and how to maximize its expression ("50,000+ feet").

I'm blending the three uppermost levels together here because situations often can't easily be pigeonholed into one or another of these categories. Also, since Getting Things Done is more about the art of implementation than about how to define goals and vision, I won't offer a rigorous examination here. But by its very nature this investigation can broach potentially deep and complex arenas, which could include business strategy, organization development, career planning, and life direction and values.

For our purposes, the focus is on capturing what motivators exist for you in current reality that determine the inventory of what your work actually is, right now. Whether your directions and goals should be changed — based on deeper thinking, analysis, and intuition — could be another discussion. Even so, there are probably some things you can identify right now that can help you get current in your own thinking about your work and what's important in it.

If you were to intuitively frame a picture of what you think you might be doing twelve to eighteen months from now, or what the nature of your job will look like at that point, what would that trigger? At this level, which is subtler, there may be things person-ally you need to let go of, and people and systems that may need to be developed to allow the transition. And as the job itself is a moving target, given the shifting sands of the professional world these days, there may need to be projects defined to ensure viability of the outputs in your area.

In the personal arena, this is where you would want to consider things like: "My career is going to stagnate unless I assert my own goals more specifically to my boss (or my boss's boss)." Or "What new things are my children going to be doing next year, and what do I need to do differently because of that?" Or "What preparation do I need to ensure that I can deal with this health problem we've just uncovered?"

Through a longer scope you might assess: How is your career going? How is your personal life moving along? What is your organization doing relative to changes in the environment, and what impact does that have on you? These are the one-to-five-year-horizon questions that, when I ask them, elicit different and important kinds of answers from everyone.

Not long ago I coached someone in a large international bank who, after a few months of implementing this methodology and getting control of his day-to-day inventory of work, decided the time was right to invest in his own start-up high-tech firm. The thought had been too intimidating for him to address initially, but working from the "runway level" up made it much more accessible and a natural consequence of thinking at this horizon.

If you're involved in anything that has a future of longer than a year (marriage, kids, a career, a company, an art form), you would do well to think about what you might need to be doing to man-age things along that vector.

Questions to ask yourself here are:

• What are the longer-term goals and objectives in my organization, and what projects do I need to have in place related to them to fulfill my responsibilities?

• What longer-term goals and objectives have I set for myself, and what projects do I need to have in place to make them happen?

• What other significant things are happening that could affect my options about what you I'm doing?

Here are some examples of the kinds of issues that show up at this level of conversation:

• The changing nature of your job, given the shifting priorities of the company. Instead of managing the production of your own training programs in-house, you're going to outsource them to vendors.

• The direction in which you feel you need to move in your career. You see yourself doing a different kind of job a year from now, and you need to make a transition out of the one you have while exploring the options for a transfer or promotion.

• The organization direction, given globalization and expansion. You see a lot of major international travel looming on the horizon for you, and given your life-style preferences, you need to consider how to readjust your career plans.

• Life-style preferences and changing needs. As your kids get older, your need to be at home with them is diminishing, and your interest in investment and retirement planning is growing.

At the topmost level of thinking, you'll need to ask some of the ultimate questions. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? What is the core DNA of your existence, personally and/or organizationally, that drives your choices. This is the "big picture" stuff with which hundreds of books and gurus and models are devoted to helping you grapple.

"Why?": this is the great question with which we all struggle.

You can have all the other levels of your life and work ship-shape, defined, and organized to a T. Still, if you're the slightest bit off course in terms of what at the deepest level you want or are called to be doing, you're going to be uncomfortable.

Getting Priority Thinking Off Your Mind

Take at least a few minutes, if you haven't already done so, to jot down some informal notes about things that occurred to you while you've been reading this chapter. Whatever popped into your mind at these more elevated levels of your inner radar, write it down and get it out of your head.

Then process those notes. Decide whether what you wrote down is something you really want to move on or not. If not, throw the note away, or put it on a "Someday/Maybe" list or in a folder called "Dreams and Goals I Might Get Around to at Some Point." Perhaps you want to continue accumulating more of this kind of future thinking and would like to do the exercise with more formality — for example, by drafting a new business plan with your partners, designing and writing out your idea of a dream life with your spouse, creating a more specific career map for the next three years for yourself, or just getting a personal coach who can lead you through those discussions and thought processes. If so, put that outcome on your "Projects" list, and decide the next action. Then do it, hand it off to get done, or put the action reminder on the appropriate list.

With that done, you may want to turn your focus to develop-mental thinking about specific projects that have been identified but not fleshed out as fully as you'd like. You'll want to ensure that you're set up for that kind of "vertical" processing.

10. Getting Projects Under Control

CHAPTERS 4 THROUGH 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level — what needs your attention and action across the horizontal landscape of your life. The last piece of the puzzle is the vertical level — the digging deep and pie-in-the-sky thinking that can leverage your creative brainpower. That gets us back to refining and energizing our project planning.

After years of working with thousands of professionals down in the trenches, I can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative out-put with minimal effort.

I've discovered that the biggest improvement opportunity in planning does not consist of techniques for the highly elaborate and complex kinds of project organizing that professional project managers sometimes use (like GANTT charts). Most of the people who need those already have them, or at least have access to the training and software required to learn about them. The real need is to capture and utilize more of the creative, proactive thinking we do — or could do.

The major reason for the lack of this kind of effective value-added thinking is the dearth of systems for managing the potentially infinite amount of detail that could show up as a result. This is why my approach tends to be bottom-up. If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you'll resist focused planning. An unconscious pushback occurs. As you begin to apply these methods, however, you may find that they free up enormous creative and constructive thinking. If you have systems and habits ready to leverage your ideas, your productivity can expand exponentially. In chapter 3, I covered in some detail the five phases of project planning that take something from the idea stage into physical reality.

What follows is a compilation of practical tips and techniques to facilitate the natural, informal planning processes I recommend. Although these suggestions are all based on common sense, they're not followed nearly as frequently as they could be. Put them to use whenever and as often as you can, instead of saving up your thinking for big formal meetings.

Most of the outcomes you have identified for your "Projects" list will not need any kind of front-end planning, other than the sort you do in your head, quickly and naturally, to come up with a next action on them. The only planning needed for "Get car inspected," for example, would be to decide to check the phone book for the nearest inspection location and call and set up a time. There are two types of projects, however, that deserve at least some sort of planning activity: (1) those that still have your attention even after you've determined their next actions, and (2) those about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up.

The first type — the projects that you know have other things about them that must be decided on and organized — will need a more detailed approach than just identifying a next action. For these you'll need a more specific application of one or more of the other four phases of the natural planning model: purpose and principles, vision/outcome, brainstorming, and/or organizing.

The second type — the projects for which ideas just show up, ad hoc, on a beach or in a car or in a meeting — need to have an appropriate place into which these associated ideas can be captured. Then they can reside there for later use as needed.

Projects That Need Next Actions About Planning

There are probably a few projects you can think of right now, off the top of your head, that you know you want to get more objectified, fleshed out, and under control. Perhaps you have an important meeting coming up and you know you have to prepare an agenda and materials for it. Or you've just inherited the job of coordinating the annual associates' conference, and you've got to get it organized as soon as possible so you can start delegating significant pieces. Or you've got to clarify a job description for a new position on your team to give to Human Resources. If you haven't done it already, get a next action now that will start the planning process for each of these, and put it on the appropriate action list. Then proceed with further planning steps.

Typical Planning Steps

The most common types of planning-oriented actions will be your own brainstorming and organizing, setting up meetings, and gathering information.

Brainstorming 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."

You need to decide where and how you want to do that action, in order to know which action list to put it on. Do you do this kind of thinking best on a computer, or by hand-writing your thoughts on paper? I may choose either medium, depending on what my intuition tells me. For me this next action would go either on my "At Computer" list or on "Anywhere" (because I can draw mind-maps wherever I am, as long as I have pen and paper).

Organizing You may have some projects for which you have already collected notes and miscellaneous support materials, and you just need to sort through them and get them into a more structured form. In this case, your next action would likely be "Organize Project X notes." If you have to be in your office to do that (because that's where the files are, and you don't want to carry them around), that action should go on your "At Office" action list. If you're carrying the project notes around with you in a folder, or in a portable organizer or on a laptop, then the "Organize. . " action would go on an "Anywhere" or "Misc." action list if you're going to do it by hand, or on "At Computer" if you're going to use a word processor, outliner, or project-planning software.

Setting Up Meetings Often, progress will be made on project thinking when you set up a meeting with the people you'd like to have involved in the brainstorming. That usually means sending an e-mail to the whole group or to an assistant to get it calendared, or making a phone call to the first person to nail down a time.

Gathering Information Sometimes the next task on project thinking is to gather more data. Maybe you need to talk to someone to get his or her input ("Call Bill re his thoughts on the managers' meeting"). Or you need to look through the files you just inherited from last year's conference ("Review Associate Conference archive files"). Or you want to surf the Web to get a sense of what's happening "out there" on a new topic you're exploring ("R&D search firms for sales executives").

Random Project Thinking

Don't lose any ideas about projects that could potentially be useful. Many times you'll think of something you don't want to forget when you're a place that has nothing to do with the project. You're driving to the store, for example, and you think of a great way that you might want to start off the next staff meeting. Or you're stir-ring the spaghetti sauce in the kitchen and it occurs to you that you might want to give out nice tote bags to participants in the upcoming conference. Or you're watching the evening news when you suddenly remember another key person you might want to include in the advisory council you're putting together.

If these aren't specifically next actions that can go directly on your action lists, you'll still need to capture and organize them somewhere that makes sense. Of course the most critical tools for ensuring that nothing gets lost is your collection system — your in-basket, pad, and paper (or equivalents) at work and at home, and in a portable version (an index card) while you're out and about. You need to hold all your ideas until you later decide what to do with them.

No matter at what level project ideas show up, it's great to have good tools always close at hand for capturing them as they occur. Once they've been captured, it's useful to have access to them whenever you need to refer to them.

Thinking Tools

One of the great secrets to getting ideas and increasing your productivity is utilizing the function-follows-form phenomenon — great tools can trigger good thinking. (I've come up with some of my most productive thoughts when playing with my Palm organizer in an airport, waiting for a flight!)

If you aren't writing anything down, it's extremely difficult to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes, especially if you're by yourself. But when you utilize physical tools to keep your thinking anchored, you can stay engaged constructively for hours.

Writing Instruments

Keep good writing tools around all the time so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with. If I don't have something to write with, I can sense that I'm not as comfortable letting myself think about projects and situations.

Conversely, I have done some great thinking and planning at times just because I wanted to use my nice-looking, smooth-writing ballpoint pen! You may not be inspired by cool gear like I am, but if you are, do yourself a favor and invest in quality writing tools.

I also suggest that you keep nice ballpoint pens at the stations where you're likely to want to take notes — particularly near the phones around your house.

Paper and Pads

In addition to writing tools, you should always have functional pads of paper close at hand. Legal pads work well because you can easily tear off pages with ideas and notes and toss them into your in-basket until you get a chance to process them. Also you will often want to keep some of your informal mind-maps, and you can put those separate pieces of paper in appropriate file folders without having to rewrite them.

Easels and Whiteboards

If you have room for them, whiteboards and/or easel pads are very functional thinking tools to use from time to time. They give you plenty of space on which to jot down ideas, and it can be useful to keep them up in front of you for while, as you incubate on a topic. Whiteboards are great to have on a wall in your office and in meeting rooms, and the bigger the better. If you have children, I recommend that you install one in their bedrooms (I wish I'd grown up with the encouragement to have as many ideas as I could!). Be sure to keep plenty of fresh markers on hand; it's frustrating to want to start writing on a whiteboard and find that all the markers are dry and useless.

Whenever two or more people are gathered for a meeting, someone should start writing somewhere where the other(s) can see. Even if you erase your thoughts after a few minutes, just the act of writing them down facilitates a constructive thinking process like nothing else. (I've found it immensely helpful at times to draw informal diagrams and notes on paper tablecloths, place mats, or even napkins in restaurants, if I didn't have my own pad of paper at hand.)

The Computer

Many times I like to think on my laptop, in my word processor. There are so many things I might want to do later on with my thinking, and it feels terrific to already have it in some digital form for later editing and cutting and pasting into various other applications. Once I've booted up and the screen is ready in front of me, I find that thinking just automatically starts to happen. This is another good reason to ensure that your typing and keyboard skills are sufficient to make engaging with the computer at least easy, if not downright fun.

The Support Structures

In addition to good tools ubiquitously at hand, it is productive to have accessible formats into which project thinking can be captured. Much as a pen and paper in front of you supports brain-storming, having good tools and places for organizing project details facilitates the more linear planning that many projects need.

Create File Folders or Loose-Leaf Pages as Needed

A good general-reference filing system, right at hand and easy to use, is not only critical to manage the general workflow process, but highly functional for project thinking as well. Often a project begins to emerge when it's triggered by relevant data, notes, and miscellaneous materials, and for this reason, you'll want to create a folder for a topic as soon as you have something to put in it. If your filing system is too formal (or nonexistent), you'll probably miss many opportunities to generate a project focus sufficiently early. As soon as you return from that first meeting with your initial notes about a topic that has just emerged on the horizon, create a file and store them in it right away (after you have gleaned any next actions, of course).

Many times, in coaching clients, I find that the mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organize random notes and potentially relevant materials gives them a significantly improved sense of control. It's a way of physically, visibly, and psychologically getting their "arms around it."

If you like to work with a loose-leaf notebook or planner, it's good to keep an inventory of fresh note paper or graph paper that you can use to set up a page on a theme or project as it shows up. While some projects may later deserve a whole tabbed section or even an entire notebook of their own, they don't start out that way. And most of your projects may need only a page or two to hold the few ideas you need to track.

Software Tools

Software is in one sense a dark black hole to explore in search of good "project management" tools. For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage. They're appropriate only for the very small percentage of the professional world that actually needs them. The rest of us usually find bits and pieces of applications more informal and project-friendly. As I've noted, I have never seen any two projects that needed the same amount of detailing and structure to get them under control. So it would be difficult to create any one application that would suffice for the majority.

Digital Outlining Most of what anyone needs to structure his or her thinking about projects can be found in any kind of application that has a simple hierarchical outlining function. I used to use a Symantec program called Grandview, and now I often use Microsoft Word for just this kind of project planning. Here's a piece of an outline I created for one of our own planning sessions:

The great thing about outlining applications is that they can be as complex or as simple as required. There are numerous soft-ware programs that provide this kind of basic hierarchical structuring. The trick is to find one that you feel comfortable with, so you can rapidly get familiar with how to insert headings and sub-headings and move them around as needed. Until you can stop focusing on how to use the program, you'll resist booting it up and using it to think and organize.

It doesn't really matter where you put this kind of thinking, so long as it's easily accessible so you can input and review it as needed.

Brainstorming Applications Several applications have been developed specifically to facilitate the brainstorming process. "Inspiration" was one, based on the mind-mapping techniques of Tony Buzan. It had some useful features, but me, I've gone back to paper and cool pen for the kind of rapid, informal thinking I usually need to do.

The problem with digitizing brainstorming is that for the most part we don't need to save what we brainstorm in the way we brainstormed it — the critical thing is the conclusions we develop from that raw thinking. The slick brainstorming-capture tools, like electronic whiteboards and digital handwriting-copying gear, ultimately will probably not be as successful as the manufacturers hoped. We don't need to save creative thinking so much as we do the structures we generate from it. There are significant differences among collecting and processing and organizing, and different tools are usually required for them. You might as well dump ideas into a word processor.

Project-Planning Applications As I've mentioned, most project-planning software is too rigorous for the majority of the project thinking and planning we need to do. Over the years I've seen these programs more often tried and discontinued than utilized as a consistent tool. When they're used successfully, they're usually highly customized to fit very specific requirements for the company or the industry.

I anticipate that less structured and more functional applications will emerge in the coming years, based on the ways we naturally think and plan. Until then, best stick with some good and simple outliner.

Attaching Digital Notes

If you are using a digital organizer, much of the project planning you need to capture outside your head can in fact be satisfactorily managed in an attached note field. If you have the project itself as an item on a list on a Palm, or as a task in Microsoft Outlook, you can open the accompanying "Note" section and jot ideas, bullet points, and subcomponents of the project. Just ensure that you review the attachment appropriately to make it useful.

Just as your "Next Actions" lists need to be up-to-date, so, too, does your "Projects" list. That done, give yourself a block of time, ideally between one and three hours, to handle as much of the "vertical" thinking about each project as you can.

At the very least, right now or as soon as possible, take those few of your projects that you have the most attention on or interest in right now and do some thinking and collecting and organizing on them, using whatever tools seem most appropriate.

Focus on each one, one at a time, top to bottom. As you do, ask yourself, "What about this do I want to know, capture, or remember?" You may just want to mind-map some thoughts on a piece of paper, make a file, and toss the paper into it. You may come up with some simple bullet-point headings to attach as a "note" in your software organizer. Or you could create a Word file and start an outline on it.

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.