by David Allen
General-Reference Filing The second type of reference system is one that everyone needs close at hand for storing ad hoc information that doesn’t belong in some predesignated category. You need somewhere to keep the instruction manual for your cell phone, the notes from the meeting about the Smith project, and those few yen that you didn’t get to change at the end of your last trip to Tokyo (and that you’ll use when you go back there).
The lack of a good general-reference file can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal action-management system. If filing isn’t easy and fast (and even fun!), you’ll tend to stack things instead of filing them. If your reference material doesn’t have a nice clean edge to it, the line between actionable and nonactionable items will blur, visually and psychologically, and your mind will go numb to the whole business. Establishing a good working system for this category of material is critical to ensuring stress-free productivity; we will explore it in detail in chapter 7.
Review
It’s one thing to write down that you need milk; it’s another to be at the store and remember it. Likewise, writing down that you need to call a friend for the name of an estate attorney is different from remembering it when you’re at a phone and have some discretionary time.
You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels. For most people the magic of workflow management is realized in the consistent use of the review phase. This is where you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops, at what I call the 10,000-foot level (see page 51), on a weekly basis. It’s your chance to scan all the defined actions and options before you, thus radically increasing the efficacy of the choices you make about what you’re doing at any point in time.
What to Review When
If you set up a personal organization system structured as I recommend, with a “Projects” list, a calendar, “Next Actions” lists, and a “Waiting For” list, not much will be required to maintain that system.
The item you’ll probably review most frequently is your calendar, which will remind you about the “hard landscape” for the day—that is, what things will die if you don’t do them. This doesn’t mean that the things written on there are the most “important” in some grand sense—only that they have to get done. At at any point in time, knowing what has to get done, and when, creates a terrain for maneuvering. It’s a good habit, as soon as you conclude an action on your calendar (a meeting, a phone call, the final draft of a report), to check and see what else remains to be done.
Review your lists as often as you need to, to get them off your mind.
After checking your calendar, you’ll most often turn to your “Next Actions” lists. These hold the inventory of predefined actions that you can take if you have any discretionary time during the day. If you’ve organized them by context (“At Home,” “At Computer,” “In Meeting with George”), they’ll come into play only when those contexts are available.
“Projects,” “Waiting For,” and “Someday/Maybe” lists need to be reviewed only as often as you think they have to be in order to stop you from wondering about them.
Critical Success Factor: The Weekly Review
Everything that might potentially require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding. In order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some more elevated level. In my experience (with thousands of people), that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review.
All of your open loops (i.e., projects), active project plans, and “Next Actions,” “Agendas,” “Waiting For,” and even “Someday/ Maybe” lists should be reviewed once a week. This also gives you an opportunity to ensure that your brain is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few days have been collected, processed, and organized.
If you’re like most people, you’ve found that things can get relatively out of control during the course of a few days of operational intensity. That’s to be expected. You wouldn’t want to distract yourself from too much of the work at hand in an effort to stay totally “squeaky clean” all the time. But in order to afford the luxury of “getting on a roll” with confidence, you’ll probably need to clean house once a week.
The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.
—James Fenimore Cooper
The Weekly Review is the time to
• Gather and process all your “stuff.”
• Review your system.
• Update your lists.
• Get clean, clear, current, and complete.
Most people don’t have a really complete system, and they get no real payoff from reviewing things for just that reason: their overview isn’t total. They still have a vague sense that something may be missing. That’s why the rewards to be gained from implementing this whole process are at least geometric: the more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it. The Weekly Review is a master key to maintaining that standard.
Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.
Most people feel best about their work when they’ve cleaned up, closed up, clarified, and renegotiated all their agreements with themselves and others. Do this weekly instead of yearly.
Do
The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. At 10:33 A.M. Monday, deciding whether to call Sandy, finish the proposal, or process your e-mails will always be an intuitive call, but with the proper preplanning you can feel much more confident about your choices. You can move from hope to trust in your actions, immediately increasing your speed and effectiveness.
Every decision to act is an intuitive one. The challenge is to migrate from hoping it’s the right choice to trusting it’s the right choice.
Three Models for Making Action Choices
Let’s assume for a moment that you’re not resisting any of your “stuff” out of insecurity or procrastination. There will always be a large list of actions that you are not doing at any given moment. So how will you decide what to do and what not to do, and feel good about both?
The answer is, by trusting your intuition. If you have collected , processed, organized, and reviewed all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgment with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work and values.
You have more to do than you can possibly do. You just need to feel good about your choices.
I have developed three models that will be helpful for you to incorporate in your decision-making about what to do. They won’t tell you answers—whether you call Frederick, e-mail your son at school, or just go have an informal “how are you?” conversation with your secretary—but they will assist you in framing your options more intelligently. And that’s something that the simple time- and priority-management panaceas can’t do.
1. The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment
At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? There are four criteria you can apply, in this order:
1. | Context
2. | Time available
3. | Energy available
4. | Priority
Context A few actions can be done anywhere (like drafting ideas about a project with pen and paper), but most require a specific location (at home, at your office) or having some productivity tool at hand, such as
a phone or a computer. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment.
Time Available When do you have to do something else? Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing many actions that require more time.
Energy Available How much energy do you have? Some actions you have to do require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy. Others need more physical horsepower. Some need very little of either.
Priority Given your context, time, and energy available, what action will give you the highest payoff? You have an hour, you’re in your office with a phone and a computer, and your energy is 7.3 on a scale of 10. Should you call the client back, work on the proposal, process your voice-mails and e-mails, or check in with your spouse to see how his or her day is going?
This is where you need to access your intution and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment. To explore that concept further, let’s examine two more models for deciding what’s “most important” for you to be doing.
2. The Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work
When you’re getting things done, or “working” in the universal sense, there are three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in:
• Doing predefined work
• Doing work as it shows up
• Defining your work
Doing Predefined Work When you’re doing predefined work, you’re working off your “Next Actions” lists—completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, managing your workflow. You’re making the calls you need to make, drafting ideas you want to brainstorm, or preparing a list of things to talk to your attorney about.
Doing Work as It Shows Up Often things come up ad hoc—unsuspected, unforeseen—that you either have to or choose to respond to as they occur. For example, your partner walks into your office and wants to have a conversation about the new product launch, so you talk to her instead of doing all the other things you could be doing. Every day brings surprises—unplanned-for things that just show up, and you’ll need to expend at least some time and energy on many of them. When you follow these leads, you’re deciding by default that these things are more important than anything else you have to do.
Defining Your Work Defining your work entails clearing up your in-basket, your e-mail, your voice-mail, and your meeting notes and breaking down new projects into actionable steps. As you process your inputs, you’ll no doubt be taking care of some less-than-two-minute actions and tossing and filing numerous things (another version of doing work as it shows up). A good portion of this activity will consist of identifying things that need to get done sometime, but not right away. You’ll be adding to all of your lists as you go along.
Once you have defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete. And your context, time, and energy available still allow you the option of more than one thing to do. The final thing to consider is the nature of your work, and its goals and standards.
3. The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work
Priorities should drive your choices, but most models for determining them are not reliable tools for much of our real work activity. In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is. And there are at least six different perspectives from which to define that. To use an aerospace analogy, the conversation has a lot to do with the altitude.
• 50,000+ feet: Life
• 40,000 feet: Three- to five-year vision
• 30,000 feet: One- to two-year goals
• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
• 10,000 feet: Current projects
• Runway: Current actions
Let’s start from the bottom up:
Runway: Current Actions This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take—all the phone calls you have to make, the e-mails you have to respond to, the errands you’ve got to run, and the agendas you want to communicate to your boss and your spouse. You’d probably have three hundred to five hundred hours’ worth of these things to do if you stopped the world right now and got no more input from yourself or anyone else.
10,000 Feet: Current Projects Creating many of the actions that you currently have in front of you are the thirty to one hundred projects on your plate. These are the relatively short-term outcomes you want to achieve, such as setting up a home computer, organizing a sales conference, moving to a new headquarters, and getting a dentist.
20,000 Feet: Areas of Responsibility You create or accept most of your projects because of your responsibilities, which for most people can be defined in ten to fifteen categories. These are the key areas within which you want to achieve results and maintain standards. Your job may entail at least implicit commitments for things like strategic planning, administrative support, staff development, market research, customer service, or asset management. And your personal life has an equal number of such focus arenas: health, family, finances, home environment, spirituality, recreation, etc. Listing and reviewing these responsibilities gives a more comprehensive framework for evaluating your inventory of projects.
30,000 Feet: One- to Two-Year Goals What you want to be experiencing in the various areas of your life and work one to two years from now will add another dimension to defining your work. Often meeting the goals and objectives of your job will require a shift in emphasis of your job focus, with new areas of responsibility emerging. At this horizon personally, too, there probably are things you’d like to accomplish or have in place, which could add importance to certain aspects of your life and diminish others.
40,000 Feet: Three- to Five-Year Vision Projecting three to five years into the future generates thinking about bigger categories: organization strategies, environmental trends, career and life-transition circumstances. Internal factors include longer-term career, family, and financial goals and considerations. Outer-world issues could involve changes affecting your job and organization, such as technology, globalization, market trends, and competition. Decisions at this altitude could easily change what your work might look like on many levels.
50,000+ Feet: Life This is the “big picture” view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its “work” really is. It is the ultimate job description. All the goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it.
These altitude analogies are somewhat arbitrary, and in real life the important conversations you will have about your focus and your priorities may not fit exactly to one horizon or another. They can provide a useful framework, however, to remind you of the multilayered nature of your “job” and resulting commitments and tasks.
Obviously, many factors must be considered before you feel comfortable that you have made the best decision about what to do and when. “Setting priorities” in the traditional sense of focusing on your long-term goals and values, though obviously a necessary core focus, does not provide a practical framework for a vast majority of the decisions and tasks you must engage in day to day. Mastering the flow of your work at all the levels you experience that work provides a much more holistic way to get things done, and feel good about it.
Part 2 of this book will provide specific coaching about how to use these three models for making action choices, and how the best practices for collecting, processing, planning, organizing, and reviewing all contribute to your greatest success with them.
3
Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning
You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
—Alvin Toffler
THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Although it ma
y seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.
Enhancing “Vertical” Focus
Horizontal focus is all you’ll need in most situations, most of the time. Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been determined. This is where vertical focus comes in. Knowing how to think productively in this more “vertical” way and how to integrate the results into your personal system is the second powerful behavior set needed for knowledge work.
The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.
This kind of thinking doesn’t have to be elaborate. Most of the thinking you’ll need to do is informal, what I call back-of-the-envelope planning—the kind of thing you do literally on the back of an envelope in a coffee shop with a colleague as you’re hashing out the agenda and structure of a sales presentation. In my experience this tends to be the most productive kind of planning you can do in terms of your output relative to the energy you put into it. True, every once in a while you may need to develop a more formal structure or plan to clarify components, sequences, or priorities. And more detailed outlines will also be necessary to coordinate more complex situations—if teams need to collaborate about various project pieces, for example, or if business plans need to be drafted to convince an investor you know what you’re doing. But as a general rule, you can be pretty creative with nothing more than an envelope and a pencil.