GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

All of these items could in turn be included on the lists in your personal system, as reminders to you, as needed, to keep the ship on course, on an even keel.

The More Novel the Situation, the More Control Is Required

The degree to which any of us needs to maintain checklists and external controls is directly related to our unfamiliarity with the area of responsibility. If you've been doing what you're doing for a long time, and there's no pressure on you to change in that area, you probably need minimal external personal organization to stay on cruise control. You know when things must happen, and how to make them happen, and your system is fine, status quo. Often, though, that's not the case.

Many times you'll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you're more familiar with what you're doing. If your CEO suddenly disappeared, for example, and you had instantly to fill his shoes, you'd need some overviews and outlines in front of you for a while to ensure that you had all the mission-critical aspects of the job handled. And if you've just been hired into a new position, with new responsibilities that are relatively unfamiliar to you, you'll want a framework of control and, structure, if only for the first few months.

There have been times when I needed to make a list of areas that I had to handle, temporarily, until things were under control. For instance, when my wife and I decided to create a brand-new structure for a business we'd been involved with for many years, I took on areas of responsibility I'd never had to deal with before— namely, accounting, computers, marketing, legal, and administration. For several months I needed to keep a checklist of those responsibilities in front of me to ensure that I filled in the blanks everywhere and managed the transition as well as I could. After the business got onto "cruise control" to some degree, I no longer needed that list.

Checklists can be highly useful to let you know what you don't need to be concerned about.

Checklists at All Levels

Be open to creating any kind of checklist as the urge strikes you. The possibilities are endless—from "Core Life Values" to "Things to Take Camping." Making lists, ad hoc, as they occur to you, is one of the most powerful yet subtlest and simplest procedures that you can install in your life.

To spark your creative thinking, here's a list of some of the topics of checklists I've seen and used over the years:

• Personal Affirmations (i.e., personal value statements)

• Job Areas of Responsibility (key responsibility areas)

• Travel Checklist (everything to take on or do before a trip)

• Weekly Review (everything to review and/or update on a weekly basis)

• Training Program Components (all the things to handle when putting on an event, front to back)

• Clients

• Conference Checklist (everything to handle when putting on a conference)

• Focus Areas (key life roles and responsibilities)

• Key People in My Life/Work (relationships to assess regularly for completion and opportunity development)

• Organization Chart (key people and areas of output to manage and maintain)

• Personal Development (things to evaluate regularly to ensure personal balance and progress)

Get comfortable with checklists, both ad hoc and more permanent. Be ready to create and eliminate them as required. Appropriately used, they can be a tremendous asset in personal productivity.

If in fact you have now collected everything that represents an open loop in your life and work, processed each one of those items in terms of what it means to you and what actions are required, and organized the results into a complete system that holds a current and complete overview—large and small—of all your present and "someday" projects, then you're ready for the next phase of implementation in the art of stress-free productivity—the review process.

8. Reviewing:KeepingYour System Functional

THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you're doing what you need to be doing, and that it's OK to be not doing what you're not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control.

If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with all the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won't get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which, as you should know by now, it doesn't do very effectively.