GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and the action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint. Most projects, given my definition of a project as an outcome requiring more than one action, need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind. You need a new stockbroker? You just have to call a friend for a recommendation. You want to set up a printer at home? You just need to surf the Web to check out different models and prices. I estimate that 80 percent of projects are of that nature. You'll still be doing the full planning model on all of them, but only in your head, and just enough to figure out next actions and keep them going until they're complete.

If the project is still on your mind, there's more planning to do.

Another 15 percent or so of projects might require at least some external form of brainstorming—maybe a mind-map or a few notes in a word processor or PowerPoint file. That might be sufficient for planning meeting agendas, your vacation, or a speech to the local chamber of commerce.

A final 5 percent of projects might need the deliberate application of one or more of the five phases of the natural planning model. The model provides a practical recipe for unsticking things, resolving them, and moving them forward productively. Are you aware of a need for greater clarity, or greater action, on any of your projects? If so, using the model can often be the key to making effective progress.

Need More Clarity?

If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale. People are often very busy {action) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction.They need to pull out their plan, or create one {organize). If there's a lack of clarity at the planning level, there's probably a need for more brainstorming to generate a sufficient inventory of ideas to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the vision of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the best how-to thinking. If the outcome/vision is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you're engaged in the situation in the first place {purpose).

Need More to Be Happening?

If more action is what's needed, you need to move down the model. There may be enthusiasm about the purpose of a project but at the same time some resistance to actually fleshing out what fulfilling it in the real world might look like. These days, the task of "improving quality of work life" may be on the radar for a manager, but often he won't yet have defined a clear picture of the desired result. The thinking must go to the specifics of the vision. Again, ask yourself, "What would the outcome look like?"

Plans get you into things but you've got to work your way out.

If you've formulated an answer to that question, but things are still stuck, it's probably time for you to grapple with some of the "how" issues and the operational details and perspectives {brainstorming). I often have clients who have inherited a relatively clearly articulated project, like "Implement the new performance-review system," but who aren't moving forward because they haven't yet taken a few minutes to dump some ideas out about what that might entail.

If brainstorming gets hung up (and very often it does for more "blue sky" types), rigor may be required to do some evaluation of and decision-making about mission-critical deliverables that have to be handled {organizing). This is sometimes the case when an informal back-and-forth meeting that has generated lots of ideas ends without producing any decision about what actually needs to happen next on the project. 

And if there is a plan, but the rubber still isn't hitting the road like it should, someone needs to assess each component with the focus of "What's the next action, and who's got it?" One man ager, who had taken over responsibility many months in advance for organizing a major annual conference, asked me how to prevent the crisis all-nighters her team had experienced near the deadline the previous year. When she produced an outline of the various pieces of the project she'd inherited, I asked, "Which pieces could actually be moved on right now?" After identifying half a dozen, we clarified the next action on each one. It was off and running.