by David Allen
Whatever your life-style, you need a weekly regrouping ritual. You likely have something like this (or close to it) already. If so, leverage the habit by adding into it a higher-altitude review process.
The people who find it hardest to make time for this review are those who have constantly on-demand work and home environments, with zero built-in time or space for regrouping. The most stressed professionals I have met are the ones who have to be mission-critically reactive at work (e.g., high-level equities traders and chiefs of staff) and then go home to a couple of under-ten-year-old children and a spouse who also works. The more fortunate of them have a one-hour train commute.
If you recognize yourself in that picture, your greatest challenge will be to build in a consistent process of regrouping, when your world is not directly in your face. You’ll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home.
Executive Operational Review Time I’ve coached many executives to block out two hours on their calendars on Fridays. For them the biggest problem is how to balance quality thinking and catch-up time with the urgent demands of mission-critical interactions. This is a tough call. The most senior and savvy of them, however, know the value of sacrificing the seemingly urgent for the truly important, and they create their islands of time for some version of this process.
Your best thoughts about work won’t happen while you’re at work.
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.
The “Bigger Picture” Reviews
Yes, at some point you must clarify the larger outcomes, 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.
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 con-
sciously 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
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.
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
Ultimately and always you must trust your intuition. There are many things you can do, however, that can increase that trust.
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
At any point in time, the first thing to consider is, what could you possibly do, where you are, with the tools you have? Do you have a phone? Do you have access to the person you need to talk with face-to-face about three agenda items? Are you at the store where you need to buy something? If you can’t do the action because you’re not in the appropriate location or don’t have the appropriate tool, don’t worry about it.
As I’ve said, you should always organize your action reminders by context—“Calls,” “At Home,” “At Computer,” “Errands,” “Agenda for Joe,” “Agenda for Staff Meeting,” and so on. Since context is the first criterion that comes into play in your choice of actions, context-sorted lists prevent unnecessary reassessments about what to do. If you have a bunch of things to do on one to-do list, but you actually can’t do many of them in the same context, you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.
If you’re stuck in traffic, and the only actions you can take are calls on your cell phone, you want to be able to pull out just your “Calls” list. Your action lists should fold in or out, based on what you could possibly do at any time.
A second real benefit accrues from organizing all your actions by the physical context needed: that in itself forces you to make the all-important determination about the next physical action on your stuff. All of my action lists are set up this way, so I have to decide on the very next physical action before I can know which list to put an item on (is this something that requires the computer? a phone? being in a store?). People who give themselves a “Misc.” action list (i.e., one not specific to a context) often let themselves slide in the next-action decision, too.
I frequently encourage clients to structure their list categories early on as they’re processing their in-baskets, because that automatically grounds their projects in the real things that need to get done to get them moving.
Time Available
The second factor in choosing an action is how much time you have before you have to do something else. If your me
eting is starting in ten minutes, you’ll most likely select a different action to do right now than you would if the next couple of hours were clear.
Obviously, it’s good to know how much time you have at hand (hence the emphasis on calendar and watch). A total-life action-reminder inventory will give you maximum information about what you need to do, and make it much easier to match your actions to the windows you have. In other words, if you have ten minutes before that next meeting, find a ten-minute thing to do. If your lists have only the “big” or “important” things on them, no item listed may be possible to handle in a ten-minute period. If you’re going to have to do those shorter action things anyway, the most productive way to get them done is to utilize the little “weird time” windows that occur throughout the day.
Energy Available
We all have times when we think more effectively, and times when we should not be thinking at all.
—Daniel Cohen
Although you can increase your energy level at times by changing your context and redirecting your focus, you can do only so much. The tail end of a day taken up mostly by a marathon budget-planning session is probably not the best time to call a prospective client or start drafting a performance-review policy. It might be better to call the airline to change a reservation, process some expense receipts, or skim a trade journal.
Just as having all your next-action options available allows you to take advantage of various time slots, knowing about everything you’re going to need to process and do at some point will allow you to match productive activity with your vitality level.
I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you’re in one of those low-energy states, do them. Casual reading (magazines, articles, and catalogs), telephone/address data that need to be inputted onto your computer, file purging, backing up your laptop, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler—these are some of the myriad things that you’ve got to deal with sometime anyway.
This is one of the best reasons for having very clean edges to your personal management system: it makes it easy to continue doing productive activity when you’re not in top form. If you’re in a low-energy mode and your reading material is disorganized, your receipts are all over the place, your filing system is chaotic, and your in-basket is dysfunctional, it just seems like too much work to do to find and organize the tasks at hand; so you simply avoid doing anything at all and then you feel even worse. One of the best ways to increase your energy is to close some of your loops. So always be sure to have some easy loops to close, right at hand.
There is no reason not to be highly productive, even when you’re not in top form.
These first three criteria for choosing action (context, time, and energy) bespeak the need for a complete next-action reminder system. Sometimes you won’t be in a mode to do that kind of thinking; it needs to have already been done. If it is, you can operate much more “in your zone” and choose from delineated actions that fit the situation.
Priority
Given the context you’re in and the time and energy you have, the obvious next criterion for action choice is relative priority: “Out of all my remaining options, what is the most important thing for me to do?”
“How do I decide my priorities?” is a question I frequently hear from people I’m working with. It springs from their experience of having more on their plate to do than they can comfortably handle. They know that some hard choices have to be made, and that some things may not get done at all.
At the end of the day, in order to feel good about
It is impossible to feel good about your choices unless you are clear about what your work really is.
what you didn’t get done, you must have made some conscious decisions about your responsibilities, goals, and values. That process invariably includes an often complex interplay with the goals, values, and directions of your organization and of the other significant people in your life, and with the importance of those relationships to you.
The Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work
Setting priorities assumes that some things will be more important than others, but important relative to what? In this context, the answer is, to your work—that is, the job you have accepted from yourself and/or from others. This is where the next two frameworks need to be brought to bear in your thinking. They’re about defining your work. Keep in mind that though much of this methodology will be within the arena of your professional focus, I’m using “work” in the universal sense, to mean anything you have a commitment to making happen, personally as well as professionally.
These days, daily work activity itself presents a relatively new type of challenge to most professionals, something that it’s helpful to understand as we endeavor to build the most productive systems. As I explained earlier, during the course of the workday, at any point in time, you’ll be engaged in one of three types of activities:
• Doing predefined work
• Doing work as it shows up
• Defining your work
You may be doing things on your action lists, doing things as they come up, or processing incoming inputs to determine what work that needs to be done, either then or later, from your lists.
This is common sense. But many people let themselves get wrapped around the second activity—dealing with things that show up ad hoc—much too easily, and let the other two slide, to their detriment.
Let’s say it’s 10:26 A.M. Monday, and you’re in your office. You’ve just ended a half-hour unexpected phone call with a prospective client. You have three pages of scribbled notes from the conversation. There’s a meeting scheduled with your staff at eleven, about half an hour from now. You were out late last night with your spouse’s parents and are still a little frayed around the edges (you told your father-in-law you’d get back to him about . . . what?). Your assistant just laid six telephone messages in front of you. You have a major strategic-planning session coming up in two days, for which you have yet to formulate your ideas. The oil light in your car came on as you drove to work this morning. And your boss hinted as you passed her earlier in the hall that she’d like your thoughts on the memo she e-mailed you yesterday, before this afternoon’s three o’clock meeting.
Are your systems set up to maximally support dealing with this reality, at 10:26 on Monday morning? If you’re still keeping things in your head, and if you’re still trying to capture only the “critical” stuff on your lists, I suggest that the answer is no.
I’ve noticed that people are actually more comfortable dealing with surprises and crises than they are taking control of processing, organizing, reviewing, and assessing that part of their work that is not as self-evident. It’s easy to get sucked into “busy” and “urgent” mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your e-mail, and on your mind.
It is often easier to get wrapped up in the urgent demands of the moment than to deal with your in-basket, e-mail, and the rest of your open loops.
In fact, much of our life and work just shows up in the moment, and it usually becomes the priority when it does. It’s indeed true for most professionals that the nature of their job requires them to be instantly available to handle new work as it appears in many forms. For instance, you need to pay attention to your boss when he shows up and wants a few minutes of your time. You get a request from a senior executive that suddenly takes precedence over anything else you thought you needed to do today. You find out about a serious problem with fulfilling a major customer’s order, and you have to take care of it right away.
These are all understandable judgment calls. But the angst begins to mount when the other actions on your lists are not reviewed and renegotiated by you or between you and everyone else. The constant sacrifices of not doing the work you have defined on your lists can be tolerated only if you know what you’re not doing. Th
at requires regular processing of your in-basket (defining your work) and consistent review of complete lists of all your predetermined work.
If choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, that’s playing the game the best way you can. Most people, however, have major improvements to make in how they clarify, manage, and renegotiate their total inventory of projects and actions. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you’re not dealing with, the result is frustration and anxiety. Too often the stress and lowered effectiveness are blamed on the “surprises.” If you know what you’re doing, and what you’re not doing, surprises are just another opportunity to be creative and excel.
In addition, when the in-basket and the action lists get ignored for too long, random things lying in them tend to surface as emergencies later on, adding more ad hoc work-as-it-shows-up to fuel the fire.
Many people use the inevitablity of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It’s easy to get seduced into not-quite-so-critical stuff that is right at hand, especially if your in-basket and your personal organization are out of control. Too often “managing by wandering around” is an excuse for getting away from amorphous piles of stuff.