GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Even the executives who have integrated a consistent reflective time for their work, though, often seem to give short shrift to the more mundane review and catch-up process at the "10,000-foot" level. Between wall-to-wall meetings and ambling around your koi pond with a chardonnay at sunset, there's got to be a slightly elevated level of reflection and regrouping required for operational control and focus. If you think you have all your open loops fully identified, clarified, assessed, and actionalized, you're probably kidding yourself.

Thinking is the very essence of and the most difficult thing to do in, business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work. . . while others party. If you're not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking . . . then you're giving in to laziness and no longer control your life.

—David Kekich

The"Bigger Picture" Reviews

Yes, at some point you must clarify the larger out-comes, the long-term goals, the visions and principles that ultimately drive and test your decisions.

What are your key goals and objectives in your work? What should you have in place a year or three years from now? How is your career going? Is this the life-style that is most fulfilling to you? Are you doing what you really want or need to do, from a deeper and longer-term perspective?

The explicit focus of this book is not at those "30,000-" to "50,000+-foot" levels. Urging you to operate from a higher perspective is, however, its implicit purpose—to assist you in making your total life expression more fulfilling and better aligned with the bigger game we're all about. As you increase the speed and agility with which you clear the "runway" and "10,000-foot" levels of your life and work, be sure to revisit the other levels you're engaged in, now and then, to maintain a truly clear head.

How often you ought to challenge yourself with that type of wide-ranging review is something only you can know. The principle I must affirm at this juncture is this:

You need to assess your life and work at the appropriate horizons, making the appropriate decisions, at the appropriate intervals, in order to really come clean.

Which brings us to the ultimate point and challenge of all this personal collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing methodology: It's 9:22 A.M. Wednesday morning—what do you do?

9. Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

WHEN IT COMES to your real-time, plow-through, get-it-done workday, how do you decide what to do at any given point?

As I've said, my simple answer is, trust your heart. Or your spirit. Or, if you're allergic to those kinds of words, try these: your gut, the seat of your pants, your intuition.

Ultimately and always you must trust your intuition. There are many things you can do, however, that can increase that trust.

That doesn't mean you throw your life to the winds—unless, of course, it does. I actually went down that route myself with some vengeance at one point in my life, and I can attest that the lessons were valuable, if not necessarily necessary.[13]

As outlined in chapter 2 (pages 48-53), I have found three priority frameworks to be enormously helpful in the context of deciding actions:

• The four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment

• The threefold model for evaluating daily work

• The six-level model for reviewing your own work

These happen to be shown in reverse hierarchical order— that is, the reverse of the typical strategic top-down perspective. In keeping with the nature of the Getting Things Done methodology, I have found it useful to once again work from the bottom, up, meaning I'll start with the most mundane levels.

The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment

Remember that you make your action choices based on the following four criteria, in order:

1 | Context

2 | Time available

3 | Energy available

4 | Priority

Let's examine each of these in the light of how you can best structure your systems and behaviors to take advantage of its dynamics.

Context