GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Once you know what you need to keep track of (covered in the previous chapter, on Processing), all you really need is lists and folders for reference and support materials. Your lists (which, as I've indicated, could also be items in folders) will keep track of projects and someday/maybes, as well as the actions you'll need to take on your active open loops. Folders (digital or paper-based) will be required to hold your reference material and the support information for active projects.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Lots of people have been making lists for years but have never found the procedure to be particularly effective. There's rampant skepticism about systems as simple as the one I'm recommending. But most list-makers haven't put the appropriate things on their lists, or have left them incomplete, which has kept the lists themselves from being very functional. Once you know what goes on the lists, however, things get much easier; then you just need a way to manage them. As I've said, you shouldn't bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you'll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change. Attempting to impose such scaffolding has been a big source of frustration in many people's organizing. You'll be prioritizing more intuitively as you see the whole list, against quite a number of shifting variables. The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review.

When I refer to a "list," keep in mind that I mean nothing more than a grouping of items with some similar characteristic. A list could look like one of three things: (1) a file folder with separate paper notes for the items within the category; (2) an actual list on a titled piece of paper (often within a loose-leaf organizer or planner); or (3) an inventory in a software program or on a digital assistant, such as Microsoft Outlook task categories or a category on a hand held PDA.

 Organizing Action Reminders

If you've emptied your in-basket, you'll undoubtedly have created a stack of "Pending" reminders for yourself, representing longer-than-two-minute actions that cannot be delegated to someone else. You'll probably have anywhere from twenty to sixty or seventy or more such items. You'll also have accumulated reminders of things that you've handed off to other people, and perhaps some things that need be placed in your calendar or a "Someday/ Maybe" kind of holder.

You'll want to sort all of this into groupings that make sense to you so you can review them as options for work to do when you have time. You'll also want to decide on the most appropriate way physically to organize those groups, whether as items in folders or on lists, either paper-based or digital.

The Actions That Go on Your Calendar

For the purposes of organization, as I've said, 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 to 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").

As you were processing your in-basket, you probably came across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed up. You may have realized that the next action on getting a medical checkup, for example, was to call and make the appointment, and so (since the action required two minutes or less) you actually did it when it occurred to you. Writing the appointment into your calendar as you made it would then have been common sense.

The calendar should show only the "hard landscape" around which you do the rest of your actions.