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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Last time, we focused on going through your mind, your home, and your workspace to collect together all of the loose ends and undone things in your life. Getting these things into one central location makes it possible to direct all of your energy and mental focus on dealing with these things directly instead of having to keep them in your mind.

What do you do after collecting all of those things, though? Quite often, the reason all of these loose ends were out there is because you didn’t have any sort of process for dealing with them. The “process” part of Getting Things Done deals with that very problem. On page 119:

When you’ve finished processing “in,” you will have:

1 | trashed what you don’t need;
2 | completed any less-than-two-minute actions;
3 | handed off to others anything that can be delegated;
4 | sorted into your own organizing system reminders of actions that require more than two minutes;
5 | identified any larger commitments (projects) you now have, based on the input.

What you basically do is this: you go through each item in your inbox and ask yourself a series of questions about it.

Let’s walk through each of these steps.

Does This Item Require An Action From Me?
An awful lot of stuff that will be in your inbox doesn’t require any action from you, now or later on. Some of it will be outright junk. Other things just need to be filed away. Some of it might be stuff that you’ll do someday, but it’s just a vague idea you want to sock away (like the name of a book you might want to read someday). A few of the items might be things that you want to examine at a specific point in the future, like an agenda for a meeting that’s happening in a week and a half, for example. But none of this requires any action from you – you just have to deal with it.

Here’s what I do.

I chuck a lot of it straight into the trash. I usually leaf through magazines, tear out what I might reference in the future, and chuck the rest. I chuck tons of junk mail. I chuck some statements. I chuck ideas that once seemed good but now seem pretty poor on reflection. All of it goes right in the trash, no questions asked.

I keep some lists of “future stuff.” For me, the big one is a list of books to read someday which I keep on my computer. Sometimes, when I have a spare hour or so, I’ll go through that list, edit it, and reserve some of those books at the library. But when I’m processing, they just go on the list. I’ll add movies I’d like to see to my Netflix queue. I also keep a big list of “someday” ideas – things I might come back to down the road – which I also keep on my computer. During my weekly review sessions, I’ll look at that “someday” list and, every once in a while, something will just “click” and I’ll pull it off of the list to actually engage in.

I file a lot of the documents. When I’m processing, I just toss stuff to be filed for later (like statements and so on) into a wire basket that sits on top of the filing cabinet. Then, when I’m all done, I file what’s in that basket.

I put some items in a tickler file. A tickler file is basically just a file with a date on it – the date at which I’ll need to look at that item again. I check such files during my weekly review and pull out any ones that are due to come up in the next week. This isn’t the place to put items for the calendar – in fact, most items in the tickler file are things that are associated with specific events I place on my calendar. Quite often, when I put something in the “tickler,” I also write a note to myself to add something to my calendar and toss that note in my inbox.

At the same time, I ask myself another question about each item…

Could I Do This in Two Minutes or Less?
Many of the items in my inbox are very quick things, like calling someone up or sending an email to someone or taking food out of the freezer for supper. If I see a task in front of me that I can do in just two minutes, I do it immediately. This often takes care of many of the items in my inbox.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about whether it’ll take two minutes or not – I just trust my gut instinct and run with it. If it takes five minutes instead of the two I’m expecting it to take, then it’s not the end of the world.

Can I Delegate It or Defer It?
Is there someone else that could be (or should be) working on this item I have in my hand? Sometimes – like when I’m going through some of the mail that’s found its way into my inbox, I find stuff that Sarah should look at. I sometimes find work-related tasks that need to be passed on to others. Maybe I just need to send out invites for a party (and the invites are sitting there in my inbox). In any case, doing that gets it out of my inbox and on to the appropriate person.

Similarly, I ask myself if this is something that can (or should) be done later, preferably at a specific date. Appointment notes are key examples of this, as I’ll often write down appointments in my pocket notebook and just toss the page in my inbox. Specific documents that are needed at a specific date are usually tied to an appointment and I put them in a folder for that week that goes in my filing cabinet – and I mention that document in my calendar.

Yes, a calendar is key. Anything that’s happening on a future date is recorded in my calendar and saved in one specific place. We’ll get to the specifics of that later on.

What’s Left?
What’s left at that point are longer tasks and projects, which should be a much smaller pile of things to do. I handle these separately by keeping a “next actions” list (one item on the list equates to one undealt-with item from the inbox) and a series of “project” folders in my filing cabinet, with the project folders coming together as described in the earlier piece about project planning.

In effect, this is the process I go through once a day with the stuff that I’ve collected in the inbox on my desk during that day. Of course, when you’re doing all of this for the first time, there’s going to be a giant mountain of stuff and processing all of it will take hours.

The Biggest Key Thing…
… is that nothing goes back into your inbox. Allen spells it out on page 124:

There’s a one-way path out of “in.” This is actually what was meant by the old admonition to “handle things once” [...] Where the advice does hold is in eliminating the bad habit of continually picking things up out of “in,” not deciding what the mean or what you’re going to do about them, and then just leaving them there. A better admonition would be, “The first time you pick something up from your in-basked, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in ‘in.’”

Yes, sometimes it can be important to do an emergency scan of your inbox, but that’s because you’re looking for a specific item or you’re trying to fill a tiny sliver of time. Once a day (at least), you should sit down and process through that inbox, and when you do that, you should not put anything back into your inbox once you pull it out and start to look at it. Deal with it now, even if it’s tempting to move on to something else.

So, in the end, we have two steps out of our five key steps for managing all of the things you have to do in your life.

Collect, which simply means keeping all of the stuff you need to do in one place and (more importantly) keeping it out of your head so you can focus fully on the task at hand.
Process, which means taking all of that stuff you collected and determining what needs to be done with each item, including doing the short ones.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter seven, which focuses on the “organize” portion of this system, where we talk a bit more in depth about the various places you put stuff when you’re processing.

Last time, we discussed what exactly you need to have in place to get yourself organized (time, a bit of space, and a few supplies). What’s the first step in that organization process? Collecting. In other words, now is the time to corral all of that stuff you’ve got floating around in your mind and in various places.

What exactly does that mean? To put it simply, you’re just going to spend time gathering all of the stuff you need to do and haven’t yet completed into one place. A lot of it is going to be in your head, but you’re going to want to get it out of there. Other things will be spread throughout your house. Quite a few will probably be on your computer. Some may be in your car. Some may be at work.

It takes longer than you think. Allen, on page 104, estimates a few hours:

When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did take all of twenty hours with one person (finally I told him, “You get the idea”).

Most people expect that the process will take just a few minutes, but it doesn’t work like that, not if you’re thorough. The first time I thoroughly did this (sometime in 2005), it took me about four hours to put everything down.

Every once in a while, I do the whole thing again, just to make sure nothing I need to be addressing has fallen through the cracks. It still takes me about two hours to collect everything.

Now, it’s important to note that I’m collecting stuff for both my personal life and my professional life. I work from home, so the line between the two in terms of my “to-do” lists is often incredibly blurry. Many days, I practically alternate between “work” tasks and “personal” tasks. Plus, with the type of work that I do (it amounts to being a freelance writer when you bundle everything together, I suppose), there are always lots of little things I need to be remembering, so my collection time for professional stuff might be longer than it is for others.

Still, even if you’re unemployed, the collection process should take a good hour, minimum.

Another important part of this equation is that all you should be focused on is collecting stuff, not actually doing stuff. It can be really tempting when you’re collecting together all of the stuff to actually do many of the simple tasks, but that’s actually counterproductive because you never actually end up collecting all of the stuff you need to collect. Allen explains on page 105:

There are very practical reasons to gather everything before you start processing it:

1 | it’s helpful to have a sense of the volume of stuff you have to deal with;
2 | it lets you know where the “end of the tunnel” is; and
3 | when you’re processing and organizing, you don’t want to be distracted psychologically by an amorphos mass of stuff that might still be “somewhere.” Once you have all of the things that require your attention gathered in one place, you’ll automatically be operating from a state of enhanced focus and control.

The interesting part about this really is the sense of control and freedom you get when everything is collected in one place… but I’ll get to that again in a minute.

So How Do You Actually Do It?
Rather than go into great detail about how Allen explains it, I think it works best if I explained exactly how I’ve done it in the past that worked well for me.

First, I just sat down with a big, thick notebook in front of me and started thinking of all of the stuff left undone in my life. Each item took up a full page in that notebook, giving me plenty of room to jot down any notes about it that I need to remember.

As I wrote down a task, I literally tore the sheet out of the notebook and tossed it in the inbox on my desk.

What did I think about? Allen offers a list of things to think about several pages long, starting on page 114 of the book. Here’s a sampling from the “personal” part of the list:

Projects started, not completed
Projects that need to be started
Commitments/promises to others:
- Spouse
- Children
- Family
- Friends
- Professionals
- Borrowed items
Projects: other organizations
- Civic
- Service
- Volunteer
Communications to make/get
- Family
- Friends
- Professional
- Initiate or respond to:
=== Phone calls
=== Letters
=== Calls
Upcoming events [...]

This giant list goes on for several pages. I simply spent a moment thinking about each item and jotting down everything that came into my mind related to it. I didn’t worry about duplicating items, either, because I can deal with duplications later on when I process the pile. My goal is to collect everything, not to worry about organization.

After that was done, I toured my house, visiting every single room in it. I looked into cabinets and closets and dresser drawers. Whenever I saw something that needed to be done, I jotted it down in that notebook (one item per page), and when I returned to my office, I tore out all of those pages and tossed them in my inbox. In some cases, I actually picked up the physical item, like mail and magazines and such.

Key places to look include your email inbox (print off all emails that require some action), desk drawers, countertops, closets, the inside of any and all cabinets, the little drawers in your end tables, the top of your refrigerator, the back of the laundry room, and so on. Every place where you’ve hidden away stuff because you were unsure how to deal with it is a key place to look. And if you’re like virtually everyone else in America, you’ll find a lot of stuff you haven’t dealt with.

The first time I did this, I had almost 1,000 things in my inbox. I’m not kidding in the least – it was an amazing pile of stuff. And here’s the thing – you probably will, too.

In fact, one common problem is that you completely overwhelm whatever you have set up as an “in” basket. Allen is there for the save, on page 108:

If you’re like 98 percent of my clients, your initial gathering activity will collect much more than can comfortably be stacked in an in-basket. If that’s the case, just create stacks around the in-basket, and maybe even on the floor underneath it. Ultimately you’ll be emptying the in-stacks, as you process and organize everything. In the meantime,though, make sure that there’s some obvious visual distinction between the stacks that are “in” and everything else.

I certainly had several stacks. At the time, we still lived in the old tiny apartment, so the stacks took up much of the kitchen table for a day.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you see that kind of accumulation. I was a bit overwhelmed at first, but what I found was that when I realized that everything I needed to take care of in my entire life was in those piles and I didn’t have to think about them at all any more, it became much, much, much easier to deal with all of it. I didn’t have to have items stuck in my head to remember them any more and for the first time in a very long time, my mind wasn’t crowded with lists of things left undone. That filled me with a lot of physical and mental energy as I began charging through the big pile of stuff, processing all of it.

What usually scares people about the pile is that they’re not sure what they’re actually going to do with all of that stuff. “Where will all of this stuff go?” they’ll ask themselves. Allen riffs on this on page 118:

When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to take the next step. You don’t want to leave anything in “in” for an indefinite period of time, because then it would without fail creep back into your psyche again, since your mind would know you weren’t dealing with it. Of course, one of the main factors in people’s resistance to collecting stuff into “in” is the lack of a good processing and organizing methodology to handle it.

And that’s exactly what will happen next – building a good organizing and processing methodology to handle all of that stuff in your inbox.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter six, which focuses on the “process” portion of this system.

Last time, we discussed how exactly to plan a project and fit it into the context of focusing entirely on the next specific action. Prior to that, we discussed the five stages of a task and information management workflow (collect, process, organize, review, do).

But how does all of this work in a coherent system? This chapter – and the five that follow – break it all down into incredibly simple steps. Along the way, I’ll show you (often visually) how exactly I implement all of this stuff.

Right off the bat, though, Allen makes the point that implementing such a system is a lot about “tricks.” On page 85:

If you’re not sure you’re committed to an all-out implementation of these methods, let me assure you that a lot of the value people get from this material is good “tricks.” Sometimes just one good trick can make it worthwhile to range through this information.

If it all sounds too overwhelming, just focus on picking out the specific bits that work for you.

I’ll say this from my own experience. Switching over to this system as a whole takes quite a bit of time, and it also takes some maintenance time as you go along. What I’ve found, though, is that the time it saves you every single day is tremendous.

Without this system, I would have never been able to launch The Simple Dollar. I just would have never had time for it. I wouldn’t have the time I have each day to spend with my family. I wouldn’t be able to juggle the fifty different activities I’m involved in and the fifty different interests I have. It just wouldn’t work – I wouldn’t have the time.

So, let’s walk through what you need to get started one step at a time.

Time
I’ll be blunt. If you want to set this up in your life, the best way to do it is to simply set aside a whole weekend – or two to three full weekdays – to do it. For many people, it’s tricky to find that kind of a block of time, but it’s really worth it. In Allen’s words (p. 87):

I recommend that you careate a block of time to initialize this process and prepare a workstation with the appropriate space, furniture, and tools. [...] An ideal time fram for most people is two whole days, back to back. (Don’t be put off by that if you don’t have that long to spend, though: doing any of the activities I suggest will be useful, no matter how much or how little time you devote to them. [...]).

For me, the time invested wasn’t spent just getting a “system” set up, it was getting a bunch of the mental backlog of things I had to do done so that the system wouldn’t immediately fall apart. I wound up spending maybe half a day getting the system itself ready, then the next day and a half mostly tackling tasks that had just built up over time: going through my accumulated papers and tossing the trash and filing the stuff that needed to be kept, taking care of lots of miscellaneous tasks in my life, coming up with plans for some of the big projects in my mind, and so on.

The reason for this will be addressed in more detail in the next article, but one big portion of “starting up” is simply doing a brain dump. You just write down everything that’s on your mind – all of the stuff you’re thinking about doing – and then you process that big list of stuff. For many of those items, that simply means doing it.

So, in the end, a weekend spent getting GTD set up is a weekend getting a lot of the stuff built up over time finished.

Space
You have to have a bit of room to get started, too. You’ll need just a bit of space, but it’s space that you should devote to this. A small table with room to write and space for a basket will suffice. From page 89:

A functional work space is critical. If you don’t already have a dedicated work space and in-basket, get them now. That goes for students, homemakers, and retirees, too. Everyone must have a physical locus of control from which to deal with everything else.

If you have a desk at home that catches the mail, that’s a perfect place for this. Most of us have such a place in our home – a little corner table that serves as a desk or something like that. Often, it has a computer on it. All you need space for is a place to write and an inbox.

Stuff
Allen suggests a long (unnecessarily long, in my opinion) list of supplies you’ll need to pull off his full system. From page 92:

Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch. In addition to a desktop work space, you’ll need:
= Paper-holding trays (at least three)
= A stack of plain letter-size paper
= A pen/pencil
= Post-its
= Paper clips
= Binder clips
= A stapler and staples
= Scotch tape
= Rubber bands
= An automatic labeler
= File folders
= A calendar
= Wastebasket/recycling bin

That seems like quite a list – until you realize that most people already have at least some of this stuff lying around their home. Even better, you can often find a lot of this stuff on sale at various places if you look around – and, to tell the truth, you don’t really need at least some of it.

Here’s a walkthrough of the stuff on this list I actually use.

Paper-holding trays I actually have three of these, two of which you can see in the picture above. One is an “inbox,” one is a “stuff I’m currently working on” holder, and one is a “stuff to be filed” tray.

A stack of plain letter-size paper On the rare occasions I need a full sheet of paper, I steal it from the printer (which you can also see above). Usually, I just use some Mead Cambridge pocket notebooks, a stack of which you can see in that picture. These each have 70 sheets and I buy them in groups of twelve for $5 at Sam’s Club. I like these because they fit easily in my pocket along with a pen, so I can take it everywhere.

A pen/pencil Just something to write with. Anything works. I really love my space pen, but it’s pretty expensive for a pen that you just carry around in your pocket all day (and plus, I’m prone to losing them). I usually just keep one or two cheap ones in my pocket and a few more in a pen holder in my desk.

Post-its I usually get the 4×4 lined ones that you can see on my desk there, at Sam’s Club in bulk. At first, I didn’t really find these useful, but I find myself often sticking them to documents and other things as a reminder of what I intended to do with them.

Paper clips Again, I didn’t think I’d use these – and you might not ever need them – but I do find myself using them to keep small piles of loose paper together at times.

Binder clips Never bought them. Never used them. Don’t waste your money.

A stapler and staples I have been picky about my staples for a very long time. Currently, we have a Swingline high capacity stapler (this one) that we’ve used for years. Again, I don’t use one that often, but when I do (for taxes, for one example), it’s incredibly handy.

Scotch tape We have some in the kitchen for wrapping gifts. Never used it for anything organization related, though.

Rubber bands Nope.

An automatic labeler My technical term for such a device is a “pen.” Sometimes, I upgrade this with “masking tape.”

File folders I do have quite a few of these – again, bought in bulk and used regularly. In fact, we have a home filing cabinet which resides in the closet in my home office (which is a converted bedroom).

A calendar I abandoned using a paper one a few years ago. Instead, I now use Google Calendar and I keep an electronic copy of it on my iPod Touch for offline use. Even if I didn’t have a “portable” version of the calendar, I’d still use an electronic one and just print off any pages I needed to have with me on the road.

Wastebasket Of course!

Filing
One big part of this system is getting the stuff you want to keep but don’t need out of the way, but in a place where you can easily find it if you need it. In other words, get a filing system. From page 96:

A simple and highly functional personal reference system is critical to this process. The filing system at hand is the first thing I assess before beginning the workflow process in anyone’s office. As I noted in chapter 2, the lack of a good general-reference system can be one of the greatest obstacles to implementing a personal management system.

What does that mean? It simply means that when you have something you want to keep and look at later, it should go into some sort of system where it’s out of your way, but you can easily find it when you look for it.

I just use a simple A-Z filing system for everything. I just name folders with the most logical name I can think of at the time – Joe – Artwork is one, for example, that contains a few highlights of my son’s artistic output. That way, it’s out of the way, but I can retrieve it later on if I need it. Everything is simply A to Z based on the name at the top of the folder.

I try to keep all of the shelves in my filing cabinet balanced (except for the top shelf, which I handle differently – but I’ll talk about that later on). Right now, all of the files I have fit on two of the shelves – A to M and N to Z. If the shelves start to get out of balance, I move a letter to the other drawer to keep them in balance. If either one starts to get full, I’ll just annex another drawer (which is empty right now and, honestly, is my spot for hiding gifts).

Whenever an item comes in that I need to save, I file it away. If I don’t need to save it, I chuck it. If I need to retrieve it, I pull out the file, look it over, do whatever I need to do with it, and toss it back into my “to be filed” basket when I’m done.

I also keep plenty of fresh folders nearby so that I never feel bad about starting a new one. If I need a new folder, I usually know it right off the bat and it’s pretty poorly effective if I’m trying to hedge my bets over a simple folder.

One final note: the best time to do this is over a holiday weekend where you won’t be interrupted anyway. A holiday like the daytime portion of the Fourth of July is a great time to do this.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter five, which focuses on the “collect” portion of this system.

Last time, we looked at the five stages of a healthy task and information management workflow (collect, process, organize, review, do). Of course, one of the big revelations is that while this works really well for short, individual, discrete tasks, it doesn’t immediately seem to work all that well for larger multi-step tasks, i.e. projects.

Without these larger tasks, the whole system is easy. Toss stuff in your inbox, go through them regularly, take care of them, done. The challenge comes about when you have something that can’t simply be done in a session or two – particularly things that require feedback and input from others. How do you handle these?

The key, of course, is to break down these larger projects into bite-sized pieces that you can take action on right away. In order to do this effectively, Allen argues (on page 56) that we need five elements, which we often already use in a very informal way:

You’re already familiar with the most brilliant and creative planner in the world: your brain. You yourself are actually a planning machine. You’re planning when you get dressed, eat lunch, go to the store, or simply talk. Although the process may seem somewhat random, a quite complex series of steps in fact has to occur before your brain can make anything happen physically. Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task:

1 | Defining purpose and principles
2 | Outcome visioning
3 | Brainstorming
4 | Organizing
5 | Identifying next actions

A great way to demonstrate this process is to look at how I think about preparing supper.

First, I decide on my purpose and principles. My family needs supper. I have about three hours between now and suppertime.

Next, I imagine the outcome. I want to cook something fairly healthy but also tasty.

Then, I brainstorm. What meals might fit that bill? A taco salad. A vegetarian pizza.

After that, I organize. I look in the refrigerator and the cupboards to identify what ingredients we have on hand, which quickly narrows down the brainstorming. I eventually settle on vegetarian pizza – I’m going to make vegetarian pizza for supper. What steps go into that? First, I make the dough. I then bake the crust, put toppings on it, and bake the pizza.

Finally, I proceed to the next action: I make the dough. Making pizza dough is a simple enough standalone action that it would be just fine in my inbox.

Here’s the thing: for simple things like dinner, most of us just shoot through this process without even thinking about it. It’s incredibly automatic for simple tasks like dinner.

Where people get stymied is when they have to apply the same process to a much bigger project.

Here’s an example of that. I had a great idea for a huge ebook project a while back. The thing is, every time I would think about it, I would get almost overwhelmed at the sheer size of the project. What’s the general concept of it? What are the specific things that would go into it? How would it be designed and laid out? Where would all of the content come from? How would I distribute or sell it? Every time I sat down and looked at this idea, I was stymied.

Another, more personal example would be our shed installation project. We have a perfect spot in our backyard for a shed – and having such a place would be very helpful, as it’d be a great spot to store a lot of the larger equipment that eats up space in our garage. How would I build it? Should I build it myself or hire someone to do it? What options are out there? Do we want a small one or a bigger one? How will it affect property values? Again, I’m stymied without some sort of process to work through this stuff.

That is, until I spent some serious time applying those natural five steps to these ideas.

Purpose and Principles
The purpose part of the equation is easy. Why are you doing this? Asking yourself why has a lot of benefits (p. 63):

It defines success.
It creates decision-making criteria.
It aligns resources.
It motivates.
It clarifies focus.
It expands options.

In other words, it helps you to figure out exactly what you want to do. A clear goal, then, makes it easier to plan everything it takes to get there.

So, with my ebook project: I’m doing it because I think there’s a great deal of value in the idea. I also would like to eventually reach a point where I’m financially independent from advertisements for income on The Simple Dollar, and a really high-quality ebook would be one way to open that channel.

What about the shed? My reason for doing that is to increase the property value of our home as well as provide a place to store tools and equipment (like our snowblower, for example).

The other half of the equation is the principles of the matter. In other words (p. 66):

A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: “I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they…”

With the ebook project, my biggest “as long as” would be that the quality of the material produced remains high. With the shed, my biggest “as long as” would be that the cost is kept under control. Of course, each one has a few more minor “as long as” statements attached to them, which is useful to think about and know before continuing.

Outcome visioning
From there, you can start adding some attributes to the project that specifies exactly what you want in the end. From page 67:

In order most productively to access the conscious and unconscious resources available to you, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like. [...] This is the “what?” instead of the “why?”

In other words, you’re focused entirely on what the end product will look like, not what steps are required to get there.

So, for my ebook project, my end product would be a beautifully designed document that includes a lot of valuable content based around the central theme. It’d be available at a special site created just for it that provides extensive previewing of the content included in the document.

For the shed, the end result is simple: a shed in the yard. How big? 10′ by 15′, according to my measurements and some additional thought. I’m already sure of the location, but I also know I’d rather build it well rather than cheaply so that it stands for a very long time without leaks or maintenance.

Brainstorming
Here’s where the meat of the business can be found. On page 70:

Once you know what you want to have happen, and why, the “how” mechanism is brought into play. When you identify with some picture in your head that is different than your current reality, you automatically start filling in the gaps, or brainstorming.

In other words, once you know your goal clearly, you start assembling the steps to get there. Obviously, a full-fledged plan isn’t going to pop right out. Instead, you have to sit down and start breaking down the process.

There are a lot of ways to do this. Many people use a “mind map,” in which they just write down ideas as they come into their head and connect those ideas together with lines and sometimes additional notes. I tend to write my ideas down in a double-spaced list, just dumping them out as fast as I can, and I connect any related ideas together with a thick line.

The best part about brainstorming is that it’s easy to utilize other people since you’re just gathering ideas. This is the stage where you look for advice from your social network, from websites, and so on.

Also, don’t waste your energy judging the relative merits of your ideas right now. Just focus on accumulating ideas and potential steps for how to move from where you’re at now to your goal.

Organizing
Once you’re satisfied with your collection of ideas, the next step is transforming that mess into some form of organized plan. On page 75, Allen suggests a simple way for doing that:

The key steps here are
+ Identify the significant pieces.
+ Sort by (one or more):
+ components
+ sequences
+ priorities
+ Detail to the required degree

You have this big collection of ideas from your brainstorming session. The first thing to do is to simply go through them and pull out the significant ones. You’re looking for the essential pieces that will take you from here or there. Don’t worry about lots of specifics yet – you just want a good framework to build on. Also, don’t worry about order yet.

Once you have the key pieces, you’re going to order them. Often, some steps rely on earlier steps to be accomplished, so they should be put into the obvious order. If two things can happen at the same time, you can make up your own mind which one has priority based on your own prerogatives. I like to list these in order with plenty of space between them.

Finally, add in details until the steps are comfortable for you. For me, “comfortable” means “small enough that they can be done in reasonable chunks, like an hour or two.” If a remaining piece is too big for me to accomplish in that short of a timeframe, I keep breaking it down into smaller details.

Next Actions
The final step is really to get started. Most projects have one or two (or several) pieces that you can get started on right away.

For example, with my ebook project, I can start gathering the written content, gathering the image content, and coming up with basic layout ideas in Adobe InDesign. With the shed project, I can gather lots of options and quotes for the assembly of the shed in preparation for a meeting with my wife to discuss exactly what we want to put up.

When I’ve got a project rolling, I usually have a few things I’ve added to my “next actions” pile. I’ve also started a folder that contains all of this material for the project, especially the list I made during the “organizing” part of setting up the project. This gives me something to look at each week during my “weekly review” so that I can keep tabs with the progress on that project.

The basic idea here – and how it fits into the previous chapter’s great workflow – is that whenever you’re faced with something too big to deal with in one swoop, you use this process to break it down. You start a folder for that project, keep that folder, and review it regularly to make sure you’re keeping up with the next actions.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter four, which focuses on how to get this entire system started in terms of the time, space, and tools needed.

A while back, I reviewed Robert Pagliarini’s The Six-Day Financial Makeover and concluded that there was some very good advice buried inside a lot of marketing gloss. The core of that advice was strong enough that I kept an eye out for future books by Mr. Pagliarini, and now The Other 8 Hours has come down the pike.

This time around, Pags has written an interesting personal productivity book that doesn’t focus on workplace productivity. Instead, it focuses on your free time. How can you channel the time each day when you’re not working and sleeping to create new wealth and purpose in life (ideally with some leisure time, too, so you don’t go insane)?

I’ll be honest, though: the idea really strikes a chord with me. After all, I launched The Simple Dollar and grew it for two years in my spare time. Does Pagliarini lay out a good game plan for that kind of application of one’s spare time? Let’s dig in.

1 | Life Begins at 5:00 PM
For most of us, the time outside of work is the important part of our life. It’s where we spend time with our families and loved ones and engage in activities that are enjoyable to us. We work so that we can enjoy these moments. Pagliarini’s central argument is that if you seek out enjoyable and personally fulfilling activities that also have a second benefit – building skills, producing income, building connections – then your other eight hours can go to productive use as well.

2 | The Living Dead and the Dead Broke
Why do this? What’s the motivation for seeking out a better way to spend our “other eight hours”? Frankly, people are working more, experiencing more stress, and have more financial problems than ever before. Adding personal growth to one’s spare time goes a long way towards solving all of those problems while still being quite fun.

3 | Getting the Other 8
The first (and biggest) problem is that many people feel that they barely have eight minutes to themselves in a given day, let alone eight hours. “How are you supposed to find the time to do anything like launch something like The Simple Dollar?” one reader once asked me.

The key is prioritizing. In order to have free time, you have to prioritize what you spend your time on and just chuck some of the lower priority stuff. You simply can’t fit it all in. And, yes, the things you do in your spare time do have different priorities. Some of them do need to remain in place while others can easily be chucked. This chapter walks through some basic time management tactics that mostly revolve around figuring out what fits and what doesn’t.

4 | Lifeleeches
From there, Pagliarini moves on to things that commonly “suck time” for people – television is an obvious one, but so are news, the internet, perfectionism, gossip, video games – even answering the phone. The more of these distractions you can eliminate from your life (or at least successfully cage into a limited time and space), the better off you are.

5 | Shift from Consumer to Cre8tor
“Cre8tor” is Pagliarini’s term for people who devote their extra “8″ hours – or at least some of that time – to creating things of value for others as opposed to just consuming. Even more challenging, you almost always win if you give it away. The Simple Dollar has 81,000 subscribers who get the content by email or RSS every day and just shy of a million visitors to the website each month. I got those by giving away almost everything I create.

6 | The Big List of FAQs
Obviously, ideas like this one almost always bring about lots of questions, so this chapter serves as a big FAQ (frequently asked questions) document. What do you do if you’re not creative, for example? Pagliarini’s solution is simple: partner with someone who is creative and put what skills you have to bear. So, for example, if you’ve got skills at marketing something someone else has created and you have a friend who makes stunningly good furniture in his woodshop, team up together so you can both make some cash.

7 | The Cre8tor Rules
Here, Pagliarini lays out several rules for being a “creator” (or “cre8tor”) in your spare time. Keep your day job. Focus on minimizing your effort to maximize results. Limit your risk. Take lots of swings – in other words, try lots of different things to see what works. Put effort into marketing what you create, simply so others are at least aware of it. Always have a plan for making money in the long run, even if you give things away for free.

8 | The Top 10 Cre8tor Channels
These are ten short “startup kits” for ten different types of businesses: blogging, invesnting, writing, starting a company, reselling things, taking advantage of fads, working for stock, freelancing, pure career advancement, or turning hobbies into income. Most of the things a person can invest their found free time into falls into one of these ten categories, but the specifics vary widely from person to person.

9 | Could’ve, Should’ve, Would’ve
Every day you sit idly by with an idea in the back of your head is a day you’ll regret later on. I’m thirty one and there are already big things that I passed on that I regret. I had a great opportunity to get some of my fiction published in 2003 and I missed the boat on it, mostly because of my own fears. That’s perhaps my greatest regret, but there are many others that litter the path to my life today. In fact, I’m only where I’m AT today because I kept chasing those side opportunities and, after a lot of failures, one of them worked (you’re reading it).

10 | Find Your Pulse
So, what makes you tick? What makes you jump out of bed in the morning and tackle things? If you can find what makes you passionate, then you’ve found a source of energy that you can channel into making your “other eight” more exciting and profitable. In short, it can be your engine for creating things, creating value, and putting money in your pocket. There are a lot of suggestions and ideas here for seeking out what you’re passionate about.

Is The Other 8 Hours Worth Reading?
The Other 8 Hours combines a lot of different elements into one package, drawing from career development, lifestyle design, and even a bit of time management. If you’re finding yourself struggling in your current career and can’t help but wonder what else there is out there, The Other 8 Hours is a great read.

I’d also say The Other 8 Hours is a much better read than Pagliarini’s first book, The Six-Day Financial Makeover, because he cut out the marketing-speak and actually focused on real topics, which is where his strengths lie.

Last time, we talked about why an effective time management system is useful and also the basic ideas behind what a successful one would be. Namely, a good time management system allows you to get the things that occupy your thoughts out of your head and into a trusted system, which frees your mind to focus on the task at hand, making you more efficient and more likely to produce excellence in whatever you’re doing.

Knowing this, though, presents a new problem. If you simply toss down whatever is in your mind onto paper, it quickly dissolves into a disorganized, unmanageable mess. Trust me, I’ve done it. For a while, I really got into jotting down everything that came into my mind and I made myself feel as though if it were out of mind, it was taken care of. Of course, what happened is that I wound up with a notebook full of scraps of ideas and things to do and other stuff that was simply unmanageable and not useful in any way. I wound up in worse shape than when I started because I had to devote so much energy to piecing through all of that nonsense.

There has to be a better way. And there is.

Allen proposes a system (starting in this chapter, then expanded upon in great detail later in the book) for dealing with all of those floating ideas, appointments, tasks, projects and other things floating in your head that sneak up and devour your focus. It’s really made up of five parts.

Collect
This is really the only portion of the process that’s an ongoing thing. To put it simply, to collect means to just jot down, in some fashion, any idea that you know you’re going to have to deal with later and put it somewhere where you can very easily find it later. In Allen’s words, from page 26:

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

What Allen is saying (in a bit of a wordy way) is that whenever you have an idea or encounter something that you think you’ll take any sort of action on in the future (including even just thinking about it), you need to grab it and put it in some physical place outside of your head. Call it your “inbox.”

Let me give you an example of what I mean, again from my own life.

I walk outside to get the mail. On the way, the girl from two doors down yells, “I need the money for the walkathon by Friday!” Uh-oh – that’s something I need to take care of. So I pull a pocket notebook and a pen out of my pocket and jot down a note: “Get Billie her walkathon money by Fri.” This note takes up a whole sheet in my pocket notebook, just like any other such note. I go get the mail and dig through it on my way into the house, where I throw away the junk mail and keep four things worth looking at. As I go upstairs, the very beginning of an idea for an article starts to form in my head, so as soon as I get upstairs, I open a computer program and start jotting down the idea in rough form. I then save it with an appropriate name (“Jun 4 Taxes Idea”), pull out my pocket notebook again, and write down “Jun 4 Taxes Idea on computer” on a new sheet of paper. I then tear out the two sheets I’ve written on and toss those sheets and the mail into a physical inbox on my desk.

So, in this process, I collected six items: the note about the walkathon, the note about the “tax idea,” and the four pieces of mail. They’re now all laying in one specific place – the inbox on my desk – to be dealt with later. I no longer have to actively think about any of them for the moment and can settle in to focus on whatever task is at hand.

Literally, whenever any idea at all pops into my head that I need to take care of, it gets jotted down on its own little piece of paper. Then, as soon as I have a chance, I toss all of the sheets of paper into my inbox on my desk. Usually, it’s just these notes. Sometimes, it’s physical items – pieces of mail, a book I need to read, a phone message, or something like that. I also sometimes use Evernote in this fashion to jot down things I need to do – it’s just an electronic form of my physical inbox on my desk.

The key thing is that all of this stuff is in one place. I’m not worried about organizing it yet, just making sure it’s out of my mind and in a single place so that I don’t have to worry about it and can focus on the task at hand instead of having stuff routinely popping up in my mind.

This is an ongoing process, of course. I jot down notes like this all the time and save them. You can use whatever form of “inbox” works best for you, whether it’s a physical one or an electronic one (or both).

Process
Of course, without further steps, that pile of notes, mail, and other materials would quickly explode into chaos. Once a day (or a few times a day), you have to go through this pile of “stuff” and do something with it.

Allen offers a very simple plan for dealing with each individual item in your inbox.

First, ask yourself “is this item actionable?” In other words, does it directly lead to some sort of action in the very near future on your part? If it doesn’t, it’s either trash (which means throw it away immediately), it’s for reference (which means file it immediately), or it’s something that needs to “incubate” (meaning it’s something that will tie heavily to action later on, which should be stored in their own special place called a “tickler” that we’ll deal with later). Examples of the last group would be agendas for meetings that will happen in a week or the scripture you’re supposed to read aloud in church next Sunday.

So, if it does require action, ask yourself if the action can be done in the next two minutes. If it can, do it immediately. I’m often amzed how many things just disappear from my inbox simply by doing them right away.

If they take longer than two minutes, you have some choices. You can delegate it – meaning you’re making sure that someone else is going to take care of it. You can defer it – meaning you set an appointment in your calendar to take care of it at some future date (this is what you do with an appointment notice, for example). Or you can simply do it, which means add it to your list of “next actions” to take – in other words, your immediate list of things you need to do.

Let’s continue the example above.

I’ve got six items in my inbox.
1. The first one is a note about writing a check to Billie for the walkathon. I need to take action on this. Billie’s out playing in the yard and I have my checkbook right here, so I know it’ll take less than two minutes, so I just do it now. I then toss the note.
2. The second one is the note about my post idea for taxes. I add that to my small pile of “next actions” – my actual real work for the next few hours.
3. The third item is a letter from the church reminding me that I’m supposed to serve as usher on a particular future Sunday. I immediately add it to my calendar and toss that note into the trash.
4. The next item is a magazine. I look through it and identify an article I ought to read – the rest looks like rubbish. So I just tear out that article I want to read, put it in my “next action” pile, and toss the rest of the magazine.
5. The next item is from our son’s science summer camp. I open it and read it, because it might be a bill, but instead it’s a welcome packet. I defer it to my son by simply placing it on his pillow in his bedroom.
6. The last item appeared to be a bill based on the envelope, but actually turned out to be trash, so I tossed it immediately.

My inbox is processed, so now I move onto actually doing my real work – and I’m able to focus in on it knowing that there’s nothing circulating around that’s unfinished.

Organize
That takes care of a lot of the obvious stuff, but what do you do about big projects – things that require a lot of actions to complete?

Allen’s suggestion, in the end, is to maintain a folder for each project that you have going on. So, whenever something happens related to a project, you can just open that folder, look at the situation of that project, determine your next action for that project, and add that action to your pile of stuff to do today.

Allen explains it on page 38:

You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it “done.”

I’ll give you some folder examples of my own projects.

Learning the piano My end goal for this is that I can sit down with a reasonable piece of sheet music (not high-end concert pieces, but ordinary stuff), look it over, sit down at a piano with it, and play it. That’s not just one action that anyone could take. So, I have a folder for this project. Once a week, I take an action step towards it – my piano lesson for the week. I also practice regularly throughout the week. In my folder, I keep things like a practice log and some sheet music that I intend to try out when my skill level is up to it.

Writing and publishing a novel My goal with this project is to publish a novel. The way to get there is murky, but I do recognize that writing fiction in order to improve my skill is an important part, as is generating ideas for a novel. So, in this folder, I mostly just collect ideas – plot ideas, character ideas, and so on.

Building a love of literature in my children I also want to encourage a love of literature in my children. In this folder, I keep an ongoing document that describes things to do to encourage a child to read, along with tons of literature recommendations for different age ranges and reading abilities so that I can always find great books for them as they grow.

These folders serve several purposes. They keep all the documents I need for a particular project all together in one place. The existence of the folder itself is a reminder to keep going with that project (see “Review,” below). They also help me to figure out what my “next action” is going to be – for example, if I flip through the “love of literature” folder and recognize Joe’s ready for something more advanced, I have the materials in hand to help me figure out the next step, like getting him a copy of Maniac McGee.

I also keep a someday/maybe list and a few “sub-lists.” What goes on these things? They’re full of ideas of things I’d like to do someday, but I don’t have time for now because I have too much going on. The “sub-lists” are things like “Books I want to read” and “Movies I want to see” and “Places I want to travel to.” They’re usually places to record whims that show up in my inbox.

Review
The three steps above really do help me take care of everything that passes through my inbox, but it’s easy to see that if I just left it at that, I’d fail to make progress on big projects and I might also allow other things to slip through the cracks, like “next actions” left undone.

The solution to that is to do a weekly review of everything – your inbox, your remaining next actions, all of your project folders, and so on. Allen sums it up well on page 46:

Everything that might potentially require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding. IN order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some elevated level. In my experience [...] that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review.

Once a week (I usually do it on a weekend day on whichever of the two days Sarah is on nap duty while the kids are napping), go through everything. Your inbox. Your remaining “next actions” that you haven’t finished up yet. Your project folders. Your calendar. All of it. See what you’ve been doing well and what’s been lagging.

This is the time to ask yourself big questions like whether or not you’re committed to actually following through with a volunteer project you agreed to or whether you’re putting enough effort into learning the piano or losing weight or getting your financial house straight. You can often judge this by the “next actions” left undone.

This really is the most critical part, because it’s the time you can ask yourself why you’re filling your time the way you are, why you’re doing some things and not others, and really dig into who you are and what your motivations are and what your real goals in life are. Everything else really comes from that, and reviewing it once a week can be pretty stark.

It is the single most important thing I do with regards to any of this. It’s a weekly gut check.

Do
In the end, you’re left with a pile of “next actions” to take – your actual, real work. For me, it’s a mix of professional stuff, personal stuff, big stuff, little stuff, urgent stuff, non-urgent stuff, important stuff, and not important stuff.

On page 49, Allen suggests a simple way of deciding which action to tackle first:

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

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

The first question is can I actually do this right now, given the location and the resources I have available? If you can’t, then you know that item is out.

Next, you ask yourself do I have time to do this right? If you don’t, put it aside. The worst thing you can do is shoehorn a two hour task into forty minutes and do it abysmally.

After that, ask yourself do I have the energy for this? So, for example, early in the day, I might have the mental energy for a big writing project, but later in the day, I don’t. Discard the stuff that you don’t have the energy for right now.

Finally, simply prioritize the rest. How do you do that? It really depends on your job and the demands on you. Some jobs are “urgent, urgent, urgent” and you have to constantly put out fires. Other jobs aren’t like that and you can put the “important but not urgent” tasks pretty high in the queue.

The amazing thing is that all of this just flows together almost seamlessly once you start doing it. It seems like there are a lot of parts to it, but in the end, once you start doing it, there’s really not much to it at all, especially once you’ve done it. The amount of time saved by not carrying ideas and appointments and things in your head is just tremendous and the ability to review everything you’re doing once a week is also incredibly empowering.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter three, covering the five stages of project planning. How do you take a large-scale project and incorporate it into this kind of mindset? Yep, we’ll be looking more closely at those “project folders.”

The first question a lot of people are going to ask is why am I writing a fourteen part series on a time management book on a personal finance website. Sure, there’s the obvious maxim that time is money, but what does that actually mean in people’s lives?

This book has changed my life radically over the past several years and has made my current life possible. The best way I can think of to explain how it has helped is to use my own life as an example, and so I’ll be doing that over and over again throughout this series.

Right now, I have three young kids at home that each require some time and focus and attention, as well as a wife and a marriage that need care and feeding. I have a writing career that involves having written two nonfiction books in the last two years (and working roughly on a third), writing short stories and polishing them for publication, and kicking around a novel. I also write two articles each day for The Simple Dollar, deal with the cavalcade of email and comments that produces, and manage advertisers and other demands related to that. In order to remain a good writer, I need to read quite a lot, too. I’m on multiple volunteer committees in the local community. My son is in a t-ball league, my son and daughter will soon be in a soccer league, and they’re both in a dance class. I share responsibility for maintaining the house with Sarah, with my part usually focusing on meal preparation (which I take pride in) and general cleanup. I have several friendships to maintain. Over the next three months, I have trips to Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Decorah (IA) planned. I also have a series of speaking engagements and book signings and other media appearances related to the book scheduled. I’m also learning the piano with weekly lessons and taking time to practice whenever I can.

Whew. How is all of that even possible? When I write it down, even I can scarcely believe that I pack it all in.

The thing is it’s not possible without a system of time management that actually works. If I didn’t have a good system in place, I simply wouldn’t be able to do all that stuff. Something would have to go, and it would hurt to remove any of it.

Allen sums this up pretty well on page four:

A paradox has emerged in this new millennium: people have enhanced quality of life, but at the same time they are adding to their stress levels by taking on more than they have resources to handle. It’s as though their eyes were bigger than their stomachs. And most people are to some degree frustrated and perplexed about how to improve the situation. [...] A major factor in the mounting stress level is that the actual nature of our jobs has changed much more dramatically and rapidly than have our training for and our ability to deal with work. In just the last half of the twentieth century, what constituted “work” in the industrialized world was transformed from assembly-line, make-it and move-it kinds of activity to what Peter Drucker has so aptly termed “knowledge work.”

Allen hits on two big factors here.

First, we tend to take on more than we can chew. Modern lives are so full of possibility that many people want to jam them full with as much as possible. We want a great job that pays well, but we also want the freedom to enjoy the rewards of all of that hard work. We feel personal responsibility towards causes, towards our family, and towards improving ourselves. Add that all together and you have days without much breathing room at all.

Another interesting factor is the blurred line between work and personal life. Many, many people are tethered to their jobs. Everyone who works at home, is self-employed, or runs a business can attest to this, as can anyone who carries a work cell phone with them everywhere they go and constantly receives calls about work-related issues. From a writer with a home office to a nurse constantly on call, we all have blurred lines between our work life and our personal life. We mix together work tasks and professional tasks constantly, like answering an urgent call during dinner with friends or picking up a birthday cake during our lunch break at work.

Allen argues that the most effective way to deal with all of this is to find ways to get the most done with minimal effort. He points to the idea of being “in the zone” – and reaching it as often as possible – as the key to success. On page 9:

There is a way to get a grip on it all, stay relaxed, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, across the whole spectrum of your life and work. You can experience what the martial artists call a “mind like water” and top athletes refer to as the “zone,” within the complex world in which you’re engaged.

My days are pretty much constantly filled with being “in the zone” or trying to find a way to get there.

What exactly does that mean? I can’t really say what it means for others, but I certainly can describe what it’s like for me.

When I’m in the zone, I usually lose all track of time. That’s a big reason why I maintain my schedule electronically so that when an event occurs, it alerts me in various ways (usually a loud beep) to interrupt me and get me to my appointment. I also somewhat lose track of the mechanics of what I’m actually doing. So, for example, when I’m writing, I will lose all track of the fact that I’m sitting at a computer and typing. I get lost completely in the words and don’t notice anything else for long chunks of time. Also, when I pop out of the zone, I’m usually stunned at how much I’ve accomplished while in the zone compared to the amount of time that has passed.

In other words, when I’m in the zone, I’m incredibly productive, to the point that it’s very useful for me to arrange my other life activities to maximize the amount of time I’m in that state.

Thus, the best time management scheme would be one that is focused entirely on maximizing the amount of time I’m in the “zone.” And that’s exactly the point of Getting Things Done.

The entire idea rests on one core principle: dealing effectively with internal commitments. In other words, if something is on your mind, it’s going to make it much more difficult to get into that zone state. If you’re trying to remember the three things you need to get at the store and also remember to make it to your kid’s soccer game at 6, it’s going to be hard to drill down into the task you need to work on right now.

(There’s also another big factor here: the money. If you’re consistently able to get into “the zone,” you’re going to be much more productive and produce higher-quality stuff. This sets you directly up for better performance marks, pay increases, and the potential for better, higher-paying work. It can also make the non-professional elements of your life work much better – for example, practicing the piano works much better if I don’t have anything else on my mind.)

Allen touches on the basic requirements for managing commitments on page 13:

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

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

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

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

In other words, if something’s on your mind, you need to get it out of your mind and into some sort of external system that you trust and that you review regularly. If you don’t, all the stuff you’re trying to keep in mind will make it harder for you to devote your maximum brainpower towards the task at hand, which is really needed to help you get into that “zone” state where your productivity goes up, your quality of work goes up, and your stress about it goes down.

The interesting thing, though, is that all of the stuff we store in our mind boils down to action. We keep facts in our mind to help us with a project (an action). We remember an appointment because we have to go to it (an action). We make a project plan so that we have an orderly flow of actions. It’s all about managing your actions – nothing more, nothing less.

Allen spells it out on page 19:

In training and coaching thousands of professionals, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they themselves may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.

The best way I can make this idea clear – and it’s a powerful idea – is to give you an example from my own life.

It’s 2:55 PM. I have an hour-long teleconference at 3 that I’m going to have to focus on. I also need to do a load of laundry, get supper started and in the oven, and get in some piano practice between now and five o’clock, when I have to go to a t-ball game. There is pretty much no way to slot in all of those projects because none of them fit before the conference call and the rest take more than an hour combined (and I have only an hour after the call), so something’s going to have to go.

Or is it? What I can do is simply identify the “next action” for each of these activities.

Finding the sheet music I want to practice with and setting it out on the keyboard is the next action for the piano practice, and it takes a minute or so.
Starting a laundry load, which is the next action in the “do laundry” project, takes about three minutes.
Pulling chicken out of the freezer and putting it on the counter to thaw is the next action for preparing supper, and it takes about thirty seconds.
My next action for the conference call is to get out my note-taking software and dial in. I focus entirely on the conference call and it’s over at four.
I then head downstairs and put the laundry in the dryer, the “next action” on the laundry project, taking about a minute.
I then walk straight to the keyboard, sit down, and am completely ready to begin banging out “Fur Elise,” which I do for twenty minutes or so.
I then go upstairs and proceed into the next action for making supper, in which I assemble a casserole and get it in the oven. It’s ready at 4:40 and the next action is to bake it, so I preheat the oven.
I then go downstairs and pull the clothes from the dryer, folding the items that need to be folded and changing my shirt, taking me until about 4:50.
I go back upstairs, where the oven is preheated, and put the casserole in the oven to bake while I’m at the t-ball game.
I walk out the door and drive to my son’s game, arriving on time with all of the projects completed.

By focusing on the “next action” and not stressing out on the projects as whole items, I was able to accomplish more than I thought.

It goes even further than that, as Allen explains on page 23:

For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out of your [short term memory] and yell at you, internally. And waht did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted “bucket” that you know you’ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased.

So, unless you have all of the things you need to do out of your head and somewhere else, the undone things interfere with your progress on the immediate action you’re tackling right now.

So, in that example above, if I don’t have a trusted system for getting all of those plans and next actions out of my head, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate well on that conference call because my mind would wander into those undone things. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my piano practice. I also wouldn’t be able to make a great supper for my family – I’d likely botch something while my brain wandered through the things I need to do.

If I know it’s all recorded and down on paper, my mind doesn’t wander. And if I’ve extracted the next action for each project I’m invested in, I don’t have to worry about those, either. I simply think about the item I’m tackling now on my current to-do list and nothing else has to eat up my focus. I can get in the zone when practicing the piano and really grow my playing skill. I can get in the zone on that conference call and wow the people I’m talking to, which helps my career.

Next time, we’ll look at the second chapter, which covers the five stages of mastering workflow – in other words, how exactly do you take the garbled collection of facts and ideas and things to do that eat up your short term memory and actually deal with them all in any sort of coherent way?

Procrastination by Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen focuses on the challenging issue of procrastination. Why do we put off important, challenging work?

For me, procrastination is a “sometimes” issue. I tend to not put off work so much as to choose among things to do based on which one seems the most enjoyable to do at the moment. This often means that “un-fun” tasks languish longer than they should while more enjoyable tasks (this, for me, usually means the raw task of writing) find their way to the forefront.

Some of my friends are terrible procrastinators, finding “time” to play video games and other leisurely activities instead of taking care of business. In the end, though, it’s not all that different than my own procrastination.

Is there a solution to all of this? Does Procrastination have any answers? Let’s find out.

1 | Procrastination: Nuisance or Nemesis?
Life is hard. The authors argue that procrastination is a shield that we create that protects us against the hard things in life over the short term, but when the items become too strong for the shield to protect against them, they explode all over us with truly disastrous consequences. This “shield” takes a lot of different forms and the authors provide a list of them, with items like “I must avoid being challenged” and “I must be perfect” and “I can’t afford to let go.” Some of the statements listed really hit home for me.

2 | Fear of Failure: The Procrastinator on Trial
Some of us procrastinate out of a fear of failing, a sense that we’re not up to the task at hand. We believe that we’re not going to be able to succeed, so actually attempting the task is futile. The thing is very few tasks put in front of us are above and beyond our skill level. We’re usually able to handle all of it, from challenging work tasks to tough school assignments. The key is to start chipping away at the difficult problem, doing the pieces that we can easily extract and do, until we’re left with pieces that don’t seem all that hard.

3 | Fear of Success: Hello Procrastination, Goodbye Success
Others procrastinate out of fear of actually succeeding. They might get promoted to a job that they don’t actually want. They might receive unwanted attention. The best way to avoid that is a certain level of mediocrity. The thing is that such attention and “rewards” from success do not have to be the result. Simply talking to those around you about these issues can usually cut through them like a hot knife through butter.

4 | The Procrastinator in Combat: Fear of Losing the Battle
This type of procrastination often revolves around some form of the idea “if others are strong, then I must be weak and I will inevitably lose.” Thus, procrastination is simply a method of extending the battle to postpone the loss. In truth, though, concluding the battle, even if you “lose,” is often a win. You end up stronger and often in another battle that you’re capable of winning instead of the dread of prolonging the inevitable.

5 | The Comfort Zone: Fear of Separation and Fear of Intimacy
Here, we just want to maintain the status quo. Changing how things are seems painful, so we procrastinate because during the procrastination, our lives appear unchanged. The truth of the matter is that as soon as the decision is available at all, our life is already changed. We have the consequences of either side of the decision on our lap. All procrastination does is frustrate those around us – it doesn’t actually free us from the decision.

6 | Do You Know What Time (It) Is?
Some people simply have difficulty keeping track of time. They are poor estimators of how long a task will take and how much time they have between now and the due date to complete it. This misjudgment often results in being pushed up hard against deadlines, not because they’re putting it off, but because they misjudged the time investment.

7 | Current Neuroscience: The Big Ideas
This chapter is easily the one that will become outdated the fastest in the book, as it is kind of a “what’s hot in current neuroscience that might be related to procrastination” section. Some of this will prove true and useful. Other pieces will not. It’s interesting reading, but far from a game changer.

8 | Procrastination and Your Brain
Somewhere in the process of procrastination, your mind perceives danger and your body reacts to that perception in some way. We feel fear – or at least a sense that we should avert danger. Procrastination is just the “flight” part of a “fight or flight” reaction to perceived danger.

9 | How You Came to Be a Procrastinator
Most people become procrastinators because they found that the “flight” reaction was easier for them at an earlier stage in their life than the “fight” reaction. Think of grade school homework that could easily be done later, or avoiding a personal conflict in the hallways of junior high. If “flight” works, it becomes natural. Of course, later on, the “fight” reaction is usually much more successful, but we’re used to the “flight” reaction.

10 | Looking Ahead to Success
The key, then, is training ourselves to use the “fight” reaction more often – in other words, when we are faced with something that we would naturally procrastinate against, we have to train ourselves to actively and naturaly take it on instead. Doing this makes us more proactive.

11 | Taking Stock: A Procrastination Inventory
What do you procrastinate on? What are the benefits and costs of procrastinating? What are the benefits and costs of not procrastinating? The idea is to simply lay out the case for each of your procrastinations and look at them consciously and clearly. Is it really a net benefit to procrastinate? Usually, it’s not.

12 | Setting and Achieving Goals
What do you want to achieve? Going through the process of determining your goals, coming up with plans for achieving them, and starting through the steps of those plans is key. It puts things in perspective and helps you define a clear pathway to the things you want. Goal setting is all about clarity.

13 | Learning How to Tell Time
Yes, this means learning to keep a schedule and a planner. I think for most people that are involved in a demanding field (and/or have a demanding personal life), maintaining a calendar is a vital part of success. Part of this, of course, is penciling in plenty of time to take care of the big tasks you need to accomplish.

14 | Learning to Say Yes and No
Say yes to other people. Say no to time wasters and information overload. Say yes to those who want to support you. Say no to those who want to belittle you. Say yes to spending your time finishing tasks. Say no to spending all of your time in virtual worlds.

15 | Using Your Body to Reduce Procrastination
Keeping your body in reasonable shape is also a big key to solving procrastination because it raises your energy level and your ability to focus. Eat a better diet. Put aside some time to exercise. This seems counterintuitive – “How can I find time to do this when I’m already so overloaded I have to procrastinate?” – but I constantly find that my productivity per hour is way, way up if I’m eating well and am getting regular exercise.

16 | Tips for Procrastinators with ADD and Executive Dysfunction
The solution, as always, is to break it down. Break decisions down into the smallest chunks possible. Break tasks down into small, manageable chunks that you can do within your attention span. It takes additional time to do this, but it makes otherwise unamangeable tasks quite manageable.

17 | Neither Here nor There: Procrastination and the Cross-Cultural Experience
Many people fall into procrastination during times of culture shock – going to college or moving to a new country. The best way to get past this is to establish relationships and to dig into the culture of the new situation. That might include learning a new language or participating in activities you might otherwise avoid.

18 | Living and Working with Procrastinators
The best way to deal with other procrastinators is to subtly help them overcome their procrastination. Break their tasks down into bite-sized chunks when you make requests of them. Don’t ask for a five hour task – ask for a five minute task, followed by another, and another. Later, you can show the big thing they accomplished and show them how to break it down themselves.

Is Procrastination Worth Reading?
Procrastination is perhaps the single best collection of advice on, well, procrastination that I’ve yet read. It really covers the causes of procrastination extremely well – I don’t know how a procrastinator couldn’t read the first section of the book and not have something painfully hit home.

What really works, though, is how the diagnosis (the first part) is tied so well to some of the solutions (mostly, the second part). It’s that connection that really makes the book work – you see yourself in the pages, then you connect that image of yourself to a fairly straightforward solution.

If you have issues with procrastination, Procrastination is well worth reading.

I’m pretty passionate about organization – after all, I named David Allen’s book Getting Things Done as one of the ten books that changed my life. I’m also (obviously) passionate about how information technology and the internet can change people’s lives.

This book, Getting Organized in the Google Era by former CIO of Google Douglas C. Merrill, hits the joint between those two passions quite firmly. It looks at how people organize all of the information they need to maintain their life on a daily basis and talks about how recent advances in technology (particularly cloud computing – where you save your data on a web server, a la Gmail or Facebook) have potentially changed or improved how we organize ourselves.

Intriguing stuff, but is there enough meat there to fill up a whole book with ideas?

1 | Cocktail Parties & Cap’n Crunch
Our brain is a strange little machine. It’s pretty poor at retaining a large number of little pieces of information, but it is very good at taking lots of little pieces of information and making sense of them. That’s why, over time, successful humans have developed external aids to help with storing those little pieces of external information.

Think of our schedules. Most of us who have a lot of appointments to keep maintain some sort of written schedule – I sure do. Why? Because without it, you’ll have a lot of little pieces of information floating around in your brain (each appointment) and if you forget one, it’s a major problem. So we get into the routine of storing it all externally and just remembering to check the schedule all the time.

2 | Summer Vacations, Suburbia & Factory Shifts
An awful lot of societal structures are woefully inefficient. Many, many people work a nine-to-five schedule (or something close), so there are resultant traffic jams, causing long commutes and tons of lost productivity – I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to be working than sitting in traffic. School students have long summer vacations during which their learning and skills get rusty. The list goes on and on – the way things were always done might have been efficient in the past compared to the alternatives, but society has changed so much that these things have become inefficient.

Instead of just forcing yourself into these inefficient structures, why not see if you can change a rule or two. Do some homeschooling during the summer. Ask if you can shift your work schedule to two hours earlier – or two hours later – so you can avoid the morning and evening rushes. Look into telecommuting if your job allows it. If something seems inefficient – and every time you’re sitting idle, there’s probably an inefficiency – look for ways around it so you can actually fill your time with meaning.

3 | Racecars, Basketball Shorts & Opera
All of us have constraints in life. I work at home with three young children – that certainly introduces some constraints. The big challenge is to determine which constraints are real and which ones are imagined. If you can figure out that you’re just imagining a constraint, then it’s no longer a constraint.

Take naptime, for example. I used to view this as a pretty long constraint on other activities, as I’d stay near the kids until they were asleep (they’re good at going to sleep by themselves at night, but during naptime when the sun is shining outside, they can sometimes get antsy). What I eventually learned is that the constraint was much smaller than I imagined. Once a story is read and they’re laying down, the perfect time has arrived to open my laptop and get a few things done.

What constraints in your life are real constraints?

4 | Climb That Mountain or Chill in the Barcalounger?
What is it that I want to achieve above all else? Why do I want to achieve it? What happens if I don’t achieve it? What exactly do I have to do to make it happen? The more you ask yourself these questions and reflect on your answers, the more you begin to put the big things you want in life front and center.

What do I want to achieve above all else? I want to be a successful writer and a successful father. Those are my front-and-center goals – the other goals I have are almost always subordinate to those two things. Other things really don’t matter in comparison. What does success mean in those areas? That’s a much longer answer, but after a lot of reflection, I think I know what success is there, too.

5 | Beyond Taylorism & Trapper Keepers
Once upon a time, organizing information meant keeping it in hierarchical structures that made it easy to dig down and locate a specific piece of information – think of the Dewey Decimal System or a complex filing system.

Today, though, information technology allows us to have all of that data electronically and, more important, it’s all searchable. Instead of digging for a file in a huge filing cabinet, we can just search for it if we have it stored electronically.

This gets around a lot of differences: different filing methods, different constraints, different personal quirks. Everyone simply searches for what they want.

Think about Wikipedia versus an old printed set of World Book encyclopedias, for example.

6 | Paris, France or Paris, Vegas?
In fact, the best skill one can build for managing information in the future is the ability to know how to search effectively and accurately for a specific piece of information. This means learning the nuances of various search engines, knowing how they work, and knowing how to apply them.

Using Google means more than just going to the search field and typing in what you want, for example. There’s quite a lot of syntax that goes into really narrowing down what you want, from using the “site:” prefix to narrow down searches within a particular site to using “-” as a prefix to exclude terms. There’s even more useful syntax within specific programs like Gmail when you’re searching through old emails.

7 | Colored Markers & Filters
There is so much information out there that it’s impossible to process it all. So where do we begin?

Merrill suggests starting with your goals. For example, you’re probably reading The Simple Dollar because you have personal financial or personal success goals: paying off debt, building up some savings, getting a better job, or so on. This means that some posts apply to you and your situation and some do not. If it doesn’t apply, filter it out immediately. Use your energy to read something else.

This is also true when it comes down to the information you save – old emails and the like. Why are you saving it? What’s your goal with that information if you retain it? This often helps you figure out how to retain it.

8 | Day-Timer or Digital?
Should you have a document in digital form or in paper form? To put it bluntly, you should always have it in the form that takes the least amount of time for you to manage it once you’ve climbed the learning curve.

For example, I keep my schedule electronically because it takes far less time to enter repeated appointments or to share my schedule with others than it does with a written schedule. On the other hand, it’s often easier to receive statements in the mail because electronic distribution of paper statements is still sometimes very poor. Paper is still also superior when it comes to jotting down quick notes, though that may change in the near future.

9 | Beyond Send & Receive
Merrill is a huge fan of Gmail for organizing email and contact information and I have to agree with him. The ability to search through mountains of email effortlessly, tag key emails easily, sort them as I wish, and retrieve email from any web browser makes Gmail an indispensable tool for me (and for others).

Much of this chapter focuses on Gmail power tips. In fact, Merrill often argues in favor of just emailing information that you need to retain to your own Gmail account because of the ease of searching it in the future.

10 | Thanks for Sharing
Similarly, Merrill makes an argument for using GCal here, for similar reasons as Gmail – accessibility and ease of searching. He rails quite a bit against the “locked system” of Outlook/Exchange and Domino, mostly because of the barrier they put between work appointments and personal appointments.

I find Gmail and Gcal to be essential tools for my work and for my personal life thanks to things like integrating weather forecasts into my personal schedule (so my calendar alone can indicate whether today is a good day for an outdoor activity).

11 | A Browser, an Operating System & Some Cool Stickers
Here, Merrill proposes moving collaborative documents online to Google Docs, enabling you to easily work together with others that have access to a web browser, as well as store all of your documents at a place easily accessible via the web and, of course, searchable. I also use this for some documents, while keeping others offline for my own privacy.

While Merrill does focus pretty heavily on the Google apps, he’s right on in terms of two key points. First, the more searchable all of your emails, documents, schedules, and other information is, the more useful it is. Second, no one is putting this all together as smoothly as the Google apps do – and they’re free.

12 | Avoiding Brain Strain
The best technique for avoiding brain strain is to focus on one activity at a time, because every time you switch activities, some focus and some information is lost in the process. If you’re about to switch activities, take the time to note your current train of thought on your current activity so that you can pick it up easier when you return.

If your job and life seem to constantly push you to switch focus with frightening regularity, seek out spaces in which you can minimize those focus switches. Turn off your distractions (like your phone) and shut your door so you can bear down on a task.

13 | Checking Email from the Beach
It’s all about “work-life balance.” In other words, the more efficient you are at your required work tasks and life tasks, the more time you have free for genuine relaxation and enjoyment of life. That’s why, if you have pockets of down time that don’t allow for sustained relaxation, you should try to find ways to fill those pockets with some sort of useful activity.

Yes, that does mean you should do things like check your email during a fifteen minute downtime on a Saturday. Doing that, however, frees you up to spend more sustained time involved in activities you care about later. The more efficient your tools are, the easier it is to do these microbursts of tasks.

14 | Dealing with the Unexpected
You’re going to make mistakes along the way – no one is perfect. The key is to learn from those mistakes and look for solutions so that these mistakes don’t repeat themselves.

The book closes with one of the best parts – a long list of “stuff we love,” web applications that solve particular personal information management concerns.

Is Getting Organized in the Google Era Worth Reading?
This is a really useful read if you are already fairly organized as it does a good job of outlining a large number of ways that you can use many recent advances in information technology to organize your personal and professional information. I fall into that category, so I found lots of interesting things in this book.

This book isn’t a useful read if you’re not already pretty organized. If you’re in that group, the stuff in this book won’t necessarily help you get organized – it’s not an organization system in itself, but a bunch of tactics to help improve what it is you already do. If you’re starting from scratch, I really recommend David Allen’s excellent book Getting Things Done (which I’m planning to cover in detail in an upcoming series).

I got a lot of good ideas from this book. You might, too.

At one of my (many) college jobs, I would spend hours upon hours sifting dirt. I’d scoop a big pile of dirt onto a box with a screen on the bottom, pick up that screen box, and shake it back and forth, allowing the fine dirt to come out and the rocks and large clumps to stay behind. I’d discard the lumps and rocks and repeat. Some days, I would go through more than a thousand pounds of dirt in this way, as I would fill up a hundred pound tub with the dirt, then haul it elsewhere.

I usually worked in tandem with a guy who was constantly horsing around. He’d work in spurts, then start fidgeting and finding ways to goof off. He’d try to get me involved with it, but I usually wouldn’t. In fact, most of the time, I didn’t hear him. I would simply “zone out” during the work, not really being aware of anything at all. The time would seem to pass very quickly and I’d be finished with my dirt while he had barely filled up a bin.

It wasn’t long before I got a raise and he was fired.

Later on, I noticed the same phenomena when I was a computer programmer. For several months, I was involved in writing a giant database API. Some of the code was interesting and required me to think. Most of it was not – it was just very simple stuff that had to be done. I would often find myself “zoning out” while writing this simple code.

Again, there were ample opportunities here to hit the water cooler. One of my other coworkers did pretty much everything possible to distract and interrupt my focus.

Six months later, the project shipped, she had contributed only a small fraction of what had been accomplished, and she was out looking for another job.

The same exact phenomenon happens today, with my writing job. Some of my tasks – researching topics, writing posts – requires focus. Some other tasks – sifting through comments, separating spam emails from real ones – require very little focus.

Sometimes, I’ll dread doing those mindless tasks and I’ll find anything else to do.

Other days, I’ll turn off Skype, turn off the phone ringer, put my favorite iTunes playlist on repeat, and dig in. Three or four hours later, I’ll find that the slog work is done – and my situation is much better off because of it.

There are two lessons here.

First, for most of us, it’s the successful, repeated completion of the slog work that makes the difference. In each of those cases above, the boring, grinding work felt like the last thing on Earth I wanted to be doing. Yet, by just bucking down and heading right for the boring, repetitive work, I got through it.

Even more important, it was the completion of that slog work – often over and over again – that laid the groundwork for success in other areas. It built trust in those around me. It built the foundation for further work. It enabled a greater array of communications. Each of these things enabled me to succeed in areas that were much more personally valuable to me.

Second, if you just throw yourself at that work and let your mind go, slog work is often completed more quickly and more easily than you expect. Just turn off the distractions and stop with the excuses. Sit down and get to work on those mindless tasks you’ve been avoiding. Turn off all of your potential distractions, hit the boring task hard, and just let your mind go with it.

What you’ll find is that if you’re not distracted away, time passes quickly and you’re done with the task surprisingly fast. Even better, the task is now done and it’s likely created the foundation for much greater success – building the respect of your coworkers, enabling you to move forward on a project, or something else.

As you’re reading this, you probably have a few hours left in your day. Why not spend that time taking care of some mindless task that, if you completed it, would make tomorrow a lot easier? Turn off the distractions, hunker down, and complete something – it’ll do wonders for your career.

One of the biggest underlying themes of The Simple Dollar is that personal finance is merely a tool to improve the quality of your life. Of course, it’s an unwieldy and dangerous tool, one that, if used without care and forethought, can add quite a lot of difficulty and pain to your life. Take credit cards, for example.

In connection with that theme, I often read intriguing books about personal happiness – take my reviews of Stumbling on Happiness and Happier, for example, both of which were excellent reads.

Perhaps the most enjoyable book on happiness I’ve yet read, though, is The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. A quick note: I know Gretchen professionally, have exchanged several messages with her over the years, and enjoy reading her excellent blog on happiness topics. Of course, if I didn’t like her writing already, I might never have read the book – which I suppose means I already knew I would like the book before I opened the cover. But enough with that…

The Happiness Project largely focuses on Gretchen’s own experience applying mountains of classic advice on happiness (from Thoreau to Epicurus to the Dalai Lama to Oprah) to see what actually worked – and what didn’t. It’s mostly written in a memoir form covering a single year in which she applied these ideas, which works really well for the material covered (and makes it engaging to read).

Although I’ve had this book for a while, I decided to save this review until the start of the new year because it relates so well to the resolutions that people make for themselves.

January – Boost Energy
It’s often hard to tackle all the things we want to do in life if we don’t have a high level of energy. If your energy is sapped, it becomes all that much easier to simply take the path of least resistance and simply not work on the important things in life, which of course contributes greatly to a sense of unhappiness. Thus, there’s a great deal of sense in beginning a happiness journey by lifting one’s energy.

The two techniques that really stood out in this chapter – and in my own life – were to get more sleep and to simply move around more and get a bit of exercise. I’ll speak for myself in saying that when I don’t get adequate sleep for a few nights in a row, I feel tired and lethargic and unable to do much of anything productive. Similarly, when I fall off the “exercise wagon,” my energy level drops like a rock after about a week.

February – Remember Love
Marriages aren’t easy. Add kids and they become even more difficult. At times, marriages can seem like an emotional negative on the whole. What works? First, don’t expect appreciation for the things you do – and don’t feel a need to point them out and lord them over your partner. It does nothing more than instigate fighting and resentment over something you chose to do. If you want something done, do it and don’t use it as a psychological weapon.

Second, don’t just use your partner as someone to dump your problems on. Don’t blame them for problems. Don’t nag them over things left undone – if it’s undone, it must not occupy a high level of importance for them. Instead, focus on ways to accentuate your partner’s positives. What do they do well? Encourage that in a positive way instead of browbeating over the things they don’t do well. You’ll both wind up happier.

March – Aim Higher
There are few things that feel better than success, particularly when that success occurs at something you never expected to be successful at. When you think to yourself, “I could never do that,” then after investing work you find that you can do that, you’ll find yourself at a big emotional peak.

The best way to aim higher and go beyond what you think you’re capable of is to simply give it a shot. You should expect to fail at first. The first ten times. The first fifty times. That’s fine – you’re learning what it takes to succeed each time you fail. The key is to not give up, to not beat yourself up over the failure, and to get up and try again. Eventually, you will succeed – and that success will lift you high.

April – Lighten Up
People are often happiest when they’re doing something. Gretchen refers to this as “fog happiness” – a sense of happiness, or at least contentment, that comes from working towards a goal. Often, that happiness is borne of a sense that what you’re doing will make others happy.

Another big piece of the puzzle is to simply act happy. Act lighthearted. One effective way to do that is to simply sing on a regular basis – Gretchen suggests doing it in the morning. Play some simple pranks on other people. Do things that make you laugh. It’ll lift everything else.

May – Be Serious About Play
Happiness is often found when you seek out sources of happiness – things you do that bring you joy, no matter what they are. Those things are different for each of us, but when you find those things, devote some serious time to them. Block out time for fishing or for playing the piano. Those times will become powerful personal refreshers for you.

If you don’t have a hobby or activity that brings you such joy, find one. Set aside time to explore potential new interests – and block that time off. Make time for it. When you find something that brings joy into your life, it often works like a “happiness battery,” charging your entire day.

June – Make Time for Friends
Friendship is an easy thing to neglect in our busy lives. We often think to ourselves that our friends will always be around, but when we look again, we find that the friendship has drifted away. Even more importantly, we get joy from time spent with friends, but because we define such interactions as “important but not urgent,” we often replace them with the “urgent but not important” things in our lives.

One powerful way to maintain friendships is to schedule regular events with them. Start a weekly potluck dinner at your house and invite several friends (something we’re in the process of setting up). Another effective tool is to avoid gossip – don’t talk negatively about people behind their backs.

July – Buy Some Happiness
This chapter more or less focuses on one of the major themes of The Simple Dollar – the connection between money and happiness. Without directly touching on it, Gretchen touches on the idea of the fulfillment curve – that everyone has some point that maximizes the enjoyment they get from their spending. Spend too much and you’re not happy. Spend too little and you’re not happy, either.

How do you find that balance? Focus on just buying things you know will bring value into your life, but don’t chide yourself constantly for doing so. Look at your true passions and focus on things that complement those passions and don’t spend as much on the rest.

August – Contemplate the Heavens
Spirituality is another interesting beast in the stable of happiness. For many, there is a lot of solace in contemplating the mysteries of life. If you find peace in seeking these answers, seek them. Gretchen suggests reading about the lives – and beliefs – of spiritual leaders of all stripes (like the Dalai Lama or the Pope or any of a huge number of historical figures).

I find a lot of power in keeping a gratitude notebook. Simply by writing down five things I’m grateful for each day, I keep in mind how many gifts and blessings have found their way into my life. It also often opens a window into religious exploration for me as well.

September – Pursue a Passion
In a way, pursuing a passion builds upon many of the themes already in this book. If you discover you’re passionate about something, chase it. Dig in deep.

For me (and for many others), one great way to build upon a passion is to embark on a big, ambitious project that requires us to dig deep. Write a novel. Build a new deck. Master a particular technology. Start an ambitious blog. To do these things, you have to set aside time – but the projects themselves provide a lot of spiritual happiness and personal reward.

October – Pay Attention
Quite often in life, it’s easy to feel as though we’re swept along by currents largely out of our control. Yet, just as often, if we study our lives, those currents make sense. We have a surprising amount of control over them as well. Most importantly, that awareness can be a real source of happiness.

One effective way to do this is to meditate a bit each day. Spend some time doing nothing more than emptying your mind of all of the mental junk you’ve picked up and clear out that space. Looking at the world with fresher eyes makes all the difference.

November – Keep a Contented Heart
If you’re finding more happiness in your life, how do you maintain it? To put it simply, just pass it on.

It’s very easy to do this. Laugh when others are around. Help others out. Use good manners and be polite. Be positive when you talk about things. Surround yourself with people who do the same thing. This will all add up to a lot of reflected happiness in your life.

December – Boot Camp Perfect
If all of these changes seem overwhelming or impossible, remember one thing: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Take small steps and do them when you think of them or when you can do them. Put these ideas into your calendar and mark off some boundaries for your happiness – but don’t despair if something happens to take one of them out.

The key is to put little positive steps into your life and let the aggregate of those steps help you reach a higher level of personal joy.

Is The Happiness Project Worth Reading?
Regardless of any value you might get out of the advice, I think The Happiness Project is worth reading for the pure entertainment factor. I was sucked into the narrative and wound up reading it much more like a novel than like the nonfiction books I typically read for The Simple Dollar. In fact, this book has found its way into my “to-be-read” pile for purely personal re-reading, a rarity for the books I review for The Simple Dollar.

The advice itself throughout the book overlaps well with many of the books I’ve read on happiness. I think the real key comes through here: listen to yourself carefully and act on what you hear. Your mind is often telling you what you need to be happy, but we often overrule it because of what we’ve consciously decided makes us happy. We buy stuff when we don’t need it and get ourselves into financial pinches. We hang onto relationships too long. We stick with old tired patterns. Quite often, we know these are choices that will make us unhappy, but we don’t listen.

The Happiness Project is a very enjoyable read. It takes a topic – personal happiness – and runs with it, making it personally engaging and entertaining. Drier books fail to entertain at times and fictional narratives often fail to inform – this balances the two quite well. If you’re seeking your own happiness, read this one. You’ll enjoy it.

We want to do things like…
+ visit an old relative
+ create a master information document
+ work on a big project
+ make out a will
+ get involved in a community organization
+ get our masters degree in the evenings and weekends

Instead, we fill our time…
+ catching that can’t-miss show on television
+ surfing the web for some obscure piece of trivia
+ answering the phone and chatting with whoever answers
+ dealing with email
+ doing dishes
+ stopping at the grocery store for the third time this week

The first group of tasks are things that I would call “important but not urgent.” These are things that don’t have to be addressed immediately, but still have serious importance and value in our lives.

The second group of tasks are things that I would call “urgent but not important.” These are things that try to grab our attention and focus now but have no real impact on our long-term lives.

It’s easy to let our lives be run by the things that are “urgent but not important.” Most large bureaucracies function in this way. I know that my previous job certainly did at times. We often manage our lives this way – we’ll look around, ask ourselves what needs to be addressed right now, and then focus on dealing with that task just because it’s due today, even if it’s trivial compared to a much more important thing.

We’ll answer the phone several times in an hour even though it means constantly stepping away from a big project.
We’ll watch the big game tonight and call our elderly mother in a few days.
We’ll surf the web for trivia but let our dreams of a masters degree sit idle.

I do this myself, more often than I would like. Since I have two articles “due” on a given day for The Simple Dollar, it’s often easiest to focus wholly on the task that needs to be done today (those two articles) instead of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of writing really long-lasting useful information. It’s easier to look around the house, see a big mess, and tackle it, even though my kids are quietly clamoring for more attention.

I find that four little things help me keep the “important but not urgent” in the forefront and let the “urgent but not important” things slide.

I’m unafraid to turn off my phone and email. Closing off channels through which the “urgent but not important” tasks can interrupt the “important but not urgent” tasks goes a long way towards maintaining my focus in the right areas. If it’s not important, it can wait. If it truly is important, I’ll know about it as soon as I’m available since I’ll check my messages.

I block off time for long-term projects. I spend part of every day focused on projects with a long-term payoff. For example, for much of July, August, September, and October, I focused heavily on the manuscript of my book. This didn’t help me at all in my day-to-day work, but it did build something with much greater long-term value. (Yes, I’m working on a long-term project now related to The Simple Dollar – no, I’m not ready to announce it.)

I sometimes will utterly drop the unimportant but urgent things if they’re getting in the way. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with little requests. If I focused on nothing but those requests, I’d never get anything done. So, sometimes, I just have to drop those requests. I’ll put off responding to an email – or not even respond at all if there’s not an obvious answer needed. I’ll skip watching the “big game” and catch the highlights later. I’ll actively choose to put my communications devices away.

I’m acutely aware of what’s truly important to me – and what isn’t. One final trick is understanding what’s actually important to me – and how relatively important various things are. Quite often, it’s easy to substitute urgency for importance – but that often leaves you putting out fires and not really accomplishing anything. Sometimes, it’s best to ignore the fires and focus on the important things.

As I often say to my wife, “Don’t worry about it. I’d rather have dirty floors and well-adjusted children than a spotless house and sullen kids.”