GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Actionable This is the YES group of items, stuff about which something needs to be done. Typical examples range from an e-mail requesting your participation in a corporate service project on such-and-such a date to the notes in your in-basket from your face-to-face meeting with the group vice president about a significant new project that involves hiring an outside consultant.

Two things need to be determined about each actionable item:

1. What "project" or outcome have you committed to? and

2. What's the next action required?

If It's About a Project. . . You need to capture that outcome on a "Projects" list. That will be the stake in the ground that reminds you that you have an open loop. A Weekly Review of the list (see page 46) will bring this item back to you as something that's still outstanding. It will stay fresh and alive in your management system until it is completed or eliminated.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.

- Elbert

What's the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you've collected; if you answer it appropriately, you'll have the key substantive thing to organize. The "next action" is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.

Some examples of next actions might be:

• Call Fred re tel. # for the garage he recommended.

• Draft thoughts for the budget-meeting agenda.

• Talk to Angela about the filing system we need to set up.

• Research database-management software on the Web.

These are all real physical activities that need to happen. Reminders of these will become the primary grist for the mill of your personal productivity-management system.

Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It

Once you've decided on the next action, you have three options:

1 Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.

2 Delegate it If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself. Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity.

3 Defer it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more "Next Actions" lists.

Organize

The outer ring of the workflow diagram shows the eight discrete categories of reminders and materials that will result from your processing all your "stuff." Together they make up a total system for organizing just about everything that's on your plate, or could be added to it, on a daily and weekly basis.

For nonactionable items, the possible categories are trash, incubation tools, and reference storage. If no action is needed on something, you toss it, "tickle" it for later reassessment, or tile it so you can find the material if you need to refer to it at another time. To manage actionable things, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you're waiting for.

All of the organizational categories need to be physically contained in some form. When I refer to "lists," I just mean some sort of reviewable set of reminders, which could be lists on notebook paper or in some computer program or even file folders holding separate pieces of paper for each item. For instance, the list of current projects could be kept on a page in a Day Runner; it could be a "To Do" category on a PDA; or it could be in a file labeled "Projects List." Incubating reminders (such as "after March 1 contact my accountant to set up a meeting") may be stored in a paper-based "tickler" file or in a paper- or computer-based calendar program.

Projects

I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things that you might not normally call projects arc going to be on your "Projects" list The reasoning behind my definition is that if one step won't complete something, some kind of stake needs to be placed in the ground to remind you that there's something still left to do. If you don't have a placeholder to remind you about it, it will slip back into RAM. Another way to think of this is as a list of open loops.

A Partial "Projects" List

Get new staff person on board

August vacation

Staff off-site retreat

Publish book

Finalize computer upgrades

Update will

Finalize budgets

Finalize new product line

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