This is the final entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen.

I’ve really enjoyed writing this series. It’s given me an opportunity to think deeply about this book and about some of the ongoing concerns and areas of focus in my own life from a bit of a different perspective than before.

Before I give my final thoughts on this book, though, let’s start off with the reason many of you will bookmark this post.

Everything That Came Before
Here are links to the previous nineteen entries in this series so you can go back through the series at your own convenience.

From Getting Things Done to Making It All Work
The GTD Phenomenon
The Process
The Fundamentals of Self-Management
Getting Control: Capturing
Getting Control: Clarifying
Getting Control: Organizing
Getting Control: Reflecting
Getting Control: Engaging
Getting Control: Applying This to Life and Work
Getting Perspective
Getting Perspective on the Runway: Next Actions
Getting Perspective at Ten Thousand Feet: Projects
Getting Perspective at Twenty Thousand Feet: Areas of Focus and Responsibility
Getting Perspective at Thirty Thousand Feet: Goals and Objectives
Getting Perspective at Forty Thousand Feet: Vision
Getting Perspective at Fifty Thousand Feet: Purpose and Principles
Getting Perspective: Gracie’s Gardens Revisited
In the Real World

Some Final Thoughts
I’ve now read the entirety of Making It All Work four times, on top of several readings of Allen’s other books. What have I taken away from all of that reading?

For me, five key things float to the top of all of this detail.

A good life connects the generic “meaning of life” to the little things you do every day
There was a time in my adult life where there was a great disconnect between the things I did every day and the bigger picture I had of my life. I went through the day spending money on unimportant objects and experiences, doing unimportant things, and filling my hours with unimportant activities. At the end of the day, I’d feel completely unfulfilled, but I’d wake up and repeat that day. I kept believing that all of my big dreams would be fulfilled by my “future self,” but that “future self” was a figment of my imagination.

The biggest thing I’ve learned over the lifetime of The Simple Dollar is the more you can connect your daily life to the big picture of what you want out of life, the more fulfilled you are, the more direction your life seems to have, and the easier it becomes to make the “right” choices in terms of money management, time management, and so on.

If you can’t make that connection, you’ve found something in your life that needs a change
For most of us, this means cutting back. Almost everyone is committed to things to the limit of their time, energy, and abilities – and often beyond it. We get worn out, we get frustrated with having too much on our plate, and we begin to make bad moves like letting people down or spending our financial resources on unnecessary things as a stress reliever.

The solution is to start looking at every thing you do in your daily life and start filtering it through the bigger things you want in life. If you’re having difficulty making that connection, then you’ve discovered something that you should be trimming from your life. If you’re having difficulty finding anything without a connection, then you should step back and start thinking about the big picture, figuring out what’s really important to you.

The more you do this, the more powerful it gets. You begin to find a deep connection between your day-to-day activities and your big goals in life and your ordinary days begin to feel filled with purpose.

You can be ten times more productive if you can get “into the zone,” so it’s worth spending time to make it easier to get there
I would rather spend two hours of my workday “in the zone” and six hours doing nothing at all than spending eight hours trying to make something happen. That’s how productive a zone state is for me, and thus it’s well worth it for me to find ways to get into that zone.

I will sometimes spend two or three hours of a given day doing only things that set the stage for such intense focus. I’ll clear my desk, remove distractions, make sure my inbox is processed, keep tools around me for whatever I might need in a pinch, and cut off access to distracting sites. The big one, however, is…

Getting stuff out of your head is the best way to increase “zone” time
The fewer things I have floating in my head at any given time, the easier it is for me to slip right into the zone when I need to. Thus, I put substantial effort into recording the thoughts in my head and making sure that they’re recorded in a trusted place where I can easily retrieve them.

At first, this means getting them down in my pocket notebook or in Evernote, but that’s not quite sufficient…

You’ve got to do something with the stuff when it gets out of your head
You absolutely have to get all of that stuff that you pulled out of your head into some sort of system where you can easily retrieve it. That means having a number of things around you that you rely on for managing the things you need to remember and do.

For me, these tools are several. I keep a detailed calendar, an ongoing to-do list, notes on all of my ongoing projects, a collection of additional lists (books to read, etc.), and a filing cabinet with documents that need to be stored for later. Nearly every piece of information that’s floating in my head winds up in one of these destinations, which I can then review at my own leisure, knowing that the specific information I need is always in the right place.

This takes time, but it also ensures that I can get into a “zone” state much more easily, and it’s thanks to that “zone” state that I can be highly productive and move forward on the myriad of things that are important in my life.

It all ties together in the end.

This is the nineteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

Much of this book focuses not on the day-to-day actions that fill our lives, but on a broader view of them. Goals, purpose, principles, areas of focus – they seem very grandiose and fairly unapproachable at first glance and not important, at least not in the sense of a day-to-day busy life.

Here’s the thing, though – they’re incredibly important. Over the last few years, I’ve found that much of the time and money I once spent in my life wasn’t tied to any sort of greater life perspective. It was all about the “now” – and when the “now” shifted into the past, I was left with a present that felt very empty. I basically felt like I wasn’t going anywhere at all in life, that it was fairly empty and hopeless. I would often dream that my “future self” would somehow magically solve everything – he would have money and fame and fortune and all the answers – but I also knew that I was never going to miraculously turn into that great “future self.”

I was merely running in place and I really had only myself to blame.

Over the last few years, I’ve strived to fix that, and both of Allen’s books (this one and Getting Things Done) have helped greatly in that journey, along with a pile of personal finance books and other materials.

What I’ve found is that there is no one “ready-made” solution for getting your life in order. The reason I like Allen’s books so well – and many of the other books that have helped along the way – is that, while they usually offer a “system” of some kind, that “system” is usually just composed of a big mountain of individual tips from which a thoughtful person can pull what they need to build their own system.

What do I mean by “system”? Allen spells it out pretty well on page 269:

There’s nothing like having outstanding tools, comfortable environments, and simple behavioral tricks to turbocharge your productivity. It’s easier to win a game and conduct successful business with proper gear, a conducive atmosphere, and some smart habits and rituals that support the best practices.

In other words, a “system” is merely all of the bits and pieces that enable you to go through life at your absolute best as much as possible.

Allen spends most of this chapter outlining some of his most useful “bits and pieces” for the system that works for him – and I’ve actually found most of them are useful for me, too. Here are the ones that Allen mentions that also click with me.

Ensure that you have great capturing tools I need to constantly have the ability to jot down the things that come into my mind and put them in a place that I know is secure and reliable. Without that, spare thoughts – appointments, things to be done, books to find out more about, etc. – begin to fill my head, distracting me from whatever task is at hand. When I’m at my computer, I use Evernote. When I’m elsewhere, I usually just use a pen and a pad.

Set up your calendar and action list manager A good reliable calendar is essential, as is a tool that helps you keep track of your “next action” list – your to-do list, in other words. I use Google Calendar for my calendaring needs. I have tried lots of different systems for a “next action” list manager, but I keep going back to Remember the Milk, which just brings more features that I need to the table than any other such service.

Set up ad hoc list functionality For me, this mostly means a list of my ongoing projects as well as a list of sorts for each project outlining where I think it needs to be going. I don’t keep these in Remember the Milk – instead, I use Google Docs for these because they tend to be a bit more free-form than just an ordinary list.

Structure effective personal office, home, and transit workstations I’ll admit that my home office often isn’t in the order I’d like it to be in – that’s an ongoing challenge for me. However, my “transit workstation” – my laptop bag – is probably more useful than my home office. I keep my laptop in there, along with several different chargers, a notepad, plenty of pens, and so on, along with some source material for at least a few articles. Why is this so important? I know that at any moment, I can grab this bag and be professionally functional for several days almost no matter where I go.

Complete mind sweeps For me, a big part of being able to focus on the task at hand relies on having as clear a mind as possible. I achieve this (in part) through mind sweeps – in other words, I write down everything that’s on my mind (usually with each discrete thought on a separate line or on a separate small piece of paper) and throw them all into my inbox. From there…

Incorporate time for processing Processing is a key part of making all of this work. Once or twice a day, I process my inbox, meaning I take each item that’s in there and figure out what to do with it. Is it a new entry on my to-do list? Is it a calendar entry? Is it something I can do right away? Is it an email? Whatever it is, I deal with it and get it out of my inbox and into some other place that makes more sense than a catch-all.

Build in the weekly operational review Once a week (usually on a weekend day when my wife is putting the kids down for a nap), I spend an hour or so reviewing the week. I make sure that there isn’t anything clogged in the inbox, go through my project list and make sure they’re all moving forward, and so on.

Create elevated horizon events Once every three months or so, I have a long weekly review, taking two or three hours. During these, I step back and try to look at everything going on in my life from a broader perspective. Is everything in line with what I value most? Is my life headed towards the picture I have for it in five or ten years?

Every great system is made up of useful pieces. These are just some of mine – at least, the ones brought to my plate by David Allen.

This is the eighteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

In an earlier section of the book, Allen tells the tale of a guy named Ron and his experiences dealing with an inherited business called Gracie’s Gardens. In that earlier chapter, Allen walks through how Ron applies the basic GTD workflow to the business.

Here, in contrast, Allen looks at how Ron applies the different levels of perspective to the business, going from purpose and vision all the way down to next actions.

While I could easily quote from this story, I thought instead I’d give you an example of connecting purpose and principles down to next actions in my own life.

Purpose and Principles
As I’ve mentioned last time, one major purpose I see in my own life is creating thoughtful entertainment for others. The Simple Dollar clearly falls into that category – I try every single day to make The Simple Dollar into thoughtful entertainment for you, something that will interest you and also perhaps help you grow in some way. Of course, I’m interested in exploring other areas within this realm, too.

Vision
One dream I have along these lines is to publish a tabletop game I developed in college. It’s set in a future where the United States has fallen into a civil war among various regions. You’re essentially in control of one of the regions and you take on one of the other regions in battle. The game is entirely card-driven and can be played in about thirty minutes.

I’ve been working on it in some fashion for about eight years. About five years ago, I really got into it for a while and made up a mock version of the game, playing it a bit with several friends who were really enthusiastic about it, but I didn’t really know what to do with it at that point.

Goals
My goal is to take that game idea of mine and finish it, taking it to the point that it could actually be published. It’s not worth taking it to a publisher unless it’s in a fairly complete state, at which point they help you finish it off and handle the production of the game. It’s not too much different than handing a completed manuscript of a book to a book publisher.

Projects
Getting the game to that state means making sure the rules are clear, playing it with a lot of people to ensure that it plays well and is easy to teach, and so on – in other words, a big bundle of projects that need to, in some ways, be done in a particular order.

First among them is making up a revised playable version of the game, along with writing up clear rules for the game. Once those are prepared, I can start testing the game with friends, revising and remaking the game over time. Eventually, I need to find a remote group of people I trust to see whether the game is learnable on its own.

Next Actions
So, what’s next? The first task is a rough draft of the rules. The next task is to walk through the game components, a small batch at a time, and make sure they make sense within the rules and are reasonably fun to play.

What this all means is that there’s a clear thread connecting the mundane things I do day-to-day and the large purposes and principles I have in life. Establishing those ties (usually during my weekly reviews) helps me to figure out whether the things I’m doing have a deep connection to the big things in my life – or whether there’s a disconnect and things need to change.

I don’t expect that my purpose and principles match yours or that my goals and projects for expressing those purposes and principles would be what you would do. At the same time, though, I do believe that you should always be figuring out what your purpose and principles are and figuring out how to connect the things you do each day, from your job choices to your money choices, to those big things in life. It’ll fill every moment of your life with a much deeper sense of purpose.

This is the seventeenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? How do I achieve that purpose?

At first glance, these seem like rather vague questions. Most people, if you sit down with them, don’t have a purpose in life, at least not one that they can clearly articulate. We just don’t spend much time – if any – thinking of our lives on that level.

There’s a good reason for that, of course. Such thoughts have incredibly low urgency, particulary compared to the business of day-to-day living. Things like “why am I here” often pale compared to the more direct needs of finishing a work project, preparing dinner, cleaning the house, making sure our son makes it to basketball practice, and so on.

As a matter of course, we almost always put the non-urgent things on the back burner and focus on the urgent things, while ignoring how truly important the various tasks are. Never is this more true than when we address the big questions in our lives – there’s always something more urgent to do.

I find a statement of purpose to be incredibly useful not just for my broad life, but for the specific large things I choose to do. Allen riffs on this a bit on page 251:

On an individual basis, an equivalent personal statement of purpose would represent the highest criterion for direction and meaning. “I exist as a human being to…” On more mundane horizons, it could involve clarification of your purpose for having a family, planting a garden, serving as an officer of a local chamber of commerce, or organizing a bake sale for a local charity.

Why do you do such things? Why do you exist as a human being? For that matter, why do you plant a garden? Why do you go to work?

It took me a long time to really piece through such questions in my own life. For the longest time, I was motivated by what I thought I was supposed to be doing or what others told me I should be doing. For me, such things are incredibly poor reasons to do anything, particularly over the long haul.

The longer I looked at my own life, the more I began to realize that I found success with things when I had an internal reason for doing them. The professional projects that I’m most proud of in my life were fueled by some sort of internal desire or drive. I had a “why” for doing each one of them. The same is true for every personal success – my “reason” for dating my wife, for example, was probably the strongest of any woman I ever knew.

In short, if you have difficulty stating “why” you’re doing something – or that reason isn’t something that really moves you – it’s going to be hard for you to succeed. On the flip side of that, the stronger your “why,” the more likely you are to find success.

This realization led me to spend a lot more time thinking about what I wanted out of life. What really moves me? Helping others moves me. Providing entertainment and provoking thinking in others – or in myself – moves me. This explains, to a degree, why I love to both read and write and why I love to both play and design games.

Here’s the thing, though. These conclusions didn’t come to me in a vacuum. They came to me as a result of doing lots of things in life, thinking about the things I’d done and why I’d done them, and figuring out which ones had meaning for me.

Allen touches on this on page 253:

Too often, though, the admonition to discover and clarify life and organizational purpose has created inordinate pressure to have all the answers before their is sufficient commitment to getting involved and being fully engaged.

In other words, starting with your purpose will usually end in failure. Do stuff, then step back and start drawing some conclusions from that. Without some real experiences to draw from, it’s nearly impossible to really understand what drives you forward to accomplish things.

Of course, a purpose rests upon a set of principles – basic rules that govern how we act in life. These work hand in hand with purpose, often channeling the purpose into something more specific that’s deeply in line with what you believe and desire. Honesty. Constant self-improvement. Being supportive of your spouse. Being in service to your community. These are examples of the types of principles people choose to govern their life by.

Why are such things important? Allen really sums it up at the end of the chapter:

As a general rule, the more you explore and identify what you personally consider the most essential factors and features of your life, the more solid your reference point for the times when you have to make tough choices. Is this decision really in keeping with my purpose? Does it line up with what I consider really important? That’s the kind of perspective that provides the greatest ballast for staying in control in deep seas and rough weather.

In other words, the more time you spend refining your purpose and principles and really trying to understand why you’re here, the more they will help you when you need to make decisions, like telling people yes or no at key moments or deciding where to go next at a career crossroads.

Just remember, though, that actions come first. Principles and purpose are drawn from experience. Through experience, we begin to understand what things work for us and feel “right” to us – and which things do not.

This is the sixteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

“What would long term success look, sound, and feel like?”

Again, Allen opens the chapter with a provocative question. What, to you, would success really be like? What would your life be like? What would you have achieved?

In the past, I’ve written about an exercise that I regularly do where I sketch out, in as much detail as possible, what I would like my life to look like in, say, five years. Where am I living? How do I spend my time? What are my children like? What is my relationship with my wife like?

Details, details, details.

But why so many details? The more details I have, the more clues I get as to the types of goals and projects I should be setting.

Allen actually advocates for this type of thought experiment on page 244:

For an individual, writing or crafting a script for an ideal future can serve the same purpose and have the same kind of positive effect [as a simple "what-if" scenario]. Over the years I have experienced innumerable instances in which people I have known (myself included) have simply written a lot of the things they would like to have in their ideal world – from quality of relationships, to living environments, aspects of career, health, and finances – and over time have watched them manifest.

How do you do that?

A more detailed version of this kind of future thinking can take the form of writing out a more descriptive scenario, as if composing a short story about an ideal situation coming into being. If you are particularly visual, creating “treasure maps” can function the same way. Either drawing pictures and expressive icons or cutting and pasting pictures and text from magazines onto a collage can be wonderfully freeing, creative, and deeply motivating.

On some level, this sounds a lot like the whole “positive thinking” often espoused by popular New Age gurus. This is different in one key way, though: this stuff isn’t just manifested by thinking positively about it.

Instead, as I mentioned above, this type of thinking about the future sets the foundation for a lot of projects and goals that will carry you in that direction.

As with my overall goals, I review this sketch of mine about once a quarter, roughly as often as I review my goals. Allen seems to concur with this type of regular revisiting, on page 255:

As is true with the other more elevated Horizons of Focus, revisiting this level could be done on a regular basis as part of an ongoing commitment to keeping a vision active or whenever circumstances require a consideration of the overall situation from this perspective.

I actually keep a Word document on my computer that, within it, contains a handful of detailed descriptions of what I would like my life to be like in the future. I use this document when I sit down every three months or so to review all of my goals, areas of focus, and projects, so that I know that I’m on target with where I want to be going with my life.

During my reviews, I look at that vision. Are all of the things in my life, from the big ongoing initiatives to the smaller projects to the way I spend my day, leading to this picture that I’ve developed? Is this still the big picture of what I want in my life in five years?

Usually, the only time the picture shifts significantly is when I’m taking stock of changes in my life. I’ll add another child to that picture. I’ll change my career goals based on the successes I’ve been seeing and what I feel excited about doing over the past several months. The picture slowly evolves.

What’s powerful, though, is when I see how much of the everyday activities in my life lead to this picture. The most mundane day-to-day things almost always have some connection to this picture, another step in that long, long journey. It is at this stage when I really can connect all of the little things I do to the bigger picture of my life.

It’s powerful, indeed.

This is the fifteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

“What do I want to achieve?”

Allen opens the chapter with this question and it really underlines everything that this chapter is about. Goals. Commitments. Things you’ll need to get done or plan to get done over the next year or two in your life.

Usually, these goals and commitments are connected to (or propped up on) the areas of focus mentioned in the previous chapter. For example, one of my goals is to write a third book – accomplished in the next year or two – and that’s firmly propped up on top of my focus on writing. Another goal is to teach my son and daughter basic mastery of arithmetic – and that’s firmly propped up on top of multiple areas of focus.

What distinguishes a goal from a project, though? Allen’s description of goals, on page 236, doesn’t really distinguish between them:

Goals, like project, are outcomes that can be completed and checked off as “done.” Restructuring an organization, publishing a book, getting out of debt, sending your son off to college, launching a new product line, running a marathon – these would be the kinds of aspirations you might expect to have on this list.

So, what’s a project and what’s a goal? Here’s my take on this.

A project can be finished in less than a year, while a goal is clearly longer than a year away from completion.

A project is one where you can clearly outline all of the steps you need to execute to get there. That’s scarcely true with a goal outside of some general guidelines and ideas.

A goal is often composed of a number of smaller projects.

I’ll give an example in my own life. A goal of mine is to write a third book. The first project within that goal is to define what I want to write. Another project might be to outline the entire book. These projects, together, lead to achieving my goal.

How often should a person re-evaluate their goals? Allen offers a take on page 237:

It makes sense to rethink the substance of annual and longer goals at least once a year. In most organizations this process is fairly automatic because of planning and budgeting meetings, which can be tied to the start of the fiscal year if that’s different than the calendar year. It’s also common to revisit the annual goals on a monthly or quarterly basis, for course correction and recalibration, if requested.

I actually am in favor of reviewing such big goals more often. I look at mine roughly every three months, because I often feel that my life’s priorities change subtly enough over a given three month period that it can really impact my goals.

As with Allen, I involve my wife in such goal discussion (and plan to involve my children in the future). On page 237:

My wife and I go through a rather unsophisticated exercise in this regard at the end of every year. First we spend about half an hour taking an inventory of everything we accomplished and everything noteworthy that we did that year. Major projects completed, new places we traveled, significant events that we experienced – all are just dumped out into a long list. [..] During the next half hour we simply ask ourselves what we would like to have on that list at the end of the following year, and capture those goals on another list.

We do something similar to this, but it’s more organic and happens more frequently than annually. Our shared goals are a semi-regular topic of conversation between us and, often, our children overhear this conversation as well.

Of course, such large-scale goals are simply what I would call a direct manifestation of what we want out of our lives as a whole, which is what we’ll be talking about next time.

This is the fourteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

What, exactly, are areas of focus? I think the best way to spell this out is to give you some examples from my own life.

Areas of focus, as Allen describes them on page 228:

This level functions as an abstraction of your reality, a tightly focused series of ten to fifteen categories in areas that you are particularly responsible for, interested in, or pay special attention to, just to keep your ship afloat and sailing steadily.

I’ve considered what my areas of focus are many times in the past few years and I’d probably list them as follows:
Writing Simple Dollar content
Writing other content
Responding to readers
Maintaining websites
Personal finances
My marriage
Teaching my children
My health
Family activities
Household maintenance
Spirituality
Friendships and family
Gaming
Reading
Community/civic service

I would say that these areas pretty much define all of the things that I focus on with any significance. Every project I take on fits into one or more of these areas of focus, and all of these areas of focus are part of at least one broader goal or mission in life.

So, what use does this have? For me, the real value in knowing these areas of focus is that when I review things once a week, I can look at each of these areas and ask myself, simply, “Are things up to snuff in this area?”

Let me explain what I mean. Within each of these areas, I’ll have a bunch of little one-off tasks and some broader projects that I’m working on during any given week. During a certain week, though, I might be spending a lot of time on the “gaming” and on the “friendships” and not as much on the “family” part of things – for example, when I go to a gaming convention like GenCon. Or, another example: I might spend a week where I’m focused on writing a book – the “writing other content” part of things – and I spend less time focused on household maintenance.

When I reflect on these areas at the end of the week, I can usually identify which areas in my life that I’ve been neglecting recently and make a conscious choice to focus more on that area in the next week. This is a self-correcting mechanism – it ensures that I don’t let some aspect of my life get away from me while I’m too focused on other things.

Allen puts it this way, on page 233:

Often the benefits of visiting the more elevated horizons will be the opportunity to indentify a number of important topics that have had your attention but that have tended, at least initially, to lurk further back in the recesses of your mind.

Now, one interesting thing to note is that this isn’t strictly hierarchical. Most of my projects are tied to one or more areas of focus, but it isn’t a matter of each project strictly being a part of a specific area of focus. If I have a project that involves teaching my son how to multiply, then I know it’s part of my focus of teaching my children things.

But what does a game night on Saturday evening fall into? It’s about friends. It’s about gaming. It’s also about household maintenance – we’ll have to clean up and get everything ready. It touches on other areas, too – parenting, my health, my marriage.

The important question I ask myself at the end of the week is whether or not my efforts in each area of focus were substantial during that week. If they were not, then I know that I need to either focus more heavily on that area of my life in the coming week or, if I’m consistently not putting any effort into that area, rethink that area entirely.

Allen concurs in a simple way on page 234:

Twenty-thousand-feet themes do not lend themselves as such to specific projects, but rather they serve as reminders and affirmations of activities that we simply want to be doing and thinking about more consistently – reading more, exercising more, paying a little more attention to the extended family, being open to more ways to assist in the community, being more conscientious about health, diet, and exercise habits, and so on.

In other words, the big reason for thinking about this level is to make sure our day-to-day activities are in balance and on track. When you keep backing up from here, you start to get into broader areas that focus not only on what you’re doing today, but project ahead into the future.

This is the thirteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

All of us have ongoing tasks in our lives – individual things that need to be done but are too large to be accomplished in a single sitting or require various things for various steps along the way.

I know that my own life is littered with such projects. I’d like to rearrange my office, moving my mostly-empty bookshelf over to another wall and replacing it with shelving for my game collection. I’d like to write a third book. The list goes on and on.

I like how Allen describes them, on page 217:

A project is essentially a miniature goal, something that can be finished and marked off as “done.” The reason for the “within a year” parameter is that any commitment you have that can be completed in that time period – even very big ones – should probably be reviewed at least once a week.

In other words, a project is any large task that you can reasonably complete within a year. It’s usually composed of enough work that you can’t get it all done in one session – instead, you have to break it down into smaller chunks, spread out over time. Sometimes, those chunks require something to happen between them – time must pass, someone else must accomplish something, or so on.

A big key to completing your projects is review. In other words, keep track of your ongoing projects, then once a week, review all of those projects and determine what your specific next action for each of those projects is. A “next action” should be something small enough that you can do it in one session.

So, for example, with the projects listed above, I might have a “next action” of looking for an appropriate shelving unit for the games. I might have another “next action” that involves an outline of the book.

It should be noted that projects are tangible things that you can wrap your hands around. They’re not nebulous – they have a clear and definite conclusion, one that can be reached within a year.

Allen offers up some keywords that can help you define the projects in your life. On page 218:

The following verbs point to typical outcomes that I refer to as projects:

Finalize
Implement
Research
Publish
Distribute
Maximize
Learn
Set up
Organize
Create
Design
Install
Repair
Submit
Handle
Resolve

If you’re curious about what and how many projects you actually have, just use the above as a checklist, and include everything that can be linked with one of these words.

I currently have a list of forty-five ongoing projects that almost entirely match up with the words on that list.

Each week, I do a review of this project list and try to look for the “next step” with each of these projects. This keeps them all moving forward or helps me to realize that I need to abandon them.

Allen riffs on the weekly project review idea on page 222:

During a weekly look at all your projects, actions, and schedule provides an “inner coordination” that is fundamentally intuitive because of all the shifitng factors involved in the complexities of your life.

In other words, you’ll find that when you look at your project list at the end of a week, you’ve changed a bit as a person. You no longer find one project to be as vital, but now find this other project to be really important to you.

In many ways, this reflection helps you to connect your ongoing projects to the higher level things going on in life – your areas of focus, your goals, your purpose in life. As these subtly shift over time, you’ll find more radical shifts at the lower levels.

I can make a very clear example of this in my own life. Five years ago, being a parent was barely on my radar screen as a central value in life and my day-to-day activities showed it. Today, that’s completely different – one of my main life goals is to be a great parent to my kids. This shows up not only at the “purpose in life” level, but it begins to have bigger and bigger effects going down. Today, some of my projects involve things like potty training and teaching reading and teaching arithmetic, things that would not be projects in my life if I didn’t value my role as a parent so highly. The broader elements of my life greatly affect the projects I choose, which thus affect the things I choose to do every day.

A final thought: one really compelling idea I found in this chapter comes on page 224:

One of the most inspiring examples of how this elevated look at your commitments can add huge value to your life is the family weekly review. Establishing a context in which life partners (and children) can mutually debrief their past week, share a thorough and concrete overview of their commitments and projects, compare calendars, look ahead to the immediate future, and make decisions and plans together can be a phenomenal way to experience winning at the business of life.

I can’t tell you how much I love this idea nd I can’t wait until my children are a bit older so we can start doing this. Right now, my children are a little young to have ongoing projects of any real kind other than their ongoing epic castle made out of Magna-Tiles and Legos.

What sorts of projects will our family members have and share when we grow older together? It’s really hard to say, but I not only see this as a way to teach my children how to be more organized, but also a way to bond more deeply as a family.