Getting Things Done

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments

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

•First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.

•Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it.

•Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do. This constitutes the management of the "horizontal" aspect of our lives—incorporating everything that has our attention at any time.

Collect

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

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

Let's examine the three requirements to make the collection phase work:

1 | Every open loop must be in your collection system and out of your head.

2 | You must have as few collection buckets as you can get by with.

3 | You must empty them regularly.

Process

Is It Actionable?

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

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

1 | It's trash, no longer needed.

2 | No action is needed now, but something might need to be done later (incubate).

3 | The item is potentially useful information that might be needed for something later (reference).

YES

Two things need to be determined about each actionable item:

1 | What "project" or outcome have you committed to? and

2 | What's the next action required?

If It's About a Project. . . You need to capture that outcome on a "Projects" list. That will be the stake in the ground that reminds you that you have an open loop. A Weekly Review of the list will bring this item back to you as something that's stilloutstanding. It will stay fresh and alive in your management system

until it is completed or eliminated.

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

These are all real physical activities that need to happen. Reminders of these will become the primary grist for the mill of your personal productivity-management system.

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

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.

NO

For nonactionable items, the possible categories are trash, incubation tools, and reference storage.

Projects

I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things that you might not normally call projects are going to be on your "Projects" list.

You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done." The list of projects is the compilation of finish lines

we put before us, to keep our next actions moving on all tracks appropriately

Your "Projects" list will be merely an index. All of the

details, plans, and supporting information that you may need as

you work on your various projects should be contained in separate

file folders, computer files

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 these in your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your "Next Actions" lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a "Waiting For" list).

Three things go on your calendar:

• time-specific actions;

• day-specific actions; and

• day-specific information.

No More "Daily To-Do" Lists Those three things are what go on the calendar, and nothing else!

The calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

So where do all your action reminders go? On "Next Actions" lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization.

Review system

"Projects" list, a calendar, "Next Actions" lists, and a "Waiting For" list

The item you'll probably review most frequently is your calendar, which will remind you about the "hard landscape" for the day.

After checking your calendar, you'll most often turn to your "Next Actions" lists. These hold the inventory of predefined actions that you can take if you have any discretionary time during the day. If

you've organized them by context ("At Home," "At Computer," "In Meeting with George"), they'll come

into play only when those contexts are available. "Projects," "Waiting For," and "Someday/Maybe" lists need to be reviewed only as often as you think they have to be in order to stop you from wondering about them.

Critical Success Factor: The Weekly Review

All of your open loops (i.e., projects), active project plans, and "Next Actions," "Agendas," "Waiting For," and even "Someday/Maybe" lists should be reviewed once a week.

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 large 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 collected, processed, organized, and reviewed all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgment with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work

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

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

1 | Context

2 | Time available

3 | Energy available

4 | Priority

1. The Threefold Model for Evaluating 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

1. 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 aerospace analogy,

the conversation has a lot to do with the altitude.

• 50,000+ feet: Life

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

• 30,000 feet: One- to two-year goals

• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility (health, family, finances, home environment, spirituality,

recreation, etc)

• 10,000 feet: Current projects

• Runway: Current actions

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.

The Natural Planning Model

1 | Defining purpose and principles

2 | Outcome visioning

3 | Brainstorming

4 | Organizing

5 | Identifying next actions

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

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 a barbeque in the backyard?

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.

Outcome Visioning

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.

Many of us hold ourselves back from imaging a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there. Unfortunately, that's backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods. One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes. 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 completed 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?

Here are three basic steps for developing a vision:

1 | View the project from beyond the completion date.

2 | Envision "WILD SUCCESS"! (Suspend "Yeah, but. . .")

3 | Capture features, aspects, qualities you imagine in place.

Brainstorming

Once you know what you want to have happen, and why, the "how" mechanism is brought into play.

Capturing Your Ideas

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 go "have the idea" again. (mind mapping) Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out of-the-box thinking. The basics 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.

Next Actions 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.

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

How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do?

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

Most projects, given my definition of a project as an outcome requiring more than one action, need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind.

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

Need More to Be Happening? If more action is what's needed, you need to move down the model.