This is the final entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

Before I start digging in to what I think are the five key take-home messages from this book, I’ll link back to the thirteen previous entries, in order, for people who want to read them in order.

1. A New Practice for a New Reality
2. The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow
3. The Five Phases of Project Planning
4. Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools
5. Corraling Your Stuff
6. Getting “In” to Empty
7. Setting Up the Right Buckets
8. Keeping Your System Functional
9. Making the Best Action Choices
10. Getting Projects Under Control
11. The Power of the Collection Habit
12. The Power of the Next-Action Decision
13. The Power of Outcome Focusing

Here are the five key messages (from my perspective, anyway) contained in Getting Things Done.

Get stuff out of your head and on paper (or in a reliable digital form).
We all daydream. We’re in the middle of doing something when a thought pops into our head – something we need to do, something we wish we were doing, etc. We think about it for a moment and suddenly, our focus on the task at hand is broken. It takes us time to get back on track on what we’re doing, plus we’re trying to remember that thing that we just thought about.

This is hugely counterproductive. It keeps us from doing the task at hand well, even if it’s just a short task or a “mindless” task. Your mind drifts when you’re writing an email and you forget an important detail, requiring additional communication and more work for you. Your mind drifts when you’re washing dishes and you cut yourself, requiring time to take care of the wound. Your mind drifts when you’re “focusing” on one task at work and you suddenly find yourself taking 50% longer to do it.

The big solution to this is to get “in the zone” with whatever task you’re doing, but that’s often hard to do. The single best way I’ve found to get myself in the zone with whatever task I’m working on is to simply get everything out of my head in advance and have it in a trusted system – and if something pops into my head mid-task, I can just jot it down quickly, knowing I’ll deal with it later. Daydreaming and mind-wandering almost disappear if you get all of that stuff out of your head and somewhere secure. Read the fifth entry in this series for more focus on corraling all of your stuff and thoughts.

When being productive, your focus should be exclusively on the next action.
We all have tons of things going on in our lives. Some of them are simple – “call the repairman about the dishwasher” or “be at the recital at 7 PM.” Others are quite complicated and nebulous – “improve my relationship with my mother” or “get a better career going.”

However, the basic principle for making all of these things happen is the same: focus on the very next action you can take to move it forward. No matter how big or how small of a project you’re looking at, it can’t move forward without you taking a single step.

That single step is the key. If there’s something you genuinely wish to accomplish, focus not on the enormity of the goal and the seeming complexities it holds (at least, not right now). Focus instead on the very next thing you need to do to achieve that goal. Nothing else matters right now. The twelfth entry riffs on this idea.

Processing the stuff that comes out of your head and into your life is a daily practice.
My inbox sits on a corner of the desk I use for almost everything. Into that inbox goes all kinds of stuff – currently, I see some mail, a poster I need to hang up in our children’s room, two magazines, a couple of receipts, and about five handwritten notes. That’s good. That means I’m collecting this stuff as soon as it appears in my mind or in front of my eyes.

There’s still a problem, though. In my rush to get things done, it can be easy to just let stuff pile up in your inbox. The problem with that is before you know it, you’re right back to where you started, with random thoughts penetrating your focus and slowing you down.

The key is to deal with the stuff you collect in its entirety every single day. Deal with it properly, too (as I discuss in the next point). Dealing with this stuff regularly means that all of your stuff – ideas, things, and so on – find their way to where they’re supposed to be – your filing cabinet, your trash can, your calendar, your to-do list, and so on. That way, when you need to know what appointments you have (for example), you only need to look at your calendar. You don’t need to rack your brain. The sixth deals with this.

Have coherent, known places to put all of your stuff.
Hand-in-hand with the processing is the idea of having rational places to put stuff.

You’ve got to have a calendar that stores all of the things you need to do at a certain time or date. You also need to have a “next action” list that tells you what stuff you need to get done. You also need a trash can and an attitude that’s not afraid to trash stuff. I think those three pieces are absolutely essential.

Beyond that, there’s some flexibility. I usually keep a master list and a series of folders for all of my larger ongoing projects. The list just lists all of the projects, and each project has a folder for specific ideas related to it. I also have a filing cabinet in which everything I think I should keep gets tossed. I don’t do anything complicated to file – I just give each folder a name and alphabetize them A-Z with the folders that start with numbers coming after them.

The seventh entry gives you all kinds of ideas and details about having the right places to put stuff.

A regular (preferably weekly) review is essential, where you reflect on things more broadly.
Each weekend, on whichever day of the two Sarah is on nap duty with the kids, I spend an hour or two reviewing my life.

Am I moving forward on all of my projects? How are they each doing? Are these projects in line with what I really want to be doing with my life? Did anything fall through the cracks this week? What does my calendar look like for the coming week? Is absolutely everything in my inbox processed?

These thoughts and tasks not only keep the day-to-day system running, but they also go a long way towards ensuring that I’m doing things that are in line with the big things I want in life and that the big things I’m shooting for are in line with what I want out of life now. That kind of reflection helps me to constantly connect the little stuff to my big dreams, which is key for keeping everything moving forward. You can read more about this in the eighth section of the discussion.

In closing, reading Getting Things Done and implementing the strategies has made a tremendous difference in my life. I would have never launched The Simple Dollar – or been able to sustain it – without the techniques in this book. If you have dreams – or simply have a hard time handling what’s on your plate right now – Getting Things Done might very well be the most useful book you’ve ever read. If you got even a glimmer of a good idea from this series, check out the full book – and don’t worry about Allen’s focus on business topics. The ideas he presents work in every context of life, from the stay-at-home parent to the self-employed to the programmer sitting in his or her cubicle.

This is the thirteenth entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

It is easy to set big, audacious goals for ourselves like “spend more time with our kids” or “get our finances in the right order.” The big problem, though, is that such goals often seem enormous and vague. What can you really do to make these things happen?

Allen touches on this on page 250:

“Create a way to regularly spend more time with my daughter” is as specific a project as any, and equally demanding of a next action to be determined. Having the vague, gnawing sense that you “should” do something about your relationship with your daughter, and not actually doing anything, can be a killer. I often work with clients who are willing to acknowledge the real things in their lives at this level as “incompletes” – to write them down, define real projects about them, and ensure that next actions are decided on – until the finish line is crossed. That is real productivity, perhaps in its most awesome manifestation.

The solution to such a big, vague project is to focus on a very small handful of things.

First, what’s the outcome you want from this? Do you want a better relationship with your children? Do you want to have a grip on the money that’s going in and out of your accounts? You need to spend some time imagining what you want at the end of any idea for life change that you have. The more specific you are, the better.

Next, what’s the next step you can personally take to get there? If you want a better relationship with your children, the first step is to push away from your desk and spend some time with them – and then start doing that regularly. If you want to get a grip on your finances, the first thing you need to do is select a software package to help you figure this out. You need an action step that you can actually do that will start moving this initiative forward.

That really covers it. Just execute that next step, then ask yourself “what comes next?” again and again until you’re there.

What if you have no idea what you want? Allen addresses that on page 251:

As an experte in whole-brain learning and good friend of mine, Steven Snyder, put it: “There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.” If that’s true (and I think that it is) then there are only two solutions:

- Make it up
- Make it happen

In other words, if you don’t know what you want, it’s time for some soul-searching. A person without a goal is a person idling and not growing. Even if the things you want are mundane, they’re still goals. You can still focus on them, achieve them, and grow as a person.

On the other hand, if you know what you want and can’t figure out how to get there, start breaking that big thing you want down into smaller bites. Focus on nothing more than the absolute next step you ned to take to get there – something so small you can accomplish it in an hour.

Both of these things might require some help from others during the thought process – and that’s not only okay, that’s encouraged. Others can almost always offer very good help when it comes to figuring out such significant things in our lives.

There’s another interesting problem, too: on our way to achieving any big goal, an awful lot of steps are pretty mundane.

In order to be a great basketball player, you have to spend hours in a gym making shot after shot. You have to run all the time to keep yourself in pristine shape. The end product – being great at a sport you care about – seems wonderful, but the work to get there can be really mundane.

In order to be a great parent, you have to spend a lot of time with your children, not just hovering over them or trying to be their friend, but encouraging their problem-solving skills and their independence. You have to change diapers and deal with disciplinary issues over and over again. The end product – a child who is self-motivated to maximize their own potential – is a great target, but the work to get there is mundane.

To accomplish something big like this, you have to revel in the mundane. You have to know and appreciate how those endless free throws or those infinite diapers or those countless time-out sessions are pushing you towards your goal. Allen riffs on this on page 252:

My clients often wonder how I can sit with them in their offices, often for hours on end, as they empty the drawers of their desks and painstakingly go through the minutiae of stuff tha they have let accumulate in their minds and their physical space. Aside from the common embarrassment they feel about the volume of their irresponsibly dealt-with details, they assume I should be bored to tears. Quite the contrary.

Allen’s big goal is to be a good time management consultant. One of the mundane details of doing this is that he has to sit in people’s offices while they do their collection brainstorm for the first time and sift through mountains of junk on their desks. The thing is, though, that the mundane step here, if executed well, brings him closer to his goal. By focusing on that mundane detail and looking for ways to do it as well as possible, he inches towards something enormous.

One of my big goals is to be a writer that positively affects people’s lives. In order to get there, I have to do a ton of mundane work, from dealing with correspondence to doing interviews to reading contracts. Sometimes, I want to blow it off. Other times, though, I recognize that really nailing this little step helps me build to my dreams. I focus in on that task and get a great deal of personal joy from doing it right.

That’s the power of outcome focusing.

On Friday, I’ll share the five biggest ideas to take away from Getting Things Done.

This is the twelfth entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

One key theme in this book is the importance of coming up with a “next-action” list, which is essentially a “to-do” list. What makes the idea stand out in this book is that there’s a clear process needed to assemble that list out of the large clump of things floating around in your head and sitting on your desk that you need to do.

One big effect of this is that you often wind up with a pretty big pile of stuff, particularly right after you do a “brain dump” and get all of the stuff you’re supposed to do out of your head. Some of that stuff is a straightforward “next action,” but some of it isn’t.

What do you do with the stuff that isn’t obviously a “next action”? You analyze it and figure out what the next action is in that idea that you have. I really like the example of this that Allen lays out on page 238:

What’s ironic is that it would likely require only about ten seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list. But it’s ten seconds of thinking that most people haven’t done about most things on their list.

For example, a client will have something like “tires” on a list.

I then ask, “What’s that about?”

He responds, “Well, I need new tires on my car.”

“So what’s the next action?”

At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: “Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices.”

In other words, if there’s some vague thing you need to do, you usually just need to think about it for a moment to figure out what the next action step is. Then, add that next action step to your list.

Quite often (in fact, almost always), that next action step leads you down a sequence of actions that leads you to complete that vague thing you’ve been putting off.

For example, in that tire scenario, after calling a few tire stores, the fellow has a list of options in front of him for tires. He can drop that in his inbox if he wants, or he can keep going and set up an appointment to get new tires at the shop he prefers, adding that appointment to his calendar. Once he goes to that appointment, the vague “tires” element on his list – something vague enough that he kept avoiding it – is now completed and it’s one less thing on his mind (and on his “next actions” list).

I do this all the time. Quite often, my initial collection of some idea or some task – usually jotted down in a pocket notebook – is really vague. It’ll be something like “tires” or “chicken alfredo” or “Rudy Jimenez.” When I retrieve that note later on when I’m processing my inbox, I’ve learned that when I see such a vague note, I should spend a bit of time thinking about it and figuring out what comes next. After that thought, I can add real actions to my next action list, like “Set an appointment to get new tires on the Pilot” or “Buy the ingredients for that bookmarked chicken alfredo recipe” or “Call Rudy Jimenez about the youth baseball league meeting.”

If I didn’t do that extra second or two of thinking to turn something vague into a clear next action, I would be a much less efficient and less reliable person. That extra second or two turns things that seem vague and difficult into very clear and specific actions that I can do.

Of course, if you keep carrying this thought process further, you begin to see a different problem. What if you have a vague and amorphous task that seems to get more difficult the more you think about it? Income taxes come to mind – it seems like a simple thing, but if you sit down and start piecing through it, it starts to seem bigger and bigger and bigger.

Quickly, you reach a point where the task seems overwhelming – and that’s the point at which procrastination often begins. On page 241, Allen touches on this:

And so a lot of people [fall into this trap]. Because they’re so smart, sensitive, and creative. In my many years of coaching individuals, this pattern has been borne out more times than I can count – usually it’s the brightest and most sophisticated folks who have the most stuck piles, in their offices, homes, and heads.

In other words, smart, sensitive, and creative people tend to be very good at seeing all of the intricacies of a large problem – and it overwhelms them. Rather than dealing with all of these little elements and details, we put it off.

This is absolutely the wrong approach. If you have one of these fairly large and seemingly complex tasks in your inbox, your best bet is to spend some time figuring out nothing more than what your next action is to move it forward, then add that to your next action list.

In other words, just break it down. Don’t get scared by all of the details you see further down the road. Focus on nothing more than the very next thing that you need to actually do to move this thing forward. When that’s complete, move on to the next step. And the next.

Allen talks about it on page 242:

There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You’ll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward. Nothing, essentially, will change in the world. But shifting your focus to something your mind perceives as a doable, completeable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.

That’s why getting in the routine of just identifying the next thing you need to do to move something forward and simply doing it is so powerful. It makes your objectives clear. It gives you something specific to actually do instead of procrastinating. It lifts your mood and your attitude.

To put it simply, it gets things done.

On Tuesday, we’ll talk about the power of outcome focusing.

This is the eleventh entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

Allen concludes the book with three short chapters discussing the power of various aspects of the GTD system. This first one focuses on how powerful the collection habit really is.

As Allen states it on page 225:

When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete and unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both personally and professionally.

In other words, if your system is reliable, you become reliable, and if you become reliable, you’ll become more confident of your abilities, other people will notice your increased reliability, and you’ll become more valuable in everything you do.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon in my own life. Whenever I am operating my system really efficiently, I seem to do a great job of managing all of the stuff on my plate and others do notice this. I tend to see the results of it in the form of better articles on The Simple Dollar and elsewhere, which attracts readers. I get more notes about how today’s article was really good. I tend to build relationships in my life in a positive manner because I’m on top of the feeding and growth that they need.

What makes that happen? In the end, it’s simply the fact that I’m collecting everything that’s incomplete in my life and doing something with all of that stuff. Even if the system isn’t going perfectly for a while, I’m still making sure that all of the open-ended things are either being closed or are moving forward.

That builds trust. That builds self-confidence – and confidence from others. It builds a feeling of control over your life instead of a sense that things are just spinning out of control.

Those are things that constantly help you throughout your career and personal life, not just in terms of building relationships, but in terms of the quality work that you’re able to produce.

One interesting part of sitting down and doing a full collection of all of the unfinished stuff in one’s life – and I certainly went through this myself – is all of the negative feelings it generates along the way. From page 226:

If you’re like most peoplw ho go through the full collection process, you probably felt some form of anxiety. Descriptive terms like “overwhelmed,” “panic,” “frustration,” “fatigue,” and “disgust” tend to come up when I ask seminar participants to describe their emotions in going through a minor version of the procedure. And is there anything you think you’ve procrastinated on in that stack? If so, you have guilt automatically associated with it – “I could have, should have, ought to have (before now) done this.”

This is normal. Almost every functional adult has a big pile of unfinished stuff hanging around in their life. Even highly organized adults do.

Where do these negative feelings come from? Allen has a great explanation on page 227:

But what are all of those things in your in-basket? Aggreements you’ve made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements – they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don’t – voila! anxious and overwhelmed.

This sums up so well why dumping everything in your inbox can be a downer, but processing it can be such an incredible positive feeling and release.

When you put all of that stuff in your inbox, you see all of the agreements you’ve broken with yourself, which is a major downer.

On the flip side, though, once you have all of those promises sitting there and you actually go through the process of dealing with all of them, it feels incredibly good. Why? You’re finally living up to all of those promises you made for yourself and all of the bad feelings you have associated with yourself and all of those promises are just swept away.

I find that when I start to get behind, I really get deeply upset with myself when I collect everything together. These moments are probably the most negative ones in my life because I criticize myself harshly when I see such a pile of unfinished stuff.

Yet, with every item I process, I feel better. Each item I collect and then deal with goes from being a broken promise (a negative) to a fulfilled one (a positive). It also often reaffirms a positive reputation with others, because quite often that fulfilled promise benefits others in some way.

What usually happens is that it feels so good to start running through these processes that I almost become addicted to it. I burn through my inbox, processing all of it, then I tend to stick to the system furiously for a while, coasting on all of the good feelings.

In fact, the only time I tend to fall behind with it is during times of extreme crisis or extreme time management situations where I have more things going on than my calendar can hold. It is in those situations that stuff starts slipping through the cracks and the system starts to fall apart.

A recent example of this was in the second quarter of 2010, where we had our third child, final book edits were due, my father became seriously injured, and my book was released in a period of about seven weeks or so. Add into that a ten day trip right in the middle and I simply found myself slipping behind.

That’s why going through this book and the whole GTD process starting on June 1 was a huge lift to me. I went through the collection and processing myself as I wrote these pieces and it was a huge personal lift.

I really can’t recommend this enough. Put aside a day – preferably two, make it a weekend – where you just collect everything you need to get done. That should take about a third to a half of a day. Then, spend the rest of that time processing it. Do the simple things. Come up with plans for the bigger things. Trash the things you really don’t want to deal with.

It’ll be incredibly cathartic. You’ll come out of that timeframe with a much more positive feeling about your career, your life, and your relationships.

In fact, I’ll bet you’ll label it as one of the best things you’ve done in your adult life.

On Friday, we’ll talk about the power of the next action.

This is the tenth entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

One of the biggest difficulties in modern life is dealing with projects. We deal with so many projects in our life, from personal ones like getting an exercise routine in place or planning your wife’s surprise fortieth birthday party to professional ones like starting a blog or writing a killer piece of software.

Our biggest challenge is that with so many projects going on and filling our mindspace, we often feel like we don’t have time to concentrate on any one project. I know that at various points in my life, I fell into this exact trap. I’d be sitting at work engaging in a project when I’d suddenly be reminded of my plans to teach my son how to read, so I’d wind up wandering mentally for a bit thinking about that project and when I got back to the work at hand, I’d completely lost my flow.

Obviously, the best way to handle a project you’re working on is just like everything else we’ve talked about in this series. You’ve got to have the pieces of it out of your head, a clear plan for the project in place, and know what the next action step you need to take is so that you can include it on your list of things to do.

That’s basically the idea behind this chapter. How do you take an idea for a big project and develop it in such a way that it fits in with all of the other projects you’re doing, doesn’t mentally distract you when you’re working on something else, and makes the next step that you need to take with the project very self-evident?

Fitting the Project In
For me, the single most effective way to fit a new project into my life is to keep it accessible and make it consistent with the other projects I have going on.

For every project I’m involved with, a few central things are always true. I keep a master list of ongoing projects and each project has an entry on that list. I have a folder for each project that keeps my ideas for it, any information I have for it, and an outline of what needs to be done to bring the project to completion. I review that project each week until it’s completed or it’s abandoned for some reason (the project isn’t working or my goals have changed).

The project master list is really, really important. I use this each week to make sure that I’m actually making progress on each of my projects. I go through the entire list and I usually pull out the folder for each one just to keep things in mind.

Allen touches on this on page 222:

Just as your “Next Actions” lists need to be up-to-date, so, too, does your “Projects” list. That done, give yourself a block of time, ideally between one and three hours, to handle as much of the “vertical” thinking about each project as you can.

At the very least, right now or as soon as possible, take those few of your projects that you have the most attention on or interest in right now and do some thinking and collecting and organizing on them, using whatever tools seem most appropriate.

Focus on each one, one at a time, top to bottom. As you do, ask yourself, “What about this do I want to know, capture, or remember?”

In other words, you should have a list of all of your projects and you should regularly spend some time going through that list, focusing on each project and adding to it or just making sure you’re moving forward on it.

Bringing the Project Together
Whenever I first sit down to think about a project, I set aside at least an hour to get it correct right off the bat.

I get out a folder. I get out a piece of paper (you can also do this on a computer, but paper works better for me). And I simply start throwing down my ideas for the project.

Allen spells the importance of writing tools out on page 216:

Keep good writing tools around all the time so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with.

This is yet another reason why I always keep a pocket notebook and a pen on me at all times. Not only does it help me write down things I need to do (to get them out of my mind), but it’s also an essential aid for brainstorming projects when I’m just sitting there waiting for something.

Here are some of the big pieces for turning a vague idea of a project into something workable.

Have an end goal I usually start with the end goal – what do I want to accomplish with this project? I try to state it in such a way that success for the project is very clear – either this statement is true or it isn’t and the truth of the statement can be very easily identified by looking at data or a final product. This takes some revision.

Make it specific So, for example, a goal like I want to get in better shape doesn’t fly because it’s really impossible to measure. Instead, try something like I want to lose 25 pounds or I want to run a 5K in 30 minutes.

Figure out big steps Let’s say you decide on the 5K goal. What do you need to do to get there? Training. Possibly a better diet. Before that training, you may want to visit a doctor. You’ll probably want to do some “dry run” 5Ks, too.

Break them down until they’re small steps that you could add to your “next action” list So, what does “training” mean? What does that mean in terms of a weekly schedule? Do the research. Figure out what action you need to take. Print off a 5K training plan that meets your needs, like this couch to 5K plan. Each of those training sessions is an individual action you can add to your list. Make a doctor’s appointment and add that appointment to your calendar.

Make a list of those “next actions.” Now that the brainstorming and collection is over, turn that material into a coherent list of actions you would need to follow in order to reach your goal. That way, as you achieve them, you can cross them off your project list. These don’t have to specifically be next actions, but they need to be close enough that they can be quickly broken down into next actions. So, for example, you might have “week one training” and “week two training” and so on on your project list if you also have materials explaining what “week one training” is.

Maximizing the Next Step
The final piece of the equation is to keep translating the next step in each of your projects into something on your “next action” list.

For me, the key to doing this is a weekly review of all of my projects. Not only do I make sure that there’s an action from each of them on my “next action” list, I also spend a bit of time thinking about each project again. Is it going well? Is it going poorly? Why? Am I still invested in this project? What are the rewards of success? What are the consequences of failure?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve completely thrown out my project plans and done something completely different. Some people might think that the first plans were a waste of time, but almost every time it’s happened, I would have never found a much better plan without coming up with that initial plan and reviewing it regularly and rethinking it over time.

In the end, this all saves a lot of time. A lot of it. You find yourself moving forward on stuff instead of idling on it. You have more efficient plans because of the time you spent focusing on the project and you’re able to do each step more efficiently because you’re not trying to keep the plan in your head.

Projects that literally would take me forty hours in the past now takes ten or fifteen total. I’m not exaggerating a bit. All of that extra time enables me to add a lot of other things to my life that I would never possibly have had time for in the past. Quite simply, it was because of this type of planning and thought that I was able to launch and grow The Simple Dollar while also working a full time job (that required some overtime work, too) and being a good father and husband.

You can’t jump into your dreams if you don’t have things organized.

Next week, we’ll talk about the power of the collection habit.

This is the ninth entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

Over the last four articles, we’ve reviewed four of the five major components of getting things done:
1. Collecting all of the stuff you need to do
2. Processing that stuff down
3. Organizing that stuff into appropriate places
4. Reviewing to make sure you’re keeping things going

Today, we’re going to focus on the fifth step: actually doing stuff.

Allen offers up three models for determining how to decide what to do next.

The Four-Criteria Model
On page 192, Allen spells out this concept:

Remember that you make your action choices based on the following four criteria, in order:

1 | Context
2 | Time available
3 | Energy available
4 | Priority

You have your day’s to-do list. On that list are some errands, some things to do at your desk, some things to do in the kitchen, and so on. When you look at that list and decide what to do next, you’ll naturally want to do most of the desk things in a group, the errands in a group, and so on. That’s context.

Within each context, though, you might be boxed in by time. It’s noon, you have an appointment at 2, and you have three hours’ worth of stuff to do in the kitchen. Which tasks get done and which ones do not? That’s time available.

It’s 8 in the evening and you’re starting to run out of steam. One task involves carrying a bunch of heavy boxes. The other one just involves sitting on a chair as you clean out the fridge. Which one gets done? That’s energy available.

You’re at your desk. You have plenty of time and all of your tasks require about the same amount of energy. Which of your desk tasks do you do next? That’s all about the priority.

My method for handling these things usually comes at the start of the day when I assemble my to-do list. As I mentioned before, I maintain a Word document that contains my to-do list, adding to it every time I process my inbox. At the start of each day, I go through that list and organize it by context – errands, work tasks, personal tasks, and household tasks are usually the big four groups. Within each group, I usually list the things I need to do by priority. I then print off that list and, as I accomplish the items throughout the day, I cross them off.

Whenever I’m in a particular context, I usually just scan the things that need done, recognizing that they’re listed by priority but not necessarily following that priority with any strictness. For example, if I’m running errands, I’ll usually run them based on what things are near each other rather than by how important they all are.

I just cross things off as the day goes on and at the end of the day, I revise my Word document by deleting all of the completed tasks (and usually adding more that have built up throughout the day, to be done tomorrow).

The Threefold Model
Allen lays out this model for work on page 196:

As I explained earlier, during the course of the workday, at any point in time, you’ll be engaged in one of three types of activities:

- Doing predefined work
- Doing work as it shows up
- Defining your work

Sometimes, during the day, I follow my to-do list. Sometimes, I’m taking care of impromptu stuff, like unscheduled phone calls and other little emergencies. At other times, I’m reviewing my to-do list or processing my inbox or something like that.

I find that when I put these three elements into very separate boxes with as little overlap as possible, I find the most success. I unplug the phone to prevent “work as it shows up.” I turn off my email program. I put away my to-do list and ignore my inbox.

This allows me, along with knowing that all of the stuff I need to remember is safely recorded in my system, to quickly get into a “flow state” at my desk, which is incredibly productive time.

The Six Level Review Model
On page 200, Allen touches on the six levels of review:

The six levels of work as we saw in chapter 2 (pages 51-53) may be thought of in terms of altitude:

50,000+ feet: Life
40,000 feet: Three- to five-year visions
30,000 feet: One- to two-year goals
20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
10,000 feet: Current projects
Runway: Current actions

Obviously, each of these levels should be in line with and enhance the levels above it. The current things you’re doing should fulfill current projects. Your current projects should be in line with your areas of responsibility. Your areas of responsibility should build toward your one- to two-year goals. Your goals should be the building blocks of, well, your life as a whole.

In other words, every action you take should ideally have some impact on the larger vision of your life. Even if you don’t see it directly, it should become clear if you sit back and think about it in terms of these levels of work.

For me, thinking about my work in this way, particularly during my weekly review, helps me minimize the unnecessary work and maximize the valuable work. The time I spend thinking about each of these levels really helps me figure out what’s actually important in my life and what I can be doing with regards to that.

I’ll use an example to show how a simple action echoes through every level of my life, connecting my current action to my overall life goals.

One of my major overall life goals is to be a good father. To me, that means teaching my children how to have self-control and how to be self-reliant (five year visions). This involves teaching them things like how to go to the bathroom themselves, how to be patient and not cry when they want things, how to behave in an appropriate way around others, and so on (two year goals). I’m responsible for encouraging their good behavior in these areas and discouraging their bad behavior (areas of responsibility). One of my current projects is to teach my daughter to listen to instructions instead of just ignoring them when she’s doing something else (current project). When she doesn’t listen, I focus on getting her attention and if she refuses, I penalize her in some simple fashion, such as putting her in the “time out” chair, getting down at her eye level, and talking to her seriously about it (current action).

So, my immediate action leads (slowly) to an improved ability to follow directions, which helps her grow as a socially functional young person. This is part of self-control and self-reliance, lessons which I view as an essential part of being a good father.

What I generally find is that the more direct the connection between my current action and a major life goal, the more powerful and genuinely important that action is. The above connection is very straightforward, but sometimes they’re not all that straightforward – or at least not all that impactful. This is how I often prioritize my tasks. Not by urgency – if something is urgent but unimportant, I’ll often blow it off – but by genuine importance to what’s central in my life.

This is all very much a thought exercise. However, it is this kind of thinking – hand in hand with a trusted system that records all of the stuff you need to do – that creates an efficient and very fulfilling life, both professionally and personally.

On Thursday, we’ll talk about applying these ideas to getting project planning under control.

This is the eighth entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

So far, we’ve talked about three of the five major steps for getting things done: collecting all of the stuff you need to do, processing that stuff down, and organizing by putting all of that stuff into appropriate places. But how do you keep all of this running? Review. It’s the key element to making sure all of this works, in my opinion.

Allen makes the case for a review right off the bat, on page 181:

The purpose of this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage in some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you’re doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. Reviewing the system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control.

Here’s the truth of the matter. Our lives are incredibly busy – I can say for certain that my life is absolutely crazy at times. This means that sometimes, no matter how good the system is, things fall through the cracks. If enough things fall through the cracks, then the system ceases to work at all, which is a shame because when the system is pumping on all cylinders, it’s incredible.

The solution to this is to review things regularly. I do two distinct types of reviews to keep my system running.

Daily Review
I usually do this type of review at the start of each day. In the evening (particularly if I find myself in my office for some reason or another – usually due to children who can’t sleep, since my office is next to their bedroom), I’ll sometimes redo some of these pieces as I choose.

I check my calendar for the day. What do I have going on today? The first thing I look at is my calendar – in fact, Google Calendar is the homepage of my web browser, so I can’t help but see it pretty quickly after starting my work day. I usually set some alarms on my computer as well so that I’m alerted to coming events throughout the day.

I check my calendar for the next week, too. This sometimes causes me to add some things to my inbox, like a note about an upcoming birthday or anniversary that I need to get a gift or a card for, or a trip that I need to prepare for.

I fully process my inbox. I go through all of the stuff sitting in my inbox and do something with each item, as described in the “process” section from last week.

I reprioritize my “next action” list and print off a copy. What am I going to do today? I usually categorize the list with four colors – things I try to do each day, things that need to be done soon, things that are truly important but aren’t vital to do today, and “other.” I usually do them in roughly that order. This is my checklist for the day, and I cross off the items as I do them. The next day, I edit my “next action” list by getting rid of all of the stuff I crossed off from yesterday (except for the “every day” things).

Weekly Review
Once a week, I do a more thorough review of my entire system, just to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks. I usually do this on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, depending on whether Sarah or I is on nap duty. Here’s what that entails.

I round up anything miscellaneous floating around and get it in my inbox. On page 185, Allen explains this clearly:

Pull out all miscellaneous scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and so on that have crept into the crevices of your desk, clothing, and accessories. Put it all into your inbox for processing.

I don’t process yet, though.

I brain dump. At the start of the “collect” part of GTD, a person should sit down and toss everything that’s in their mind out onto paper so that it can be dealt with appropriately. I essentially do this each week. I just sit down with a pad of paper and start jotting down the things that are on my mind whether they’re already in the system or not. Yes, a lot of it is redundant, but those things that are repeated are big clues as to the things I need to get done because those are the things bothering me. They’re interfering with my mind flow.

I process my inbox and note everything that’s repeated. I then go through all of the stuff in my inbox. If I find stuff that’s repeated, I mark it as “important” on my “next actions” document because if it keeps popping up like this, I need to take care of it.

I file everything that’s unfiled. During the week, if I pull out a file folder, I often don’t file it again. I just toss it in a wire basket on top of my filing cabinet. At the end of the week, I put it all back so I can easily find it all again. If I don’t do this, the filing system begins to fall apart.

I take a look at each ongoing project and figure out what the next action is. As I mentioned earlier, I keep a folder for each major ongoing project I have in my life. During my weekly review, I go through each of these and figure out what the next action is to carry that project forward. A project can be anything from writing a novel to reorganizing the garage and closets.

I review my “next actions” list and set some priorities for the coming week. Mostly, this just involves upgrading the urgency of things already on my “next actions” list. Yes, I don’t necessarily empty out my “next actions” list in a given week. In fact, I can’t actually recall the last time it was completely empty.

I think about how everything I’m doing fits into my larger lifelong goals. I mostly just spend time thinking about where my life is going, what things that I wanted to do “someday” (things often saved on a list, actually) might actually be coming into focus, whether or not the things I’m doing right now are in line with what I want to be doing in my life, and so on.

Allen riffs on this at the end of the chapter, on pages 189 and 190:

What are your key goals and objectives in your work? What should you have in place a year or three years from now? How is your career going? Is this the life-style that is most fulfilling to you? Are you doing what you really want or need to do, from a deeper and longer-term perspective?

[..] As you increase the speed and agility with which you clear the “runway” and “10,000 feet” levels of your life and work, be sure to revisit the other levels you’re engaged in, now and then, to maintain a truly clear head.

How often you ought to challenge yourself with that type of wide-ranging review is something only you can know. The principle I must affirm at this juncture is this:

You need to assess your life and work at the appropriate horizons, amking the appropriate decisons, at the appropriated intervals, in order to really come clean.

Which brings us to the ultimate point and challenge of all of the personal collectiong, processing, organizing, and reviewing methodology: It’s 9:22 AM Wednesday morning – what do you do?

This, in my opinion, is the key point of this book. The whole reason for having a system like this is to make you more efficient at the little things you have to do (by keeping your mind clear of clutter) and keep it all organized in such a way that you can step back and seriously think about the big picture. It’s impossible to do this if your life is constantly chaotic with you running around putting out fires all the time and collapsing in a heap of exhaustion.

For me, the best way to do this is to focus on one area of my life each week. I do this by breaking my life down to a number of roles. What roles do I play? I am a writer. I am a friend. I am a father. I am a husband. I am a son. I am a gamer. I am a reader. I am a homeowner.

I have long term goals and short term goals in each of those areas. How do I want to fill that role? Each week, I focus for a while on one of those roles and just reflect on where I want to be in the future and what I can do now to move in that direction.

I look for some key actions for the following week that are in line with those big goals. I usually add several things to the least important section of the “next actions” list from the role I focused on, along with one or two more urgent things. For example, if I have the “I am a son” role in mind, I put things like “talk to my parents about their will” and “give my mom a long phone call” as a more important task for the coming week and “think of a great anniversary gift for them” and “plan ahead for a weekend vacation with them late this summer” as lesser things to do.

Next time, we’ll go through the final piece of the puzzle: doing stuff. How do you prioritize all of that stuff that’s on your “next action” list? How do you keep that in balance with your calendar? We’ll dig into that on Tuesday!

This is the seventh entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

So far, we’ve talked about two of the five major steps for getting things done: collecting all of the stuff you need to do and processing that stuff down. Today, the focus is on organizing – or where the stuff goes when you’re processing it.

Allen suggests that there are seven specific destinations for stuff when we’re processing it. Although this looks complicated, all you really need for this is a trash can, some folders, and some paper.

Trash
This is pretty straightforward. The stuff you don’t intend to keep goes in the trash can. The notes you’ve written to yourself and then processed go straight in the trash can. Envelopes? Trash can. You’d be surprised how large of a portion of your inbox goes straight into the trash can when you’re processing it.

Maybe/Someday
“Maybe/Someday” refers to a collection of lists. I keep all of these in a single folder on my computer so I can easily find them.

What do I mean by this? I have a list of books I’d like to read someday. I have a list of projects I’d like to take up in the future. I have a list of people I regularly buy Christmas gifts for. I have a list of movies I’d like to view someday.

Each of these lists is just that – a computer document listing all of the items that fall under that specific category. If you prefer, of course, you can use pen and paper and a series of folders.

Whenever I have an item in my inbox that refers to a book to read or a movie to watch or a big project I’m thinking about, I add these to those lists – and I usually date them. Then, during my weekly reviews (I’ll talk about this more in the next entry in this series), I pull out these lists and look them over. I usually study the most recent entries more specifically so I can decide whether I should do something with those items right now, like request them from the library. I sometimes add notes to the items on the list, too.

Reference
Reference materials refers to things that I’m going to want to keep, like tax statements or car titles or other things like that. If I think there’s a solid chance I’m going to want to refer to such an item in the future – or if there’s a slim chance but that slim chance absolutely requires the document, I keep it.

For magazines (which we subscribe to in bulk), I’ll often just tear out the articles I want to keep over the long term and throw away the rest. I have a few file folders jammed with potential articles that I might talk about on The Simple Dollar in the future, for example, and I also have a fat folder full of recipes.

I really don’t worry too much about a filing system. I put things into folders under a name that makes sense to me and organize those folders A-Z and then 0-9. I can always find what I want pretty quickly in that scheme, with only a guess or two needed to find anything at all.

Projects and Project Support Material
Some of the things I work on are ongoing “projects” – meaning big tasks that break down into lots of pieces. For each of these “projects,” I keep a folder in a separate part of my filing cabinet. I actually have a single drawer for “projects,” to tell the truth.

Again, I organize these by A-Z and 0-9 based on the title I decide on. This makes it easy to find them when I need them. I also keep a master “project list” just for my own reference – this makes things much easier when I do my review of projects.

What’s in each folder? Whenever I conceive of a new project, I usually brainstorm big time with a sheet or two of paper in front of me, then I come up with a rough outline of what needs to be done for the project (all of the steps from beginning to end, broken down into the smallest chunks I can), with lots of spaces between the items for additional steps and notes. I usually do the outline on my computer, save it, then print it out. The brainstorming and the outline are saved in the folder.

When I do my weekly “review,” I usually update each folder (if I haven’t already during the week) and then add the next step for each project to my “next actions” list (which I’ll talk about in a bit).

“Waiting”
There are obviously some things that require “waiting” for some unspecified time for someone else to come through for you. For example, if I’m working on a collaborative project with another writer and I send her a draft, I don’t know for sure when I’ll get a response from her.

For most of these things, I just wait for the response, but some of these things do require me to hold onto things. I just keep a “waiting” folder in amongst my projects to handle any such things.

Calendar
If something needs to be done on a specific date and/or time, I add it to my calendar. My calendar is the first thing I look at each day – I maintain it with Google Calendar and it is, in fact, my browser home page.

What should go on a calendar? Allen specifies on page 142:

[There] are two basic kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get ot them, around your other calendared items. Calendared action items can be either time-specific (e.g., “4:00-5:00 meet with Jim”) or day-specific (“Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she got the proposal.”)

In other words, all time-specific actions should go on your calendar. Allen goes on to discuss some things that shouldn’t be on your calendar, on page 143:

What many people want to do, however, based on old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that then actually might not, and that might then have to be taken over to following days. Resist this impulse. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be niticeable at a glance while you’re on the run.

Here’s a great example. I want to practice piano every single day, but there might be days where I’m simply not able to get around to it. Should I write the piano practice on my calendar every day? No. It should be on my “next actions” list for me to prioritize as I wish. The same is true if I want to clean the house on a given day or something like that – if I can miss it without causing devastation, it shouldn’t be on the calendar. Only the things at specific times that I can’t miss should be on the calendar.

“Next Actions”
What’s left after all of that? Surprisingly, all that’s left is the specific stuff you need to do that takes longer than two minutes (remember, you do all of the two-minutes-or-less tasks when processing it all).

For me, the “next actions” takes the form of a long list. Whenever I’m buckling down to get stuff done, whether it’s professional work or otherwise, I look through the list, pick out something, and just do it.

This is the point when the system really shines. All of the stuff above seems like a lot of overhead, but you make up for all of it and much, much more when you’re actually pushing through your pile of “next actions.” Why? Everything you need to do is right there in front of you. The only thing that matters is your next appointment, and you can set an alarm for that. Until then, the only thing on your mind is your current action. You don’t need to remember anything. If something floats into your mind, just jot it down and move on with your task.

This freedom of mind enables you to get into “the zone” (or flow state or whatever you like to call it) very easily. It turns out – and this is the big advantage of GTD – that the biggest thing that keeps people from getting into that flow state is the number of things they’re trying to keep in their head while working. If you can write it all down and have a trusted system in place where you can just toss that idea – whatever it is – and know it’s handled, then you don’t have to waste so many brain cycles keeping track of all of it.

When the system is running well for me, I can get into “the flow” for a long time every day. Without it, I would never be able to create this much material for The Simple Dollar plus all of the responsibilities of having three young children plus ongoing attempts at other endeavors. It just wouldn’t happen.

What about prioritizing? Obviously, some things on the list have a higher priority than others. The way I handle it is pretty simple. I just keep my list in a document on my computer and print it off occasionally. Before I start in with a work session (where I intend to knock several items off the list), I make an effort to roughly prioritize the list. I move the ones that I’d most like to get done up to the top so that they’re found first. That doesn’t mean I won’t change things up as I’m going along, of course; it just gives me some help as I go.

Next time, we’ll go through the fourth piece of the puzzle: a weekly review. I actually find that a weekly review (and patch-up) is perhaps the most essential part of this entire system. Without it, it would eventually fall apart.