For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it presents a very novel system along with countless specific solutions for dealing with the ongoing problem of managing one’s time and energy in a modern information-heavy world. I highly encourage you to read my multi-post series on Getting Things Done and how to apply it to your life. I found the book to be life-changing.

Anyway, over the years, I’ve used many different elements from Getting Things Done. I’ve used an “inbox” process off and on for many years, usually finding myself far more productive when the system was “on” rather than “off.” I’ve strongly taken to writing things I need to remember to do or to look up or to otherwise deal with on a piece of pocket notebook paper, then processing those pages once a day or so.

One of the most useful routines, though, is that of the weekend restock. I try to spend an hour or two each weekend doing this, and I’ve found it’s been essential in terms of keeping my life operating well in nearly every respect. Other than time directly spent with my family, it’s easily the most valuable part of my weekend.

Since I’m preparing this post as I go through my weekend “restock,” I thought I’d share with you what it entails. It only takes an hour or so and usually results in two end products: a to-do list of sorts for the weekend and a much better peace of mind.

The first thing I do is go through everything left in my “inbox” that rests on my work desk. During the week, I throw all kinds of things in there, like magazines that probably need to be thrown away, small scraps of paper with notes on them, items that need to be put away, things I want to look up, and so on.

During the week, I go through the “inbox” several times, but I usually end up leaving a thing or two behind because I don’t need to deal with it right now. On the weekend, I deal with those things.

I’ll do things like tear out recipes from food magazines and then toss the rest of the magazine. I’ll look up a book title that someone recommended to me and add it to my Amazon wish list. I’ll pay a bill using online bill pay, one that needs to have contact information added for the first time. I just take care of all of the little things that need to be done.

Often, I’ll end up with a handful of tasks that are “bigger” – they’ll take an hour or two. For example, I’ve been wanting to rotate all of the books on my bedroom bookshelf, as I’ve read almost all of them. I’ve been donating books to the library lately (as our town’s library is pretty small and they take donations), so I just need to figure out which books I want to donate, box them up, and take them to the library. Another bigger task is simply cleaning up my office, which is a mess.

After that, I spend some time thinking about all of my ongoing projects. I keep all of my ongoing projects in Microsoft OneNote, which is a great program for organizing notes and free-form materials grouped however you like.

I try to come up with one thing I can do in the very near future to move each project forward. If I don’t want to or am unwilling to do that, I ask myself whether this project is something I really want to value.

For example, I’m trying to write a draft of a fantasy novel. I have tons of ideas and other materials saved in my project document. My “next task” for the next few days is to either outline or draft the next chapter in the book.

When I’m done going through the projects – and there are usually several – I wind up with a nice to-do list. Everything on that to-do list is something that genuinely needs to be done or directly moves forward a large project I care about.

After that, I usually spend some time looking ahead into the future. What do I want my life to look like in five years? Ten years? Twenty years? I keep some project pages associated with these timeframes where I jot down ideas.

Over time, those visions for the future change. I usually keep track of the questions that have been on my mind and give them some thought. For example, do I want to push my children to go to college? If so, what portion of their college savings should I cover? Should I encourage them to have jobs or to be entrepreneurial?

In each case, the result is a far-future thing, but it’s something that impacts what I do right now. It impacts whether I save for their education and how much, and it also impacts how I talk to them about their future and what traits I encourage them to work on.

I don’t dwell on these issues forever, but I do try to give them some thought. I usually just hit on a few things that jump out at me each week.

After that, I’m usually done. I have a nice little weekend to-do list and, sometimes, a few general things to keep in mind as conversation topics for the week.

I find the hour or two I spend on this weekend “restock” to be one of the most valuable parts of my weekly routine. I hope you’ll find it valuable, too.

The post The Weekend Restock appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

After I unloaded those groceries and we had a nice family lunch, I took my oldest son to soccer practice, did some household chores, then the five of us went on a long family bicycle ride including a stop at a park and a stop at the home of some friends. We had dinner together, then we worked on some projects out in the yard.

I put our three children to bed this evening and they collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. They got a ton of fresh air and exercise, as did I.

I’m writing this article as I sit on the floor outside their bedroom, with my laptop open in front of me. The hallway is dark, as is their room. I can hear the gentle rhythm of my daughter’s breathing as she sleeps.

I have that good physical feeling of a day spent doing things outside and that good emotional feeling of having a strong connection to my family.

It was a day where the most important thing was to spend time together, enjoy the outdoors, work on some personal projects and family projects, and see a few friends.

It was a day where none of us were stressed out about our work or about our money. We talked. We hugged. We worked together on things. We played. We simply enjoyed each other without the specter of financial stress.

Today is the embodiment of what my goals have been over the last several years. The number one thing I’ve wanted is a strong relationship with my family, one where my children feel safe and free from worry and happy and secure with their relationship with me and with Sarah and one where Sarah and I have a strong marriage.

Taped to my laptop are two notes, one written by my daughter and the other written by my oldest son. They wrote these notes the other day of their own volition, while I was busy changing our youngest child’s diaper and clothes after an accident. Each of these notes says “Dad I love you.”

Those notes pretty much embody what I’m talking about.

A strong family life seems like a mundane goal to a lot of people, but it was that goal that drove me to make every major financial and professional change in my life.

Almost everybody has something out there that they want. The biggest thing that you want might be a good family life, but most likely it’s something completely different. Maybe it’s a place in a city with a bustling cultural life. Maybe it’s a lot of long afternoons to read great literature. Maybe it’s a place in your state legislature where you can help mold the policies and laws.

The real challenge is to figure out what you want most and toss a lot of less important things to the side to get there.

For me, that meant making several incredibly difficult career choices. That meant abandoning many of the hobbies I used to fill my time. That meant giving up quite a lot of impromptu spending.

I gained something more important in exchange for those sacrifices, and what I gained is represented by the sunburn that’s on my cheeks right now, the peaceful breathing I can hear coming from the next room, and those two notes stuck to my laptop. To me, that’s worth a lot of hard decisions, little sacrifices, and a few mistakes along the way.

What do you want? Figure out what you want most and chase it – hard. It will probably require some financial changes, some shifts in spending, and maybe even some hard professional choices.

If it’s what you really want, though, it’s worth it, because everything else is really less important.

The post A Sunburn and Two Post-It Notes appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

At the same time, I also get emails from people in their twenties who are already saving diligently for retirement. What they want to know is how much they actually need to save so that they, too, can retire at age 65.

The people in the first group obviously spent a big chunk of their adult life not having to save for retirement. This gave them more flexibility with their money in their twenties and thirties than people who were already saving for retirement.

On the other hand, people who start saving early don’t have to save as much overall as people who start later on.

So, which approach is better? Let’s look at the two cases.

Let’s say you’re 20 years old right now. You want to have $2 million set aside for retirement at age 65 and, magically, there’s an index fund out there that will return 7% a year (I’m using this index fund as a convenience, basing the 7% on what Warren Buffett suggests is a good number to use for average stock market returns going forward).

If you start investing at age 20, you’ll need to put aside about $510 a month to reach this goal.

If you start at age 25, you’ll need to set aside about $725 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 25.

If you start at age 30, you’ll need to set aside about $1,050 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 30.

If you start at age 35, you’ll need to set aside about $1,530 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 35.

If you start at age 40, you’ll need to set aside about $2,270 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 40.

If you start at age 45, you’ll need to set aside about $3,480 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 45.

If you start at age 50, you’ll need to set aside about $5,600 a month to reach this goal, but you don’t have to save anything from ages 20 to 50.

As you read through those previous sentences, you probably thought that the amounts early on were quite manageable, but when you got to age 50, you’re likely thinking that it’s bordering on impossible.

That’s the lesson here. You can forego the early retirement savings, but catching up later on can be incredibly punishing and the longer you wait, the more punishing it gets.

Thus, my advice is to start saving for retirement right now, no matter what age you are. Even if you can’t save very much, start by saving something. If you’re not saving, you need to be doing something else that’s financially urgent with your money.

For example, if you just save $100 per month starting at age 20 in the above retirement account, increase it to $200 a month at age 30, $300 a month at age 40, $400 a month at age 50, and $500 a month at age 60, you’ll have $720,000 saved for retirement. Double each of those numbers and you’re getting close to where you need to be.

Start saving now, even if it’s just a little bit. Don’t burden your future self with crippling amounts of retirement savings or employment until the very end of your life.

The post How Important Is It to Start Early? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Making It All Work – In the Real World appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective: Gracie’s Gardens Revisited appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Fifty Thousand Feet: Purpose and Principles appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

“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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Forty Thousand Feet: Vision appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

“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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Thirty Thousand Feet: Goals and Objectives appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Twenty Thousand Feet: Areas of Focus and Responsibility appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Ten Thousand Feet: Projects appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Starting with this chapter, Making It All Work spends some time focusing on how to determine what’s actually important (and unimportant) and how to prioritize things at each level of focus in one’s life, moving from your to-do list all the way up to your overall life goals. For me, these chapters were the real value of the book, because they gave me a framework to step back and really re-evaluate what my priorities were in each area.

The first chapter focuses on your “next actions” – in other words, your immediate to-do list of stuff you need to get done in the next few days. Allen, on page 210:

Wash the car, call your mom, draft a proposal, talk to your boss about a new idea, surf the Web for a gift for your brother, buy nails at the hardware store, check your voice mail.

This category refers to all the physical, visible actions that you can take. They could be the next things to do on your projects or larger outcomes, or simply single-step eventsthat you pursue because of some area of interest or responsibility.

To put it simply, this is the kind of stuff that your to-do list should be composed of each day: specific tasks broken down so that you don’t have to think about what to do in the heat of the moment. Your only decision should revolve around which one to do next.

How can you make that decision easier? Interestingly, Allen points to having a complete to-do list on page 211:

You will automatically feel better about what you’re doing if the invesntory of defined actions available to you is as complete as possible. At the risk of stating the overly obvious, the more aware you are of what you’ve told yourself you need to get done, and the more accessible the options are for you to consider, the more you will trust your plan of attack and your choices about the actions you’re not taking.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re looking at your to-do list and it’s as complete as you can possibly make it. You know everything you need to do is on that list, so you can just look through the items, pick the one that feels the most important or relevant to the moment, and run with it.

On the other hand, imagine you’re looking through your to-do list, but as you’re looking, your mind is constantly coming up with things that you need to be doing that aren’t on your list. Should you do something on your list … or one of those ideas that popped up in your head?

This is why the list preparation process is so important and why it’s well worth investing the time in getting a system rolling that can create this kind of thorough list for you. By doing it, you no longer have to think in the heat of the moment. You can just glance at your options and move forward with great confidence.

That sounds great, but it feels unapproachable. How can a person be that organized? Allen touches on this question on page 213:

In our two-day intesnive coaching with individuals, usually 90 percent of the program is focused on this horizon, simply because its approach is so unfamiliar and the volume of material to deal with is so sizable.

Trust me, it can be done, but it takes a lot of upfront work. In fact, it takes so much upfront work that for a long time, I didn’t believe that the work would ever be worth it. Yet, in the end, I find that every single day, my day is made smoother by having this list of genuinely important specific tasks. I am able to move from item to item much, much faster than before and I can focus on the item while I’m doing it with a depth that didn’t happen before.

The startup time was immense, but the rewards I get from all of that effort – turning all of the stuff in my life into a to-do list – is something that rewards me greatly every single day.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective on the Runway: Next Actions appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

For me, this is the exact point at which the book moved from an interesting rearrangement of the ideas in Getting Things Done to something on an entirely different level: a deep, critical look at life priorities and how they affect what you do on many different levels.

Why spend half of the book on effectively remaking Getting Things Done, then? Simply put, it’s foundational material for the rest. Without some sort of sensible system for keeping track of all of the things you have to do, you’re going to be spending most of your long-term focus on simply keeping tab on things without the space to really think deeply and figure out the larger directions in your life and how they connect with the day-to-day elements of your life.

In other words, Getting Things Done is akin to forming a strong foundation upon which you can conceive and build some of the great things in your life. Without it, you’re building on top of sand – all of it is inherently weakened because you don’t have control of the day-to-day in your life.

Allen looks at it from a somewhat different angle on page 200:

Let’s assume that, having read or listened to the first part of the book, you’ve gotten things under control. Now the question is: Where do you put your focus? The purpose of getting control in the first place is to be able to be clear of distraction. But why? And distraction from what?

In other words, when you’ve got a good grip on what needs to be done, the next step is to back off a bit and figure out, in a broader way, what actually needs to be done. That requires perspective and consistent reflection.

Allen spends a lot of this chapter looking at this issue through a very specific example: reading materials. We all have a lot of reading materials that we’d like to get to someday (I know I certainly do).

That accumulation of material in itself is a problem. It’s just a pile with no real priority within it. Which of these is actually the most important to read? Page 101:

What, of all the things you’ve captured that you think you ought to read, should you really be reading? Here comes the perspective part. Is there material in that stack that was interesting a while ago but has since lost its luster for you? Which of the reading is truly important for you?

When I consistently asked these questions of myself and of the books I had on my shelves, I came to some very fundamental conclusions about what I was doing wrong.

First, having a big shelf full of books that I’m not going to read anytime soon is a waste. Why have them? They’re sitting around taking up space and often distracting me from what I might actually want to read. If I want to have a big list of “someday” books, why not just have a big list of “someday” books instead of a big waste of space?

Second, the decision on what book to read next is often best made when I’ve finished a book and am selecting another one. Having a strict “queue” often resulted in frustration. I’d come to the next book that I had decided long ago would be the next one and I’d realize that my interest in that book had passed. I’d try to force myself through it, but then I’d burn completely out on it and get nothing out of the hours I’d invested in the book.

Because I stepped back and really thought about my accumulated books and reading habits, I came to some very different conclusions than I had held before and it’s made my reading habits much more efficient. Rather than spending my time accumulating books for a bookshelf, books that I might get around to reading someday, I’m just reading the book that looks the most interesting to me, deciding whether to keep or trade it when I’m finished, and moving on to the next one. If I know of a book I want to read now, I reserve it at the library – if I finally get that reserved book and it’s no longer of interest to me, I just return it immediately.

Why did this happen? I used to think about reading from a longer term perspective quite a lot, but I began to find that although my interest in reading is a higher level life value, my specific choice of reading material was actually often a day-to-day thing. I’m far better off choosing my books on a whim (or from an accumulated list of “to be read” books) than I am trying to decide a queue far in advance.

Thus, I spend much less of my time thinking about books in a “meta” sense and much more time doing the actual, enjoyable reading, which is what I really enjoyed spending my time on to begin with.

That kind of thought process can be used in almost every aspect of our lives, from how we manage our money to how we choose to spend our lazy afternoons. Our day-to-day actions are often tied to larger goals and ideas that we rarely think about consciously, but if we step back and think about them for a while, we often easily find better ways of doing things in our day-to-day lives.

The next several chapters focus on these types of perspective shifts.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Perspective appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Allen takes an interesting detour in this chapter. Here, Allen uses the example of Ron Taylor and a business that fell into his lap, Gracie’s Gardens, as an example of the ideas presented in the previous several chapters.

It’s a pretty straightforward story, something that could happen to many of us. Ron’s great aunt passes away and leaves him her small gardening business, the aforementioned Gracie’s Garden. Unfortunately, she hasn’t done a thing with the business in several months, so the greenhouse is like a jungle, the bills are unpaid, there’s a mountain of mail sitting there, and so on.

What does Ron do? Basically, he follows the steps of the previous chapters in moving from staring at the disaster to taking charge of the business.

Capture
On page 194, Allen spells out the first step in Ron’s journey:

The very first thing Ron does is to take a quick site walkthrough, just to identify the property lines and to notice what the obvious things are within them. Next, he clears off the top of the old oak desk in the small office, sets up an in-basket, gets a legal pad and a pen, and does another site walkthrough, this time making notes about anything that grabs his attention and gathering any paper-based or physical items that look as if they might have meaning.

In other words, the first step is to simply gather all relevant information and things that need to be done together in one place.

This is a far superior approach than just diving in to one specific task, like clearing out the greenhouse. For one, it allows Ron to sit back and make realistic decisions about all the tasks (clarifying, the next step). For another, it allows Ron to get a grasp on how big the overall task in front of him really is.

Clarify
Ron then goes on to give some clarity to the big pile of stuff in front of him. On page 195:

Now Ron has to start making some “businesslike” decisions. What assets are worth keeping? What of the viable inventory is worth keeping? What files need to be saved? What supplies are still useful?

Each of those questions involve making decisions and breaking down that specific thought into manageable and clear tasks that don’t have a person asking more questions when they see the item on their to-do list.

Take the greenhouse, for example. Is there anything in there worth saving? If not, it needs to just be cleared out. Is that a good use of Ron’s time, or should he just hire a high schooler to clear it all out for some pocket money? If he chooses to hire a high schooler, there’s the start of a project that has multiple steps. Call a few potential people that might be willing to do it. Negotiate a wage and a time with them. Be on hand to explain the job when they’re about to do it.

Organize / Reflect / Engage
The other steps follow clearly from the clarification. Organize the material on hand into a filing system, into project plans, and into other useful structures of information. Reflect regularly upon all of this that you’ve done. Then, actually take on that to-do list that should consist of specific items that you don’t have to think about, just execute.

It all flows together. In my experience, it all flows together quite well.

The Greater Context of Life
The most interesting part of the chapter, though, is the concluding bit, where Allen writes about how these processes connect back to the greater scope of Ron’s life. Obviously, Gracie’s Gardens isn’t going to be the sole focus of Ron’s life right now, just one piece of it (and perhaps a temporary piece).

On page 196, Allen lays it out:

The unexpected inheritance of a small business you know nothing about is a good example of the kinds of input most of us receive from time to time – a novel event that could be either good or bad, or both. But no matter what the ultimate evaluation of how positive or negative this experience might be, it’s certainly new, different, and demanding of our attention in the moment. And, since Ron already has far more to do than he can keep up with in the rest of his life, one more demanding project can certainly jangle his system to the point of knocking him off balance.

So now that Ron has been able to stabilize Gracie’s Gardens to some degree, he knows he needs to do the same thing for himself, given the unexpected complication this has brought to his world.

In other words, Ron will basically apply the capture/clarify/organize/reflect/engage process over every context of his life, not just that of the business he’s inherited.

What’s the point of mentioning this? These processes work very well in every context of your life, from planning household chores and your Christmas list to convincing you to start a microbusiness and keeping your professional obligations straight.

I’ve been using them for years in a borderless fashion between my personal and professional efforts. The only difference between them is the context, really.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Applying This to Life and Work appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Engaging?

To put it simply, the fifth (and final) element of positive engagement with your world is just that – actually doing stuff instead of planning. The question, though, is why this has to be mentioned at all. Isn’t the whole point of all of this to set us up to work more effectively?

I like looking at it this way. All of the collecting and organizing and reflecting serves one very specific purpose: it creates a situation so that at any given time, you have a good grasp on the things that are actually worthwhile and important to do. The question then becomes which of those important things you choose to do right at this moment.

Allen calls this a “next action.” On page 172:

The most common cause of a list becoming listless and unispiring is the lack of clarity about what to do about what’s on it.

Imagine you have a to-do list in front of you with twenty five items on it (something that’s a common occurrence for me). They’re items you’ve actually went through the process of determination with and have recognized each of them as being something important. How exactly do you determine which of those twenty five items should actually be done right now?

Allen’s first line of defense here is to make sure that your to-do list actually represents thought-out next actions. On page 174:

The best criteria to determine whether or not you’ve actually thought something through sifficiently to act upon it is how clearly you can answer these three questions:

+ What has to happen first?
+ What does doing look like?
+ Where does it happen?

In short, if you have something on your to-do list that doesn’t have immediate answers to these three questions, then your to-do (or “next action”) list has a problem.

What do you do if you find an item that doesn’t have immediate answers to these questions? You resolve them. Take the item completely off your to-do list and reprocess it. Make sure these three questions are resolved before you re-add an item to your list.

On my own to-do lists, I usually make a direct note of where the thing will happen, because I’ll often group things together by their location. Allen refers to this as “context,” and touches on it heavily on page 182:

There is never a moment at which you could do everything you’ve decided you need to do, simply because most of those actions require a specific tool or location. You have some tasks at your office and others at home, and unless they happen to be in the same place, you are limited in your choice by where you are.

A great example of this is the errands you have on a to-do list.

I live in central Iowa. I run some errands in Ames. I run other errands in Des Moines or a surrounding suburb. It makes sense, when I’m assembling a to-do list, to clearly mark “Ames errand” and “Des Moines errand” next to errands that occur in those areas so I can group them together easily and make only a single trip to Des Moines to take care of several things.

Another “context” I often use is “email.” For me, opening up my email is a gigantic black hole of time, so I often try to do it once a day (or twice a day at most). To make sure I remember to send key emails, I clearly note “email” next to items that require an email to be sent or replied to.

You can use whatever contexts you’d like. The idea is just to make it easy to group obviously related tasks together off of your big to-do list.

Another big question, of course, is how you set the priority of such a list full of items. How can you tell at a glance which one is the most important out of these important things? Allen addresses this on page 190:

Ultimately, you must trust a combination of your intelligence and your intuition. You’ll never be able to integrate enough information consciously and then apply to it some logical or mathematical formula whose results you will always trust implicitly.

In other words, you should just purely trust your intuition. I used to stress out over this part of it quite a bit, but I often find that if I just glance at my list, one particular item will stand out to me pretty quickly, so I do that (and possibly other items in the same context). Then I rinse and repeat.

In other words, the two big keys to having a successful to-do list (once you’ve actually processed everything you need to be doing) is to have very clear things to do (so you don’t have to think about them) and to trust your intuition once you have a list of these clear tasks. I find that it really works for me.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Engaging appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

For me, the single most important part of keeping my life on track and headed in the direction I want is the time I spend reviewing what I’ve done, what I need to do, and whether I still want to reach that destination. It takes time – time that’s seemingly not productive – but it adds so much value to everything else I choose to do that without it, I would simply feel aimless and lost.

Because of this, I regularly allude to the power of review, as I did yesterday when discussing procrastination. I do small reviews at least twice a day and at least one big review a week, where I look at every goal and aim I have in my life and ask myself whether this is really of value to me and, if it is, what I can be doing right now to move forward with it.

What do I mean by “review”? It parallels quite closely with what David Allen talks about in this portion of Making It All Work.

Allen argues that there are dual functions to reflection and review, on page 163:

Reviewing your system serves two distinct but equally critical purposes: (a) to update its contents and (b) to provide trusted perspective.

Let’s look at these two roles that a review can provide.

Updating
On page 163, Allen offers further insight into the value of updating:

Invariably, the world comes at us faster than we can keep up with its details. By the very nature of work, when you are doing one task, you’re not thinking about others – nor should you. You may be capturing along the way, but you won’t be clarifying and organizing everything as it happens.

During a given day, tons of little things blip across my mind and my computer screen and the phone and the mail and from the lips of my wife that I need to take care of. Most of this stuff gets jotted down quickly so I can return to the task at hand, and most of those jottings get dealt with in some way later in the day. I either take care of the task or add it to my to-do list.

The problem is that, frankly, some of that jotted-down stuff is junk – and it’s rarely completely obvious whether it’s junk or not junk. Reviewing those things a time or two goes a long way towards making that distinction, rather than just adding more junk to your to-do list.

An example: I got a letter from my bank informing me of their refinancing offers. I jot it down and add it to my to-do list, since refinancing to a much lower rate would be very valuable to us. This is one of those “important but not urgent” things that’s easy to leap over.

Without review, that kind of item would easily be left undone on my to-do list and probably discarded and forgotten. A quick review of my to-do list, though, reveals several little things that are essentially wastes of time. There’s no real importance to reshelving all of these books, since they’re mostly just going out via PaperBackSwap anyway, so I toss them in the PBS box. I don’t need to make a trip to Ames just for some new photo paper, so I just add that to-do to the grocery list. It’s not vital that I fertilize my lawn, especially since it’s late in the year and dry. Suddenly, my to-do list looks barren and I have room for that “important but not urgent” thing.

This is a simplification, of course, but that’s the kind of thought process that happens when I stop for a moment and review what needs to be done. I see through the “urgent but not important” stuff and toss it, leaving me time for the “important but not urgent” things that really matter in my life.

Similarly, as the activities in your life change, the priorities that you put on various things changes as well. On page 164, Allen expands on that:

Because projects are likely to change their meaning over time, your system also needs to reflect that fact. What was an active project last week may have turned into a “someday” one, given all the new demands that have arisen since then.

The things left undone on my to-do list are often just as important as the things that I’ve done, because they indicate how the priorities in my life are shifting over time.

For example, if I’m consistently not keeping up with some activity I’ve adopted in life, I know it’s time to sit down and ask myself whether it’s something I really value or not. If it’s not – and if I’ve adopted a pattern of avoiding it and mostly just thinking about it, it’s not something I value – then I make the hard decision to just move on as soon as I can, without regrets.

Otherwise, it hangs on like a cobweb in my mind and my to-do lists, slowing down my thoughts and popping up as something I ought to be doing. For a long time, my life was chock full of those things – things I thought I should be doing and were taking up space in my thoughts and often physically in my home. Systematically reviewing all of it and getting rid of the cobwebs makes it incredibly easier to do the things that actually are important with gusto, focus, and passion.

Getting Perspective
All of the above material comes from applying a bit of perspective to all of the things going on in your life. Just as important is reversing that paradigm to look at the big picture things in your life and seek out how they lead to the day-to-day things you’re doing.

Once a week, I sit down and go through every major goal and project I have in my life and simply ask myself if this is still important to me and, if it is, what am I going to do in the next week to move forward on it. This takes about two hours, believe it or not – I usually do it when the children are napping on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

This seems like a lot of work, and I like how it’s addressed on page 167:

“Write everything down? Decide the actions you need to take on everything? Keep all that on… how many lists? Keep an index of all my projects? And … what? Take two hours every week to review all of that and get all these lists complete? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m too busy.”

That’s exactly how I felt about all of this when I first started. “I have too much to do to waste my time with this,” I thought. What I found, though, is that I was constantly making poor choices in my life that didn’t reflect on what I really valued. I would choose work projects over my kids. I’d burn time on pointless conference calls instead of getting useful projects done. I’d deal with piles of paperwork that really didn’t need to be done while big projects sat untouched. I’d run around doing household busywork while my children were out in the yard wishing Dad was there. I’d devote hours and hours to things I didn’t really want to do because I was convinced I was supposed to be doing them.

Having a weekly review and a consistent system ended all of that. I threw out mountains of busy work – it wasn’t really important. I started spending a lot more time with my kids and a lot less time on household projects or other things. I let go of some unrealistic projects and started focusing on hitting home runs on projects more in line with my life goals (like The Simple Dollar, for example).

The simple process of having a list of all of my goals and dreams in life and all of my ongoing projects and a to-do list and then sitting down once a week to go through all of them and ask myself whether they’re really important and how I’m moving forward on the important ones is the single most valuable part of my week. It keeps me from wasting my time on the less important things and redirects me to spend my time on the more important things.

That’s well worth two hours on a Saturday afternoon, if you ask me.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Reflecting appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

So, you’ve dumped all of the stuff out of your brain and you’ve put it into appropriate places, but how do you use those places? What makes for a functional to-do list you can use? What about a calendar? What about your filing sytem, which doesn’t work if you can’t find anything in it?

All of this falls under the general umbrella of “organizing” – in other words, making all of the places you’ve moved the thoughts of your life into actually useful in your life. You want a calendar that actually has everything important on it and easy to find. You want a to-do list that actually covers the breadth of things you need to do. You want a project tracking system that keeps track of all of your ongoing projects. You want a filing system that doesn’t “lose” things and keeps them easily discoverable at a later time.

This chapter covers all of these areas and then some. I thought I’d walk through the areas that Allen covers and talk about his thoughts on them and how I actually implement them for my own use. For me, I find that every piece of information or idea that flashes through my mind or appears in front of me is either trashed or winds up in one of these five locations.

Outcomes, Projects, and Goals
On page 137, Allen says:

From time to time you will need a broad set of reminders to keep you focused at various horizons. It can be very handy to have lists and other representations of their contents that you can view and review to maintain a steady and specific direction, keep motivated, and maintain appropriate standards.

To put it simply, this means simply keeping an actual list of all of your long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals and projects, as well as lists that describe the steps you need to take to achieve those goals and projects.

I keep both, actually. I have a folder on my computer desktop that simply says “future.” Inside it, there’s one big document that essentially lists all of my goals, both in the long term and the short term, as well as all of my ongoing projects. Each goal and project has a folder, too, that contains a lot of further notes within them.

Once a week, I review all of this. I look at my list of goals and ask myself if I’m moving forward on them. I look at the notes for each project and try to get the next step I need to take on that project moved to my to-do list for the coming week.

Calendar
What about the calendar? Allen writes on page 144:

Your calendar should only contain [...] three items – appointments, day-specific actions, and information.

Nothing else should be on your calendar. Not things you want to get done today (that should be on your to-do list) or else your calendar will quickly bloat to uselessness. On the other hand, if you don’t have those items on there, you’ll be committing the biggest mistake of all: relying on your memory to do it.

I use Google Calendar for my calendaring needs. All I keep on my calendar are day-specific reminders and appointments, nothing else. If something needs to be done on a certain day or at a certain time, I add it. That way, I can let the calendar lead when it comes to making decisions about the day. I see just what needs to be done today and/or at a certain time today.

How do I decide what to do during the open gaps in my day?

To-do List
On page 144:

The vast majority of the actions you have to take don’t actually have to be done on one specific day. They should be done as soon as you can get to them.

My to-do list is, quite frankly, enormous. I always have tons of things to do that, frankly, I don’t have time to get through today – or this week. So I use some tricks to help with it.

I keep the to-do list electronically and it’s available easily via the web. I use a Google Pages website that I can access from any browser to view my to-do list. I’ve tried other solutions, but I haven’t found one that just perfectly nails what I want, so I go with the simplest one.

I have a few codes for things that I can batch together. If it’s an email, I write EMAIL at the front of it in large letters. If it’s a call, I write CALL. If it’s something I need to do in Des Moines, I write DES MOINES at the front. If it’s a task to do at the computer, I write COMPUTER at the front.

This helps me group things by context. If I’m going to be at the computer for a few hours, I focus entirely on COMPUTER tasks – and that includes EMAIL tasks. If I’m going to start making phone calls, I do all of the CALL tasks at once. If I’m going to Des Moines, I do all of the DES MOINES tasks at once.

If something needs to be done ASAP, I move it to the top and write it in red. Most tasks don’t have that kind of urgency; if they do, it’s usually the very thing I’m working on. However, sometimes I come up with tasks that do need to be done quickly, and so I move it up there.

Incubating
Some stuff needs to wait for someone else’s action or simply needs to wait for my own reflection. On page 149:

You may decide that among the many things that have crossed your mind and landed in your in-basket, there are actions, projects, and ideas that you don’t actually want to move on or even decide about immediately. They need to be put on a “back burner” for some designated period, to be considered again later.

Again, I keep these electronically on a single document on my computer. If the item is very date-specific, I put it on my calendar; otherwise, I just review this document once a week to make sure I’m still in “waiting” mode on each of these items.

Many of these things are “dreams” and eventually move lower on the list. I do that by putting newer things at the top of the list, as those are the things that are usually just things I’m simply waiting a little while on. However, having that “dream” list feels good and it enables me to get the idea out of my mind, even if I’ll probably never really move forward on it.

Reference
The final area of organization that I deal with comes with my reference materials. On page 153:

By far the category with the biggest volume of content will be “reference” – items that require no action but that you have decided might be useful to have access to in the future.

I have a filing cabinet and an extremely straightforward filing system – I just name folders based on what I think is the most logical name for the stuff I want to store and file everything A-Z, followed by 0-9 (items that begin with numbers).

When I need to find something, I usually only have to look in one or two places to find exactly what I need, which is good enough for me compared to having to use a specific nomenclature for the folders. I just use my own naming intuition and it really works for me.

I have found, though, that it’s easy to save things that really ought to be thrown away. I ask myself honestly if there is any real reason I will need this document again or if anyone will ever need to look at it again. Addressing things like this has led me to throwing away a lot more stuff.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Organizing appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Earlier this week, we talked about the idea of “capturing” – getting everything that’s taking up space in your head out of your head and into some sort of external form where you can manage them.

That kind of “capturing” is actually a pretty tall order. When you walk through all of the stuff in your life that can be captured and collect it all in one place, you’re going to have a mountain of stuff in front of you.

What’s next? You’ve got to deal with that mountain. You have to put some sort of order on that mountain of stuff so that you can actually use it effectively, because without some order, you’ll never succeed.

Some of that stuff are things that need to be immediately dealt with. Some of that stuff refers to larger-scale projects. Some of that stuff refers to life goals. Some of that stuff might never be dealt with at all.

The Organizer as Therapist
In our natural course of life, things we want to do but don’t have the resources (time, money, energy) to accomplish right now build up. It builds up in our mind, on our desk, and in our lives. Allen talks about this a bit on page 105:

In recent years the whole arena of “personal organizing” has experienced quite a heyday. One article in the U.S. national press focused on the phenomenon of the “organizer as therapist,” citing anecdotal evidence of how people had begun to express their vulnerabilities and core life issues when confronted with how to deal with the things that they had accumulated around them. [...] There is a logical explanation for this phenomenon. Usually things remain disorganized when people don’t confront their meaning. To actually decide what you’re going to do with or about something demands that you deal with how you relate to its context, your agreements about it, and how it fits into the rest of your world.

This really hits on a big fundamental truth I’ve found about getting my stuff out of my head and organized. It’s very, very therapeutic. It simply feels good to get all of it out of my head. It also feels good to go through all of it, make some sort of order out of it, and make some calls about what’s actually important and what isn’t.

It moves you from a sense that your life isn’t moving forward very much to a sense that your life is moving forward in a lot of dimensions. That’s transformative. It fills you with hope and energy and a sense of accomplishment and it lets you feel in touch with areas of your life that you’ve felt out of touch with.

Dealing With “Stuff”
During the “collection” discussed last time, we collected everything in our minds, our homes, and our workplace that needed to be addressed. That ends up being a big pile of “stuff.” In allen’s words (page 107):

Basically, “stuff” is everything in the giant in-basket of your work and live, only a tiny fraction of which most people have actually funneled into their working capture lists or trays. Most is floating around the house, office, and psyche, still uncollected, much less clarified.

That stuff “floating around the house, office, and psyche” is a constant drain on you. It reduces your focus. It reduces your positive mental energy. It distracts you, often at inopportune moments. Often, these undone things come back and bite you when you least expect it.

That negative weight is dealt with when you collect all of that stuff and deal with it in a productive way.

Is It Actionable?
This is really the fundamental question you need to ask yourself about every single item in your giant stack of “stuff.” From page 112:

There are two possible answers here – “yes” and “no.” “Maybe” is actually “no, but the item might require action later,” with the assumption that you are clarifying meaning at this moment in time to you.

Go through everything in that giant collected pile and sort it into three groups: stuff you can take action on right now, stuff that doesn’t need an action (they probably need filed or thrown away, then), and stuff you’ll take action on later (probably a calendar entry and possibly a file). Anything that takes less than five minutes that you can take action on now should be done immediately.

Just doing this will take a long time, but it’ll blow through a ton of your inbox and leave you feeling like a productive world beater.

The Fundamental Process
Of course, you’re then left with a big pile of larger actionable stuff (both now and later). To these things, you must apply two fundamental questions (from page 114:

* What’s my desired outcome? What am I committed to accomplishing or finishing about this?
+ What’s the next action? What’s the next thing I need to do to move toward that goal?

What you’re doing is two distinct things.

First, you’re taking that item, whatever that is, and transforming that into a specific goal. Many things are ready-made goals, like “get a birdhouse” or “clean the pool.” Other things are far more nebulous, like “Lisa” (one of my recent notes). What does “Lisa” even mean? What am I wanting to accomplish there? You’ve got to clarify it into a goal – something specific that you want to accomplish that’s very clear in terms of knowing that you’ve achieved it.

The next part is figuring out what the first or next step is for that goal. What can you do right now to move forward with that goal? Maybe it’s something you can do all at once. Maybe it’s something very big that needs further reflection.

What I usually end up with after doing this (and I do it pretty often) is a big list of goals and projects, each of which is ready to produce a series of action steps until I’ve reached that goal.

Success Comes Back to Action
The key to all of this is to clarify what actions you need to be taking right now to deal with all of the stuff going on in your life. On page 119:

As all roads lead to Rome, all success comes back to action. It is the final of the five stages of gaining control, and the ultimate expression of all six horizons of maintaining perspective. If you simply took every item that has your attention, on any level, and forced yourself to determine the very next step to be taken on each of them, moving it toward some closure, you would be amazed at the clarity you would achieve.

This really is about getting stuff done – simply taking care of all of the open things in your life. Doing so really, really makes a difference.

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Clarifying appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

]]> http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/22/making-it-all-work-getting-control-clarifying/feed/ 4 http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/19/making-it-all-work-getting-control-capturing/ http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/19/making-it-all-work-getting-control-capturing/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:00:33 +0000 Trent http://www.thesimpledollar.com/?p=6121 This is the fifth 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. This chapter is where the meat of the book begins, in my opinion, this

The post Making It All Work – Getting Control: Capturing appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

]]> This is the fifth 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.

This chapter is where the meat of the book begins, in my opinion, this chapter and the ten that follow it make up the heart of the book. So let’s dig right in.

The Key Idea of the Whole Book
Allen defines two key elements that are central in building a successful life: control and perspective. Control refers to the ability of a person to stay on top of all of the things going on in their life, while perspective refers to the ability of a person to discern what things in life are actually important.

Allen defines five different elements that make up “control” and six different levels of “perspective.” In essence, he plays these off of each other in these eleven chapters – in five of the chapters, he looks at an element of control through the lens of each level of perspective; in the other six, he looks at a level of perspective through each element of control.

The five elements of control are:
Capturing (identifying the things you need to know in your life)
Clarifying (deciding what to do with the things you’ve captured)
Organizing (putting the things you’ve clarified in appropriate places)
Reflecting (keeping up with the products of your organization)
Engaging (in essence, doing stuff)

The six levels of perspective are:
Actions (the things you need to do today)
Projects (the things you’re actively pushing towards completion shortly)
Areas of Focus (the areas of your life you’re dealing with regularly)
Goals (the specific things in life you want to accomplish in a few years)
Vision (the general things you want to accomplish in the next decade)
Purpose/Principles (why are you here? what is your life purpose?)

Thus, the focus of this chapter is looking at capturing at the six levels of perspective.

What Is Capturing?
Allen explains it on page 78:

The first thing to do, when you are feeling in any way out of sorts, is to clear the air by grabbing hold of whatever is pulling on your focus. If there is a lack of clarity, it is necessary to identify anything that might be the source of that discord.

In other words, if it’s on your mind, write it down or record it somehow in a concrete way. You can jot it on paper, type it, write it on a whiteboard, or even talk into an audio recorder. [...] You can add it to a list, or write each item on a separate sheet of paper and collect them in your in-tray. It doesn’t matter how you capture these thoughts, as long as you get them out of your head and have them all in some way easily accessible for review.

I think the phrase “if it’s on your mind, write it down or record it somehow in a concrete way” is really the key part of this. If you’re thinking about it, write it down somewhere (we’ll worry about dealing with it later).

Why? If you do that, then that idea doesn’t need to be in your head, distracting you from whatever task you have at hand. You can focus much more deeply on whatever it is you’re working on and push yourself into a “zone” state much more easily.

Great! How do you get started? On page 79:

[Y]ou identify anything in life or work that you think might need to be different or considered for whatever reason and create at least a crude placeholder for it in one delimited location.

In other words, take out a fat pocket notebook and a pen. Sit down at a table and just start thinking about all of the stuff that’s on your mind that you need to accomplish or think about. Write down each item on a page of that notebook and flip to the next one. When you feel like you’ve run out of things, you’ve made a good start. Now, go through your entire house or place of work and collect things that need looked at – mail, papers, and other such things.

Allen spends a lot of this chapter evaluating how to capture things at various levels of perspective. For example, if you’re capturing projects, you might want to think about Christmas or about how to care for your elderly parents or getting that will written or getting your kids involved in winter basketball. If you’re capturing areas of focus, think about some of the larger things you’re trying to accomplish at work (getting promoted, maybe) or as a parent or as a volunteer worker. You also might want to think about your larger goals in life – where do you want to be in five years? In ten? Just write those goals down. The same is true for your overall mission in life, whatever that might be.

Journaling
You’re not going to do this all at once, of course. Capturing is something you can get a big jump on in one sitting, but ideas and thoughts are going to come to you gradually over time.

One powerful way to keep this going is to start journaling. Allen describes it on page 87:

A wonderful way to begin to experience an increase in control during this first phase of capturing is to journal. Often the incomplete energies and loose edges of our lives are manifested only when we are willing to drop back into a more reflective mode and take note of what seems to want to express itself only through a more stream-of-consciousness modality.

Over the years I have gravitated toward two types of journal writing for myself. One is a kind of ad hoc running diary of events to record various aspects of my current situation in my workaday world; the other is more inner and spiritually focused.

I have journaled almost constantly since 1991 (yes, 19 years’ worth). I’ve found that time and time again, my ideas for where I’m headed and what I need to do pop up when I’m journaling and simply reflecting on my past day, past week, etc. (Here’s an example of what I mean, from a 2005 entry.)

Almost every day, something comes to the forefront when I’m journaling. It might be an immediate task I need to do tomorrow (or even that evening). It might be a revelation about an ongoing project in my life. It might be a realization that I’m no longer interested in a particular life goal. Every day, almost without fail, something valuable like this happens because of the journaling.

You Don’t Have to Do Everything
A final note from this chapter: you don’t have to actually do everything that you capture. The goal is to simply get it out of your head so you can reflect on it externally. From page 93:

A TV sitcom writer told me that reading Getting Things Done had been a transformative experience for him, solely because it gave him the idea and motivation to do a total mind sweep. In only one sitting he captured every single thing ye could possibly churn up from his psyche that he thought he would, could, should, or might do. He swor that once he’d accomplished that, it was the first time in his life that he realized he didn’t have to do them all at once, that he could only do one thing at a time, and that he could actually permit himself to not do anything on that list if, in the moment, it wasn’t appropriate.

When you actually dump all of this out, you can begin to make some real comparative choices about what’s actually important in your life. It’s very hard within your own head to compare the importance of the fifty things going on in your head. Getting them down on paper and spending the time to think about each one and ask yourself it it really matters makes all the difference.

In fact, it was really this very process that made me realize how out of whack my life used to be. Most of the things I listed that I wanted to do involved my family and rarely cost money. Most of the things I listed that I had to do involved work and were so dominant that they gave the boot to the things involving my family. After enough repetitions, I began to wonder what I was working for – I was earning money for frivolous stuff that didn’t really matter to me, and to earn that money I had to abandon the things (parenting, being a good husband, community volunteer work, etc.) that really did matter to me.

In short, I realized I didn’t need all of that extra money and that more time with my family was well worth a pay cut. It was through capturing all of the ideas in my head and evaluating them that I came to this realization.

This chapter is loaded with many, many great ideas related to capturing all of the loose ends in your life – this post really does just scratch the surface.

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]]> http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/19/making-it-all-work-getting-control-capturing/feed/ 3 http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/15/making-it-all-work-the-fundamentals-of-self-management/ http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/15/making-it-all-work-the-fundamentals-of-self-management/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:00:26 +0000 Trent http://www.thesimpledollar.com/?p=6104 This is the fourth 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. Time management. Money management. Health management. Management of your stuff. Relationship management. All of

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]]> This is the fourth 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.

Time management. Money management. Health management. Management of your stuff. Relationship management.

All of those things (and a lot more) boil down to is self-management. What is your capacity for determining what needs to be done in your life and actually executing those things that need to be done?

Can you see what needs to be done?

Do you have the ability to do the things that need to be done?

Allen boils this all down, on page 61:

The two key ingredients for making it all work are:

Control
Perspective

The more control you have, the better. The more perspective you have, the better.

Allen subdivides levels of control and perspective into four distinct areas. Of course, it’s worth noting that we all find ourselves in each of these areas sometimes, but typically one of these areas dominates our lives and life choices.

Victim / Responder
Low Control, Low Perspective
Allen sums up what life is like for a “victim/responder” on page 63:

In a self-management context, this means that you are simply dealing with only the latest and the loudest. You are likely doing “emergency scanning” of voice mails and e-mails, letting the not-yet-critical stuff mount up in heaps, dealing exclusively with the tasks you have to do at the moment.

When I read this description, I couldn’t help but think of how every task in a person’s life has two key characteristics: urgency and importance. A victim/responder simply does all of the urgent tasks without worrying much at all about their actual importance.

To put it simply, if this description sounds like your life, then serious changes are in order. There are times when we all find ourselves here – dealing with crises, handling minor things, and so on. However, without the ability to step back from this state (preferably, the ability to step back quite often), we become numb to the bigger issues and simply just focus on whatever happens to be on our plate, whether it’s important or not. That’s not a route to any kind of success.

Micromanager / Implementer
High Control, Low Perspective
So, what about the “micromanager”? From page 65:

This is the natural domain of the proverbial bean-counter, the financial guy who, if he wields too much power, strangles a company by cutting off investment in innovation, design, and research. [...] Another typical example of this sort of thinking is the person who, instead of having nothing well organized, has nothing, well organized.

We’ve all come across this in our lives: people who have built their own little empires and rule over them with an iron fist. They’re completely in control of some very minor situation and you have to follow their arcane rules to gain access to what they’re controlling.

Perhaps this is your boss or an administrative assistant you have to regularly deal with. Perhaps it’s you.

In either case, the key to growing beyond this paradigm is to step back and ask yourself what sort of role your area of control plays in the lives of others. Are you sacrificing successful interaction with others to keep more control over your own situation? Are you making life difficult for the people who need your help simply so you can maintain control over one or two minor things?

Could you be more productive and more helpful to the people around you if you focused on the bigger picture of what’s going on in the organization rather than the narrow focus of the area you control?

I keep thinking of the mind-numbing amounts of paperwork I had to do at my previous job. There were many, many instances where a smoother framework could have been introduced, but to do so would mean loss of a bit of control for a short period during the transition, so such improvements were constantly shot down – to the detriment of all.

“Crazy Maker” / Visionary
Low Control, High Perspective
The opposite of the micromanager is discussed on page 67: the “visionary”:

[T]hey have too many ideas in proportion to the amount getting done, they take on too many commitments vis-a-vis available resources, and they make everyone around them nuts by random and uncontrolled directives. Their systems and behaviors are not functioning to capture and contain all of their creative output.

I find myself in this area quite a lot of the time. I have more ideas than I know what to do with or possibly have time to follow up on. Quite often, I don’t filter them enough and begin engaging in too many projects.

In other words, I have the perspective I need to set long-term ideas and carry through with them, but sometimes I fail to have the control needed to pick and choose amoing those long-term ideas.

Think of the person you know who always has some sort of great idea but seems to have difficulty following through on them – you’re looking at a visionary. Perhaps it’s you.

I think that in many cases, visionaries and micromanagers can make a great team if they trust each other and listen to each other and give into each other on occasion.

“Captain & Commander”
High Control, High Perspective
However, it’s this final status that is the most valuable for almost everyone to have. On page 69:

The ideal of the model I’m proposing here incorporates an appropriate mix of perspective and structure, with your energies and focus directed by an internal rather than an external source. This is the state of flow, of being in the zone, of being “on.”

The success factor here isn’t what you’re doing or how much of it you’re doing, but how you’re engaged with what you’re doing. Why are you doing it? How are you doing it? What’s the end goal? How will you get there? When you have all of that inside of you and you’re able to simply throw yourself into the task at hand to the point of losing track of time and simply getting things done, you’re there.

How do you get there? Allen points back at what I consider to be the fundamental principle of the Getting Things Done model: simply get all of those spare ideas and thoughts and plans for other things out of your head and into some trusted system. Write them down and put them in a place that you’ll review later.

The more I do that, the easier I find it to simply slip into the flow, where all that matters is getting stuff done in a sensible way.

The post Making It All Work – The Fundamentals of Self-Management appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

]]> http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/15/making-it-all-work-the-fundamentals-of-self-management/feed/ 9 http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/12/making-it-all-work-the-process/ http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/10/12/making-it-all-work-the-process/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:00:53 +0000 Trent http://www.thesimpledollar.com/?p=6088 This is the third 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. Making It All Work opens with what I would call three “introductory” chapters that

The post Making It All Work – The Process appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

]]> This is the third 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.

Making It All Work opens with what I would call three “introductory” chapters that precede what I would call the main section of the book. This third “introductory” chapter is quite short and mostly just sets up a few key concepts for the rest of the book. I identified five of these concepts that really stuck out at me.

Losing Control and Direction
On page 49:

From time to time you will experience yourself either feeling out of control or lacking direction – or both. If you didn’t you’d probably be stale.

This could be true on a larger life scale, such as how you are experiencing your career, or, at a more mundane level, such as being disorganized in preparing a dinner for friends. This can (and will) happen in and with your project in the garage, your family, your team, your job, your company, your school committee, your life.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are times where I feel like my life is humming along wonderfully and everything seems to be in sync. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it. I’m really productive and full of energy.

Eventually, though, something happens that knocks this off of the rails. An emotional event. A crisis that eats a lot of time and energy. A slow change in my goals and directions.

I start to feel out of control. Sometimes, I start to wonder what exactly I’m working for.

The Two Keys
On page 51:

In the simplest terms, there are only two things you or your team or company needs to do to achieve positive and productive engagement with the commitments you face and to achieve all of the desired results [...]: get organized and get focused.

Again, that seems simple. Yet virtually every common problem a person or team boils down to one of those two problems: a lack of organization or a lack of focus.

Organization problems come from not having the right resources available for the task. People problems. Information management problems. Communication problems. They’re all signs of some form of disorganization.

On the other hand, focus problems include things like simply having too much to do or being bored without enough to do or not being engaged with what’s going on.

How do we solve them? The solution really comes from putting aside time to evaluate what you’re doing and why you’re doing it on a regular basis. So often, people and groups view that evaluation as “wasted time,” but I’ve found it to be the most valuable time that I spend.

The Price of Creativity and Productivity
On page 55:

Loss of control and perspective is the natural price you will pay for being creative and productive. The trick is not how to prevent this happening, but how to shorten the time you stay in an unsettled state.

Why are we worried about these things? Simply put, time spent out of control and without perspective is time lost.

I know that there are sometimes days when I just sit here spinning my wheels, trying to decide what to do next or not even being sure what I should be doing. I don’t have ideas. I don’t have direction. I just idle a bit.

That is pure wasted time. When I find myself in that situation, it’s time to back off and take a larger look at what I’m doing.

What Exactly Is Work?
On page 56:

The definition of work I will use in this book is quite universal: anything you want to get done that’s not done yet.

Allen’s material is interesting because it doesn’t make any distinction between the different types of things that a person needs to get done. A task to accomplish is a task to accomplish – you treat them all in the same way.

This is a really difficult bridge for many people to walk across. For many people, a work task stays at work and a home task stays at home.

The problem is that you often find yourself thinking about work at home and thinking about home at work during downtimes at each place. In those downtimes, you should be productive in those areas. If you have a great work idea at home, write it down. If you have a great home idea at work, write it down.

No “Personal” Versus “Work” Dichotomy
On page 58:

[...] there is an inherent fallacy in affirming that “life” and “work” are mutually exclusive spheres. The truth is, when you are “in your zone” – when time has disappeared and you’re simply “on” with whatever you’re doing – there is no distinction in your psyche at that moment between “work” and “personal.”

Allen goes so far with this as to suggest that there really is no difference between “work” and “personal” when you are “in the zone.” Regardless of whether you’re at home or at work, you should strive to get into that zone – and when you’re in that zone, the line between work and personal disappears. You just get stuff done.

For me, this line has completely vanished, but that’s partially because I work at home on projects that have a flexible time schedule. I find that when I do get really “productive” over a stretch of time, I intermingle “work” tasks and “personal” tasks without skipping a beat.

My enemy is idle downtime. I don’t mind taking a break or anything like that, but when I’m just sitting there doing nothing for the sake of doing nothing, I know there’s a problem, whether I’m active in my personal life or in my work.

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