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

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

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

I like how Allen describes them, on page 217:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the eleventh 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.

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.

This is the eleventh 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.

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.

This is the tenth 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.

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.

This is the ninth 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.

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.

This is the eighth 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.

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.

This is the seventh 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.

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.

This is the sixth 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.

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.