Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  Incubate

  There will probably be things in your in-basket about which you will say to yourself, “There’s nothing to do on this now, but there might be later.” Examples of this would be:

  • A flier announcing a chamber of commerce breakfast with a guest speaker you might want to hear, but it’s two weeks away, and you’re not sure yet if you’ll be at home then or out of town on a business trip.

  • An agenda for a board meeting you’ve been invited to attend in three weeks. No action is required on it, other than your briefing yourself a day ahead of the meeting by reading the agenda.

  • An advertisement for the next Quicken software upgrade for your personal finances. Do you really need this next version? You don’t know . . . you’d rather sleep on it for another week.

  • An idea you had about something you might want to do for next year’s annual sales meeting. There’s nothing to do on this now, but you’d like to be reminded when the time comes to start planning for it.

  • A note to yourself about taking a watercolor class, which you have zero time for right now.

  What do you do with these kinds of things? There are two options that could work:

  • Write them on a “Someday/Maybe” list.

  • Put them on your calendar or in a “tickler” file.

  The point of all of these incubation procedures is that they give you a way to get the items off your mind right now and let you feel confident that some reminder of the possible action will resurface at an appropriate time. I’ll elaborate on these in more detail in the next chapter, on organizing. For now, just put a Post-it on such items, and label them “maybe” or “remind on October 17,” and set them aside in a “pending” category you will be accumulating for later sorting.6

  Reference

  Many of the things you will uncover in “in” will need no action but may have value as potentially useful information about projects and topics. Ideally, you have already set up a workable filing system (as described in chapter 4) for your reference and support information. As you come across material in your in-basket and e-mail that you’d like to keep for archival or support purposes, file it.

  You’ll probably discover that there are lots of miscellaneous kinds of things that you want to keep but have piled up in stacks or stuffed into drawers because your reference system was too formal or just plain nonexistent. Let me remind you here that a less-than-sixty-second, fun-to-use general-reference filing system within arm’s reach of where you sit is a mission-critical component of full implementation of this methodology. In the “battle zone” of real life, if it’s not easy, fast, and fun to file, you’ll stack instead of organizing. And then it will become much more difficult to keep things processed.

  Whenever you come across something you want to keep, make a label for it, put it in a file folder, and tuck that into your filing drawer. Or put a Post-it on it instructing your secretary or assistant to do the same. In my early days of coaching I used to give my clients permission to keep a “To File” pile. No longer. I discovered that if you can’t get it into your system immediately, you’re probably not ever going to. If you won’t do it now, you likely won’t do it later, either.

  And If There Is an Action . . . What Is It?

  This is the biggie. If there’s something that needs to be done about the item in “in,” then you need to decide what exactly that next action is. “Next Actions” again, means the next physical, visible activity that would be required to move the situation toward closure.

  This is both easier and more difficult than it sounds.

  The next action should be easy to figure out, but there are often some quick analyses and several planning steps that haven’t occurred yet in your mind, and these have to happen before you can determine precisely what has to happen to complete the item, even if it’s a fairly simple one.

  Let’s look at a sample list of the things that a person might typically have his attention on.

  • Clean the garage

  • Do my taxes

  • Conference I’m going to

  • Bobby’s birthday

  • Press release

  • Performance reviews

  • Management changes

  Although each of these items may seem relatively clear as a task or project, determining the next action on each one will take some thought.

  • Clean the garage

  ... Well, I just have to get in there and start. No, wait a minute, there’s a big refrigerator in there that I need to get rid of first. I should find out if John Patrick wants it for his camp. I should . . .

  • Call John re refrigerator in garage

  What about . . .

  • Do my taxes

  ... but I actually can’t start on them until I have my last K-1 back. Can’t do anything until then. So I’m . . .

  • Waiting for K-1 from Acme Trust

  And for the . . .

  • Conference I’m going to

  ... I need to find out whether Sandra is going to prepare a press kit for us. I guess I need to . . .

  • E-mail Sandra re press kits for the conference

  ... and so forth. The action steps—“Call John,” “Waiting for K-1,” “E-mail Sandra”—are what need to be decided about everything that is actionable in your in-basket.

  The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to Do Remember that these are physical, visible activities. Many people think they’ve determined the “next action” when they get it down to “set meeting.” But that’s not the next action, because it’s not descriptive of physical behavior. How do you set a meeting? Well, it could be with a phone call or an e-mail, but to whom? Decide. If you don’t decide now, you’ll still have to decide at some other point, and what this process is designed to do is actually get you to finish the thinking exercise about this item. If you haven’t identified the next physical action required to kick-start it, there will be a psychological gap every time you think about it even vaguely. You’ll tend to resist noticing it.

  Until you know what the next physical action is, there’s still more thinking required before anything can happen.

  When you get to a phone or to your computer, you want to have all your thinking completed so you can use the tools you have and the location you’re in to more easily get things done, having already defined what there is to do.

  What if you say to yourself, “Well, the next thing I need to do is decide what to do about this?” That’s a tricky one. Deciding isn’t really an action, because actions take time, and deciding doesn’t. There’s always some physical activity that can be done to facilitate your decision-making. Ninety-nine percent of the time you just need more information before you can make a decision. That additional information can come from external sources (“Call Susan to get her input on the proposal”) or from internal thinking (“Draft ideas about new reorganization”). Either way, there’s still a next action to be determined in order to move the project forward.

  Determine what you need to do in order to decide.

  Once You Decide What the Action Step Is

  You have three options once you decide what the next action really is.

  • Do it (if the action takes less than two minutes).

  • Delegate it (if you’re not the most appropriate person to do the action).

  • Defer it into your organization system as an option for work to do later.

  Do It

  If the next action can be done in two minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. If the memo requires just a thirty-second reading and then a quick “yes”/“no”/other response on a Post-it back to the sender, do it now. If you can browse the catalog in just a minute or two to see if there might be anything of interest in it, browse away, and then toss it, route it, or reference it as required. If the next action on something is to leave a quick message on someone’s voice-mail, make the call now.

  Even if the item is not a “high priority”
one, do it now if you’re ever going to do it at all. The rationale for the two-minute rule is that that’s more or less the point where it starts taking longer to store and track an item than to deal with it the first time it’s in your hands—in other words, it’s the efficiency cutoff. If the thing’s not important enough to be done, throw it away. If it is, and if you’re going to do it sometime, the efficiency factor should come into play.

  Many people find that getting into the habit of following the two-minute rule creates a dramatic improvement in their productivity. One vice president of a large software company told me that it gave him an additional hour a day of quality discretionary time! He was one of those 300-e-mails-a-day high-tech execu tives, highly focused for most of the workday on three key initiatives. Many of those e-mails were from people who reported to him—and they needed his eyes on something, his comments and OKs, in order to move forward. But because they were not on a topic in his rifle sights, he would just stage the e-mails in “in,” to get to “later.” After several thousand of them piled up, he would have to go in to work and spend whole weekends trying to catch up. That would have been OK if he were twenty-six, when everything’s an adrenaline rush anyway, but he was in his thirties and had young kids. Working all weekend was no longer acceptable behavior. When I coached him we went through all 800-plus e-mails he currently had in “in.” It turned out that a lot could be dumped, quite a few needed to be filed as reference, and many others required less-than-two-minute replies that he whipped through. I checked with him a year later, and he was still current! He never let his e-mails mount up beyond a screenful anymore. He said it had changed the nature of his division because of the dramatic decrease in his own response time. His staff thought he was now made of Teflon!

  The two-minute rule is magic.

  That’s a rather dramatic testimonial, but it’s an indication of just how critical some of these simple processing behaviors can be, especially as the volume and speed of the input increase for you personally.

  Two minutes is in fact just a guideline. If you have a long open window of time in which to process your in-basket, you can extend the cutoff for each item to five or ten minutes. If you’ve got to get to the bottom of all your input rapidly, in order to figure out how best to use your afternoon, then you may want to shorten the time to one minute, or even thirty seconds, so you can get through everything a little faster.

  It’s not a bad idea to time yourself for a few of these while you’re becoming familiar with the process. Most clients I work with have difficulty estimating how long two minutes actually is, and they greatly underestimate how long certain actions are likely to take. For instance, if your action is to leave someone a message, and you get the real person instead of his or her voice-mail, the call will usually take quite a bit longer than two minutes.

  You’ll be surprised how many two-minute actions you can perform even on your most critical projects.

  There’s nothing you really need to track about your two-minute actions—you just do them. If, however, you take an action and don’t finish the project with that one action, you’ll need to clarify what’s next on it, and manage that according to the same criteria. For instance, if you act to replace the cartridge in your favorite pen and discover that you’re out of cartridge refills, you’ll want to decide on the next action about getting them (“Buy refills at the store”) and do, delegate, or defer it appropriately.

  Adhere to the two-minute rule and see how much you get done in the process of clearing out your “in” stacks. Many people are amazed by how many two-minute actions are possible, often on some of their most critical current projects.

  Let me make one more observation regarding the two-minute rule, this time as it relates to your comfort with typing e-mails. If you’re in a large-volume e-mail environment, you’ll greatly improve your productivity by increasing your typing speed and using the shortcut keyboard commands for your operating system and your common e-mail software. Too many sophisticated professionals are seriously hamstrung because they still hunt and peck and try to use their mouse too much. More work could be dispatched faster by combining the two-minute rule with improved computer skills. I’ve found that many executives aren’t resisting technology, they’re just resisting their keyboards!

  Delegate It

  If the next action is going to take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, “Am I the best person to be doing it?” If not, hand it off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format.

  Delegation is not always downstream. You may decide, “This has got to get over to Customer Service,” or “My boss needs to put his eyes on this next,” or “I need my partner’s point of view on this.”

  A “systematic format” could be any of the following:

  • Send the appropriate party an e-mail.

  • Write a note or an overnote on paper and route the item “out” to that person.

  • Leave him or her a voice-mail.

  • Add it as an agenda item on a list for your next real-time conversation with that person.

  • Talk to him or her directly, either face-to-face or by phone.

  Although any of these options can work, I would recommend them in the above order, top to bottom. E-mail is usually the fastest mode into the system; it provides an electronic record; and the receiver gets to deal with it at his or her convenience. Written notes are next because they too can get into the system immediately, and the recipient then has a physical particle to use as an organizational reminder. If you’re passing on paper-based material as part of the handoff, a written communication is obviously the way to go; as with e-mail, the person you hand it off to can then deal with it on his or her own schedule. Voice-mail can be efficient, and many professionals live by it; the downside is that tracking becomes an additional requirement for both you and the recipient, and what you say is not always what gets heard. Next would be saving the communication on an agenda list or in a folder for your next regular meeting with the person. Sometimes this is necessary because of the sensitive or detailed nature of the topic, but it then must wait to get moving until that meeting occurs. The least preferable option would be to interrupt what both you and the person are doing to talk about the item. This is immediate, but it hampers workflow for both of you and has the same downside as voice-mail: no written record.

  Tracking the Handoff If you do delegate an action to someone else, and if you care at all whether something happens as a result, you’ll need to track it. As I will walk you through in the next chapter, about organizing, you’ll see that a significant category to manage is “Waiting For.”

  As you develop your own customized system, what you eventually hand off and then track could look like a list in a planner, a file folder holding separate papers for each item, and/or a list categorized as “Waiting For” in your software. For now, if you don’t have a trusted system set up already, just put a note on a piece of paper—“W/F: reply from Bob”—and put that into a “Pending” stack of notes in a separate pile or tray that may result from your processing.

  What If the Ball Is Already in Someone Else’s Court? In the example cited above about waiting for the last K-1 to come in so you can do your taxes, the next action is currently on someone else’s plate. In such situations you will also want to track the action as a delegated item, or as a “Waiting For.” On the paper that says “Do my taxes,” write something like “Waiting for K-1 from Acme Trust” and put that into your “Pending” stack.

  It’s important that you record the date on everything you hand off to others. This, of all the categories in your personal system, is the most crucial one to keep tabs on. The few times you will actually want to refer to that information (“But I called and ordered that on March 12”) will make it worth establishing this as a lifelong habit.

  Defer It

  It’s likely that most of the next actions you determine for things in “in” will be yours to do and will take longer than two minutes to complete. A cal
l you need to make to a customer; an e-mail you need to spend a little time thinking about and drafting to your team; a gift you need to buy for your brother at the stationery store; a piece of software you need to download from the Web and try out; a conversation you must have with your spouse about an investment you think you should make—all of these fit that description.

  These actions will have to be written down somewhere and then organized in the appropriate categories so you can access them when you need to. For the moment, go ahead and put Post-its on the pieces of paper in “in,” with the action written on them, and add these to the “Pending” stack of papers that have been processed.

  The “Pending” Things That Are Left

  If you follow the instructions in this chapter, you’ll dump a mess of things, file a bunch, do a lot of two-minute actions, and hand off a number of items to other people. You’ll also wind up with a stack of items that have actions associated with them that you still need to do—soon, someday, or on a specific date—and reminders of things you’re waiting on from other people. This “Pending” group is made up of the actions you’ve delegated or deferred. It is what still needs to be organized in some fashion in your personal system, a topic I’ll cover in step-by-step detail in the next chapter.