GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it's still "stuff"—that is, they haven't decided what's actionable and what's not. Once you've made a clean distinction about which is which, what's left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it's just your library.Your only decision then is how big a library you want. When you've fully implemented this action-management methodology, you can be as big a packrat as your space (physical and digital) will allow. As I've increased the size of the hard disk in my computer, I've kept that much more e-mail in my archives. The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned, since increasing the volume of pure reference material adds no psychic weight.

The Variety of Reference Systems

There are a number of ways to organize reference material, and many types of tools to use. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the most common.

• General-reference filing—paper and e-mail

• Large-category filing

• Rolodexes and contact managers

• Libraries and archives

General-Reference Filing As I'Ve said, a good filing system is critical for processing and organizing your stuff. It's also a must for dealing with the sometimes huge volume of paper-based materials that are valuable for you for one reason or another. Ideally you will already have set up a general-reference filing system as you were processing "in." You need to feel comfortable storing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later, and your system must be informal and accessible enough that it's a snap to file it away in your alphabetized general-reference system, right at hand where you work. If you're not set up that way yet, look back at chapter 4 for help on this topic.

Your filing system should be a simple library of data, easily retrievable — not your reminder for actions, projects, priorities

Most people seem to wind up with 200 to 400 paper-based general-reference files and 30 to 100 e-mail reference folders.

Large-Category Filing Any topic that requires more than fifty file folders should probably be given its own section or drawer, with its own alpha-sorted system. For instance, if you're managing a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paper-work, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at least a whole file drawer for those designated hobbies.

Bear in mind that if your "area of focus" has support material that could blend into other "areas of focus," you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files. When you read a great article about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your "Garden" cabinet or in the general system with other information about home-related projects? As a general rule, it's best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

Rolodexes and Contact Managers Much of the information that you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You need to track contact information of all sorts—home and office phone numbers and addresses, cell-phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you may want to maintain information about birthdays, names of friends' and colleagues' family members, hobbies, favorite wines and foods, and the like. In a more rigorous professional vein, you may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates, goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff development purposes.

The telephone/address section of most of the organizers sold in the last fifty years is probably (along with the calendar) their most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track of phone numbers. It's instructive to note that this is purely and simply reference material. No action is required—this is just information that you might need to access in the future.

So there's no big mystery about how to organize it, aside from the logistics for your individual needs. Again, the only problem comes up when people try to make their Rolodexes serve as tools for reminding them about things they need to do. That doesn't work. As long as all the actions relative to people you know have been identified and tracked in your action reminder lists, there's no role for telephone and address systems to fill other than being a neutral address book.