GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

These next actions should be put on separate "Agenda" lists for each of those people and for that meeting (assuming that you attend it regularly). Professionals who keep a file folder to hold all the things they need to go over with their boss already use a version of this method. If you're conscientious about deter-mining all your next actions, though, you may find that you'll need somewhere between three and fifteen of these kinds of lists. I recommend that separate files or lists be kept for bosses, partners, assistants, spouses, and children. You should also keep the same kind of list for your attorney, financial adviser, accountant, and/or computer consultant, as well as for anyone else with whom you might have more than one thing to go over the next time you talk on the phone.

If you participate in standing meetings—staff meetings, project meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, whatever—they, too, deserve their own files, in which you can collect things that will need to be addressed on those occasions. 

Often you'll want to keep a running list of things to go over with someone you'll be interacting with only for a limited period of time. For instance, if you have a contractor doing a significant piece of work on your house or property, you can create a list for him for the duration of the project. As you're walking around the site after he's left for the day, you may notice several things you need to talk with him about, and you'll want that list to be easy to capture and to access as needed.

Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add "Agendas" ad hoc, as needed, quickly and simply. For example, inserting a page for a person or a meeting within an "Agenda" section in a loose-leaf notebook planner takes only seconds, as does adding a dedicated "Memo" in a PDA's "Agenda" category.

"Read/Review" You will no doubt have discovered in your in-basket a number of things for which your next action is to read. I hope you will have held to the two-minute rule and dispatched a number of those quick-skim items already—tossing, filing, or routing them forward as appropriate.

To-read items that you know will demand more than two minutes of your time are usually best managed in a separate physical stack-basket labeled "Read/Review." This is still a "list" by my definition, but one that's more efficiently dealt with by grouping the documents and magazines themselves in a tray and/or portable folder.

For many people, the "Read/Review" stack can get quite large. That's why it's critical that the pile be reserved only for those longer-than-two-minute things that you actually want to read when you have time. That can be daunting enough in itself, but things get seriously out of control and psychologically numbing when the edges of this category are not clearly defined. A pristine delineation will at least make you conscious of the inventory, and if you're like most people, having some type of self-regulating mechanism will help you become more aware of what you want to keep and what you should just get rid of.

It's practical to have that stack of reading material at hand and easy to grab on the run when you're on your way to a meeting that may be late starting, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, or a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting to get your teeth cleaned. Those are all great opportunities to crank through that kind of reading. People who don't have their "Read/Review" material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be processed.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

—Jean de

Organizing "Waiting For"

Like reminders of the actions you need to do, reminders of all the things that you're waiting to get back from or get done by others have to be sorted and grouped. You won't necessarily be tracking discrete action steps here, but more often final deliverables or projects that others are responsible for, such as the tickets you've ordered from the theater, the scanner that's coming for the office, the OK on the proposal from your client, and so on. When the next action on something is up to someone else, you don't need an action reminder, just a trigger about what you're waiting for from whom. Your role is to review that list as often as you need to and assess whether you ought to be taking an action such as checking the status or lighting a fire under the project.