The Art of Getting Things Done STRESS FREE

Most people have major weaknesses in their

(1) capture process. Most of their commitments to do something are still in their head. The number of coulds, shoulds, might-want-tos, and ought-tos they generate in their minds are way out beyond what they have recorded anywhere else. Many have collected lots of things but haven't (2) clarified exactly what they represent or decided what action, if any, to take about them. Random lists strewn everywhere, meeting notes, vague to-dos on Post-its on their refrigerator or computer screens or in their Tasks function in a digital tool—all lie not acted on and numbing to the psyche in their effect. Those lists alone often create more stress than they relieve.

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are

(1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Although it may seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.

We (1) capture what has our attention;

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

The Basics

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

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

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

The Basics of Organizing The key steps here are:

-Identify the significant pieces -Sort by (one or more): -components -sequences -priorities -Detail to the required degree I have never seen any two projects that needed to have exactly the same amount of structure and detail developed in order to get things off people's minds and moving successfully. But almost all projects can use some form of creative thinking from the sequential part of the brain, along the lines of "What's the plan?"

The Value of Thinking About Why Here are just some of the benefits of asking why

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

Why Things Are on Your Mind Most often, the reason something is on your mind is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:

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

When the Next Action Is Someone Else's .

. If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the Waiting For action list). In a group-planning situation, it isn't necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of the project. Often all that's required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces. This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity. Issues and details emerge that don't show up until someone holds everyone's feet to the fire about the physical-level reality of resource allocation. It's a simple practical discussion to foster, and one that can significantly stir the pot and identify weak links.

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

1.. Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined. 2. Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity. 3. Defer it, If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more "Next Actions" lists.

Activating the Moving Parts

A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every nextaction step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component's having to be completed first. If the project has multiple components, each of them should be assessed appropriately by asking, "Is there something that anyone could be doing on this right now?" You could be coordinating speakers for the conference, for instance, at the same time that you're finding the appropriate site. In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that. So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background

Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative, out-of-the-box thinking. But in the brainstorming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver. Making a list can be a creative thing to do; it's a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

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

At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? At that moment there are four criteria you can apply, in this order: context, time available, energy available, and priority. The first three describe the constraints within which you continually operate, and the fourth provides the hierarchical values to ascribe to your actions

Organize

Being organized means simply that where something is matches what it means to you.

Ground:

Current Actions This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take—all the phone calls you have to make, the e-mails you have to respond to, the errands you've got to run, and the agendas you want to communicate to your boss and your life partner. You'd probably have more than a hundred of these items to handle if you stopped the world right now with no more input from yourself or anyone else.

Defining Your Work

Defining your work entails clearing up your in-tray, your digital messages, and your meeting notes, and breaking down new projects into actionable steps. As you process your inputs, you'll no doubt be taking care of some less-than-two-minute actions and tossing and filing numerous things (another version of doing work as it shows up). A good portion of this activity will consist of identifying things that need to get done sometime, but not right away. You'll be adding to all of your lists as you go along. Once you have defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete. And your context, time, and energy available still allow you the option of more than one thing to do. The final thing to consider is the nature of your work, and its goals and standards.

Critical Success Factor: The Weekly Review

Everything that might require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding. In order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some more elevated level. In my experience (with thousands of people), that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review. All of your Projects, active project plans, and Next Actions, Agendas, Waiting For, and even Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week. This also gives you an opportunity to ensure that your brain is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few days have been captured, clarified, and organized.

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors:

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

Horizon 1: Current Projects

Generating most of the actions that you currently have in front of you are the thirty to one hundred projects on your plate. These are the relatively short-term outcomes you want to achieve, such as setting up a new home computer, organizing a sales conference, moving to a new headquarters, and getting a dentist.

Priority

Given your context, time, and energy available, what action remaining of your options will give you the highest payoff? You're in your office with a phone and a computer, you have an hour, and your energy is 7.3 on a scale of 10. Should you call the client back, work on the proposal, process your e-mails, or check in with your spouse to see how his or her day is going? This is where you need to access your intuition and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment. To explore that concept further, let's examine two more models for deciding what's most important for you to be doing.

Go for Quantity, Not Quality

Going for quantity keeps your thinking expansive. Often you won't know what's a good idea until you have it. And sometimes you'll realize it's a good idea, or the germ of one, only later on. You know how shopping at a big store with lots of options lets you feel comfortable about your choice? The same holds true for project thinking. The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.

First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it's virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time.

Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment. Trying to keep a list on the calendar, which must then be reentered on another day if items don't get done, is demoralizing and a waste of time. The Next Actions lists I advocate will hold all of those action reminders, even the most time-sensitive ones. And they won't have to be rewritten daily.

Enhancing Vertical Focus

Horizontal focus is all you'll need in most situations, most of the time. Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project or situation under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been determined. This is where vertical focus comes in. Knowing how to think productively in this more vertical way and how to integrate the results into your personal system is the second powerful behavior set needed for knowledge work.

It Creates Decision-Making Criteria

How do you decide whether to spend the money for a fivecolor brochure or just go with a two-color? How do you know whether it's worth hiring a major Web design firm to handle your new Web site? How do you know if you should send your daughter to private school? It all comes down to purpose. Given what you're trying to accomplish, are these investments required? There's no way to know until the purpose is defined.

Energy Availabl

How much energy do you have? Some actions you have to do require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy. Others need more physical horsepower. Some need very little of either.

How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do?

How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind. In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.

It Aligns Resources

How should we spend our staffing allocation in the corporate budget? How do we best use the cash flow right now to maximize our viability as a retailer over the next year? Should we spend more money on the luncheon or on the speakers for the monthly association meeting? In each case, the answer depends on what we're really trying to accomplish—the why.

Projects

I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things you might not normally call projects are going to be on your Projects list, as well as some big ones. The reasoning behind my definition is that if one step won't complete something, some kind of goalpost needs to be set up to remind you that there's something still left to do. If you don't have a placeholder to remind you about it, it will slip back into your head. The reason for the one-year time frame is that anything you are committed to finish within that scope needs to be reviewed weekly to feel comfortable about its status. Another way to think of this is as a list of open loops, no matter what the size.

Second, if there's something on a daily to-do list that doesn't absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.

If I have to call Mioko on Friday because that's the only day I can reach her, but then I add five other, less important or less time-sensitive calls to my to-do list, when the day gets crazy I may never call Mioko. My brain will have to take back the reminder that that's the one phone call I won't get another chance at. That's not utilizing the system appropriately. The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments. That said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with creating a quick, informal, short list of "if I have time, I'd really like to . . ." kinds of things, picked from your Next Actions inventory. It just should not be confused with your "have-tos," and it should be treated lightly enough to discard or change quickly as the inevitable surprises of the day unfold.

Two things need to be determined about each actionable item:

If It's About a Project . and What's the Next Action

Need More Clarity?

If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale. People are often very busy (action) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction. They need to pull out the plan or create one (organize). If there's a lack of clarity at the planning level, there's probably a need for more brainstorming to generate a sufficient inventory of current ideas and data to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the vision of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the how-to thinking. If the outcome/vision is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you're engaged in the situation in the first place (purpose).

What to Review When

If you set up a personal organization system structured as I recommend, with a Projects list, a calendar, Next Actions lists, and a Waiting For list, not much will be required to maintain that system. The item you'll probably review most frequently is your calendar, which will remind you about the "hard landscape" for the day—that is, what things truly have to be handled that day. This doesn't mean that the contents there are the most "important" in some grand sense—only that they must get done. At any point in time, knowing what has to get done and when creates a terrain for maneuvering. It's a good habit, as soon as you conclude an action on your calendar (a meeting, a phone call, the final draft of a report that's due), to check and see what else remains to be done.

Organizing

If you've done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you'll notice that a natural organization is emerging. As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you'll automatically notice natural relationships and structure. This is what most people are referring to when they talk about organizing a project. Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences of events, and/or priorities. What are the things that must occur to create the final result? In what order must they occur? What is the most important element to ensure the success of the project? This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points scribbled on the back of an envelope to heavy-horsepower project-planning software. When a project calls for substantial objective control, you'll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a Gantt-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole. Creative thinking doesn't stop here; it just takes another form. Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to fill in the blanks. Identifying the three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up

Vision/Outcome

In order to most productively access the conscious and unconscious resources available to you, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like. Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the what instead of the why. What will this project or situation really be like when it successfully appears in the world?

Someday/Maybe

It can be useful and inspiring to maintain an ongoing list of things you might want to do at some point but not now. This is the "parking lot" for projects that would be impossible to move on at present but that you don't want to forget about entirely. You'd like to be reminded of the possibility at regular intervals.

Purpose

It never hurts to ask the why question. Almost anything you're currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at this top level of focus. Why are you going to your next meeting? What's the purpose of your task? Why are you having friends over for dinner? Why are you hiring a marketing director instead of an agency? Why are you putting up with the situation in your service organization? Why do you have a budget? Ad infinitum.

Don't Judge, Challenge, Evaluate, or Criticize

It's easy for the unnatural planning model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critiques of ideas. If you care even slightly about what a critic thinks, you'll censor your expressive process as you look for the "right" thing to say. There's a very subtle distinction between keeping brainstorming on target with the topic and stifling the creative process. It's also important that brainstorming be put into the overall context of the planning process, because if you think you're doing it just for its own sake, it can seem trite and inappropriately off course. If you can understand it instead as something you're doing right now, for a certain period, before you move toward a resolution at the end, you'll feel more comfortable giving this part of the process its due. This is not to suggest that you should shut off critical thinking, though—everything ought to be fair game at this stage. "Here's what might be wrong with that approach" needs to be on the table, if it's present. Often it's the most challenging and critical ideas that have the germ of the best ones. It's just wise to understand what kinds of thoughts you're having and to park them for use in the most appropriate way. The primary criteria must be inclusion and expansion, not constriction and contraction.

Capture

It's important to know what needs to be captured and how to do that most effectively so you can process it appropriately. In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do or at least decide about, and that at some point in the near future you will process and review all of it.

Reflect

It's one thing to write down that you need milk; it's another to be at the store and remember it. Likewise, writing down that you need to call a friend to find out how he's doing after a significant event in his life and wish him well is different from remembering it when you're at a phone and have some discretionary time.

Three Models for Making Action Choices

Let's assume for a moment that you're not resisting any of your stuff out of insecurity or procrastination. There will always be a long list of actions that you are not doing at any given moment. So how will you decide what to do and what not to do, and feel good about both? The answer is, by trusting your intuition. If you have captured, clarified, organized, and reflected on all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgment with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work and values. There are three models that will be helpful for you to incorporate in your decision making about what to do. They won't tell you answers—whether you call Mario, e-mail your son at school, or just have an informal conversation with your secretary—but they will assist you in framing your options more intelligently. And that's something that the simple time- and priority-management panaceas can't do.

It Motivates

Let's face it: if there's no good reason to be doing something, it's not worth doing. I'm often stunned by how many people have forgotten why they're doing what they're doing—and by how quickly a simple question like, "Why are you doing that?" can get them back on track

if any one of these previous links is weak, what someone is likely to choose to (5) engage in at any point in time may not be the best option.

Most decisions for action and focus are driven by the latest and loudest inputs, and are based on hope instead of trust. People have a constant nagging sense that they're not working on what they should be, that they "don't have time" for potentially critical activities, and that they're missing out on the timeless sense of meaningful doing that is the essence of stress-free productivity.

Principles

Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold. Although people seldom think about these consciously, they are always there. And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress. A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: "I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they . . ." As long as they what? What policies, stated or unstated, will apply to your group's activities? "As long as they stayed within budget"? "satisfied the client"? "ensured a healthy team"? "promoted a positive image"? It can be a major source of stress when others engage in or allow behavior that's outside your standards. If you never have to deal with this issue, you're truly graced. If you do, some constructive conversation about, and clarification of, principles could align the energy and prevent unnecessary conflict. You may want to begin by asking yourself, "What behavior might undermine what I'm doing, and how can I prevent it?" That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards. Another great reason for focusing on principles is the clarity and reference point they provide for positive conduct. How do you want or need to work with others on this project to ensure its success? What behaviors are in- and out-of-bounds for your kids on the family vacation? You and others are at your best when you're acting how? Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of conduct.

Doing Work as It Shows Up

Often things come up ad hoc—unsuspected, unforeseen—that you either have to or choose to engage in as they occur. For example, your partner walks into your office and wants to have a conversation about the new product launch, so you talk to her instead of doing all the other things you could be doing. Every day brings surprises—unplanned-for things that just show up —and you'll need to expend at least some time and energy on many of them. When you follow these leads, you're deciding by default that these things are more important than anything else you have to do at those times.

Brainstorming

Once you know what you want to happen and why, the how mechanism is brought into play. When you identify with some picture in your mind that is different from your current reality, you automatically start filling in the gaps, or brainstorming. Ideas begin to pop into your head in somewhat random order—little ones, big ones, not-so-good ones, good ones. This process usually goes on internally for most people about most things, and that's often sufficient. For example, you think about what you want to say to your boss as you're walking down the hall to speak to her. But there are many other instances when writing things down, or capturing them in some external way, can give a tremendous boost to productive output and thinking.

Capturing Your Ideas

Over the past several decades, a number of graphics-oriented brainstorming techniques have been introduced to help develop creative thinking about projects and topics. They've been been given names such as mind mapping, clustering, patterning, webbing, and fish boning. Although the authors of these various processes may portray them as being different from one another, for most of us end users the basic premise remains the same: give yourself permission to capture and express any idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it. If nothing else (and there is plenty of "else"), this practice adds to your efficiency—when you have the idea, you grab it, which means you won't have to have the idea again.

It Expands Options

Paradoxically, even as purpose brings things into pinpoint focus, it opens up creative thinking about wider possibilities. When you really know the underlying why—for the conference, for the staff party, for your vacation, for the elimination of the management position, or for the merger—it expands your thinking about how to make the desired result happen. When people write out their purpose for a project in my seminars, they often claim it's like a fresh breeze blowing through their mind, clarifying their vision of what they're doing. Is your purpose clear and specific enough? If you're truly experiencing the benefits of a purpose focus—motivation, clarity, decision-making criteria, alignment, and creativity—then your purpose probably is specific enough. But many purpose statements are too vague to produce such results. "To have a good team," for example, might be too broad or vague a goal. After all, what constitutes a "good team"? Is it a group of people who are highly motivated, collaborating in healthy ways, and taking initiative? Or is it a team that comes in under budget? In other words, if you don't really know when you've met your purpose or when you're off track, you don't have a viable directive. The question, "How will I know when this is off purpose?" must have a clear answer.

It Defines Success

People are starved for "wins" these days. We love to play games, and we like to win, or at least be in a position where we could win. And if you're not totally clear about the purpose of what you're doing, you have no chance of winning. Purpose defines success. It's the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy, from deciding to run for elective office to designing a form. Ultimately you can't feel good about a staff meeting unless you know what the purpose of the meeting was. And if you want to sleep well, you'd better have a good answer when your board asks why you fired your head of marketing or hired that hotshot MBA as your new finance director. You won't really know whether or not your business plan is any good until you hold it up against the success criterion that you define by answering the question, "Why do we need a business plan?"

The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work

Priorities should drive your choices, but most models for determining them are not reliable tools for much of our real work activity. In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is. And there are at least six different perspectives from which to define that. To use an appropriate analogy, the conversation has a lot do with the horizon, or distance of perception. Looking out from a building, you will notice different things from different floors. -Horizon 5: Purpose and principles -Horizon 4: Vision -Horizon 3: Goals -Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountabilities -Horizon 1: Current projects -Ground: Current actions

Horizon 4: Vision

Projecting three to five years into the future generates thinking about bigger categories: organization strategies, environmental trends, career and lifestyle transition circumstances. Internal factors include longer-term career, family, financial, and quality-of-life aspirations and considerations. Outer-world issues could involve changes affecting your job and organization, such as technology, globalization, market trends, and competition. Decisions at this altitude could easily change what your work might look like on many levels.

Calendar

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

The "Next Actions" List(s)

So where do your entire action reminders go? On Next Actions lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization and orientation. Any longer-than-two-minute, non-delegatable action you have identified needs to be tracked somewhere. "Call Jim Smith re: budget meeting," "E-mail family update to friends," and "Draft ideas re: the annual sales conference" are all the kinds of action reminders that need to be kept in appropriate lists, to be assessed as options for what we will do at any point in time

The Next-Action Categories

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

Engage

The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you're doing at any point in time. At 10:33 a.m. Monday, deciding whether to call Sandy, finish the proposal, or clean up your e-mails will always be an intuitive call, but with the proper orientation you can feel much more confident about your choices. You can move from hope to trust in your actions, immediately increasing your energy and effectiveness.

Day-Specific Information

The calendar is also the place to keep track of things you want to know about on specific days—not necessarily actions you'll have to take but rather information that may be useful on a certain date. This might include directions for appointments, activities that other people (family or staff) will be involved in then, or events of interest. It's helpful to put short-term tickler information here, too, such as a reminder to call someone after he or she returns from vacation. This is also where you would want to park important reminders about when something might be due, or when something needs to be started (in case it hasn't been yet), given a determined lead time.

Next Actions

The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving. The question to ask here is, "What's the next action?" As we noted in the previous chapter, this kind of grounded, reality-based thinking, combined with clarification of the desired outcome, forms the critical component for defining and clarifying what our real work is. In my experience, creating a list of what your real projects are and consistently managing your next action for each one will constitute 90 percent of what is generally thought of as project planning. This ground-floor approach will make you honest about all kinds of things. Are you really serious about doing this? Who's responsible? Have you thought things through enough? At some point, if the project is an actionable one, this next-action-thinking decision must be made.* Answering the question about what, specifically, you would do about something physically if you had nothing else to do will test the maturity of your thinking about the project. If you're not yet ready to answer that question, you have more to flesh out at some prior level in the natural planning sequence.

Distributed Cognition

The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn't have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It's as if your mind were to say, "Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you're not collecting them in some trusted way, I won't give you that many. But if you're actually doing something with the ideas—even if it's just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another," etc.

The Reactive Planning Model

The unnatural model is what most people still consciously think of as "planning," and because it's so often artificial and irrelevant to real work, people just don't plan. At least not on the front end: they resist planning meetings, presentations, and strategic operations until the last minute. But what happens if you don't plan ahead of time? In many cases, crisis! ("Didn't you get the tickets?" "I thought you were going to do that!") Then, when the urgency of the last minute is upon you, the reactive planning model ensues.

Incubation

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

Is It Actionable?

There are two possible answers for this: yes and no.

Clarifying Outcomes

There is a simple but profound principle that emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work: you won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it. One of the most powerful life skills, and one of the most important to hone and develop for both professional and personal success, is creating clear outcomes. This is not as self-evident as it may sound. We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we're trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks complete as effectively and efficiently as possible. What will this project look like when it's done? How do you want the client to feel, and what do you want him to know and do after the presentation? Where will you be in your career three years from now? How would the ideal head of finance do his job? What would your Web site really look like and have as capabilities if it could be the way you wanted it? What would your relationship with your son feel like if this conversation you need to have with him were successful? Outcome/vision can range from a simple statement of the project, such as "Finalize computersystem implementation," to a completely scripted movie depicting the future scene in all its glorious detail. When I am able to get people to focus on a successful scenario of their project, they usually experience heightened enthusiasm and think of something unique and positive about it that didn't occur to them before. "Wouldn't it be great if . . ." is not a bad way to start thinking about a situation, at least for long enough to have the option of getting an answer

Day-Specific Actions

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

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

These three categories can themselves be managed; we'll get into that in a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that you need a wastebasket and <Del> key for trash, a "tickler" file or calendar for material that's incubating, and a good filing system for reference information.

Others make good decisions about stuff in the moment but lose the value of that thinking because they don't efficiently (3) organize the results.

They determined they should talk to their boss about something, but a reminder of that lies only in the dark recesses of their mind, unavailable in the appropriate context, in a trusted format, when they could use it.

Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time.

They get stuck because what "doing" would look like, and where it happens, hasn't been decided.

Still others have good systems but don't (4) reflect on the contents consistently enough to keep them functional.

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

Time-Specific Actions

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

Horizon 5: Purpose and Principles

This is the big-picture view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? What really matters to you, no matter what? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what the work really is. It is the ultimate job description. All goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it. These horizon analogies are somewhat arbitrary, and in real life the important conversations you will have about your focus and your priorities may not exactly fit one level or another. They can provide a useful framework, however, to remind you of the multilayered nature of your commitments and tasks.

What's the Next Action

This is the critical question for anything you've captured; if you answer it appropriately, you'll have the key substantive thing to organize. The "next action" is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality of this thing toward completion.

Actionable

This is the yes group of items, stuff about which something needs to be done. Typical examples range from an e-mail requesting a summary of the speech you've agreed to give at a luncheon to the notes in your in-tray from your face-to-face meeting with the group vice president about a significant new project that involves hiring an outside consultant.

No More "Daily To-Do" Lists on the Calendar

Those three things are what go on the calendar, and nothing else! This might be heresy to past-century time-management training, which almost universally taught that the daily to-do list is key. But such lists embedded on a calendar don't work, for two reasons.

The Unnatural Planning Model

To emphasize the importance of utilizing the natural planning model for the more complex things we're involved with, let's contrast it with the more "normal" model used in most environments— what I call unnatural planning.

Trash

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

Clarify

What do you need to ask yourself (and answer) -Is It Actionable? -

More to Plan?

What if there's still more planning to be done before you can feel comfortable with what's next? There's still an action step—it is just a process action. What's the next step in the continuation of planning? Drafting more ideas. E-mailing Ana Maria and Sean to get their input. Telling your assistant to set up a planning meeting with the product team. The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

Horizon 3: Goals

What you want to be experiencing in various areas of your life and work one to two years from now will add another dimension to defining your work. Often meeting the goals and objectives of your job will require a shift in emphasis of your job focus, with new accountabilities emerging. At this horizon personally, too, there probably are things you'd like to accomplish or have in place, which could add importance to certain aspects of your life and diminish others.

All of the organizational categories need to be physically contained in some form.

When I refer to "lists," I just mean some sort of reviewable set of reminders, which could be lists on notebook paper or in some computer program or even file folders holding separate pieces of paper for each item. For instance, the list of current projects could be kept on a page in a loose-leaf planner; it could be held in a category within the Tasks function of a software application; or it could be in a simple physical file folder labeled "Projects List."

Time Available

When do you have to do something else? Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing any actions that require more time.

It Clarifies Focus

When you land on the real purpose for anything you're doing, it makes things clearer. Just taking two minutes and writing out your primary reason for doing something invariably creates an increased sharpness of vision, much like bringing a telescope into focus. Frequently, projects and situations that have begun to feel scattered and blurred grow clearer when someone brings it back home by asking, "What are we really trying to accomplish here?"

Doing Predefined Work

When you're doing predefined work, you're working from your Next Actions lists and calendar—completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, or managing your workflow. You're making the calls you need to make, drafting ideas you want to brainstorm, attending meetings, or preparing a list of things to talk to your attorney about.

2. The Threefold Model for Identifying Daily Work

When you're getting things done, or "working" in the universal sense, there are three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in: -Doing predefined work -Doing work as it shows up -Defining your work

Context

You are always constrained by what you have the capability to do at this time. A few actions can be done anywhere (such as drafting ideas about a project with pen and paper), but most require a specific location (at home, at your office) or having some productivity tool at hand, such as a phone or a computer. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment

Horizon 2: Areas of Focus and Accountabilities

You create or accept your projects and actions because of the roles, interests, and accountabilities you have. These are the key areas of your life and work within which you want to achieve results and maintain standards. Your job may entail at least implicit commitments for things like strategic planning, administrative support, staff development, market research, customer service, or asset management. And your personal life has an equal number of such focus arenas: health, family, finances, home environment, spirituality, recreation, etc. These are not things to finish but rather to use as criteria for assessing our experiences and our engagements, to maintain balance and sustainability, as we operate in our work and our world. Listing and reviewing these responsibilities gives a more comprehensive framework for evaluating your inventory of projects.

If It's About a Project

You need to capture that outcome on a "Projects" list. That will be the stake in the ground that will keep reminding you that you have an open loop until it is finished. A Weekly Review of the list will bring this item back to you as something that's still outstanding. It will stay fresh and alive in your management system (versus your head) until it is completed or eliminated.

Nonactionable Items

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

The Natural Planning Model

You're already familiar with the most brilliant and creative planner in the world: your brain. You yourself are actually a planning machine. You're planning when you get dressed, eat lunch, go to the store, or simply talk. Although the process may seem somewhat random, a quite complex series of steps has to occur before your brain can make anything happen physically. Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task: 1. Defining purpose and principles 2. Outcome visioning 3. Brainstorming 4. Organizing 5. Identifying next actions

Most people let their reactive mental process run a lot of the show, especially where the toomuch-to-do syndrome is concerned

You've probably given over a lot of your "stuff," a lot of your open loops, to an entity on your inner committee that is incapable of dealing with those things effectively the way they are—your mind. Research has now proven that a significant part of your psyche cannot help but keep track of your open loops, and not (as originally thought) as an intelligent, positive motivator, but as a detractor from anything else you need or want to think about, diminishing your capacity to perform.

Thought is useful when it motivates action and

a hindrance when it substitutes for action.

Getting things done requires two basic components:

defining (1) what "done" means (outcome) and (2) what "doing" looks like (action). And these are far from self-evident for most people about most things that have their attention.

The Power of Focus

ghest level of unconscious support for their performance. We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform. This is as true on the golf course as it is in a staff meeting or during a serious conversation with a life partner. My interest here lies in providing a model for focus that is dynamic in a practical way, especially in project thinking. When you focus on something—the vacation you're going to take, the meeting you're about to go into, the project you want to launch—that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn't have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.

Vertical control

in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

Horizontal control

maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.

For nonactionable items

the possible categories are trash, incubation, and reference. If no action is needed on something, you toss it, "tickle" it for later reassessment, or file it so you can find the material if you need to refer to it at another time.

In the professional world, our jobs require us to

think, assess, decide, and execute

Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back

to the purpose of what you're doing.

You can train yourself, almost like an athlete, to be faster, more responsive, more proactive, and more focused in dealing with all the things you need to deal with. You can think more effectively and manage the results with more ease and control. You can minimize the loose ends across the whole spectrum of your work life and personal life and get a lot more done with less effort. And you can make front-end decision making about all the stuff you collect and create standard operating procedure for living and working in this millennium. Before you can achieve any of that, though, you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that, as we've seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all:

you don't manage five minutes and wind up with six; you don't manage information overload—otherwise you'd walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, you'd blow up; and you don't manage priorities—you have them.

People love to win. If you're not totally clear about the purpose of what you're doing,

you have no game to win.

To manage actionable things,

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

You must have a dedicated, individual, self-contained workspace

—at home, at work, and even in transit.