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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest.

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.

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

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.”

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

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?

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

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.