Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  1. | Lower your standards about your garage (you may have done that already). “So I have a crappy garage . . . who cares?”

  2. | Keep the agreement—clean the garage.

  3. | At least put “Clean garage” on a “Someday/Maybe” list. Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, “Not this week.” The next time you walk by your garage, you won’t hear a thing internally, other than “Ha! Not this week.”

  I’m quite sincere about this. It seems that there’s a part of our psyche that doesn’t know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company. In there, they’re both just agreements—kept or broken. If you’re holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you’re not moving on it in the moment.

  The Radical Departure from Traditional Time Management

  This method is significantly different from traditional time-management training. Most of those models leave you with the impression that if something you tell yourself to do isn’t that important, then it’s not that important—to track, manage, or deal with. But in my experience that’s inaccurate, at least in terms of how a less-than-conscious part of us operates. It is how our conscious mind operates, however, so every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn’t happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves.

  In my experience, anything that is held only in “psychic RAM” will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it’s that it’s not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

  How Much Collection Is Required?

  You’ll feel better collecting anything that you haven’t collected yet. When you say to yourself, “Oh, that’s right, I need to get butter next time I’m at the store,” and you write it on your grocery list, you’ll feel better. When you remember, “I’ve got to call my banker about the trust fund,” and you write that down someplace where you know you’ll see it when you’re at a phone, you’ll feel better. But there will be a light-year’s difference when you know you have it all.

  When will you know how much you have left in your head to collect? Only when there’s nothing left. If some part of you is even vaguely aware that you don’t have it all, you can’t really know what percentage you have collected. How will you know when there’s nothing left? When nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind.

  This doesn’t mean that your mind will be empty. If you’re conscious, your mind will always be focusing on something. But if it’s focusing on only one thing at a time, without distraction, you’ll be in your “zone.”

  I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist. To fully realize that more productive place, you will need to capture it all. It takes focus and a change of habit to train yourself to recognize and download even the smallest agreements with yourself as they’re created in your mind. Doing the collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behavior of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering and productive.

  When Relationships and Organizations Have the Collection Habit

  What happens when everyone involved on a team—in a marriage, in a department, on a staff, in a family, in a company—can be trusted not to let anything slip through the cracks? Frankly, once you’ve achieved that, you’ll hardly think about whether people are dropping the ball anymore—there will be much bigger things to occupy your attention.

  But if communication gaps are still an issue, there’s likely some layer of frustration and a general nervousness in the culture. Most people feel that without constant baby-sitting and hand-holding, things could disappear in the system and then blow up at any time. They don’t realize that they’re feeling this because they’ve been in this situation so consistently that they relate to it as if it were a permanent law, like gravity. It doesn’t have to be that way.

  I have noticed this for years. Good people who haven’t incorporated these behaviors come into my environment, and they stick out like a sore thumb. I’ve lived with the standards of clear psychic RAM and hard, clean edges on in-baskets for more than two decades now. When a note sits idle in someone’s in-basket unprocessed, or when he or she nods “yes, I will” in a conversation but doesn’t write anything down, my “uh-oh” bell rings. This is unacceptable behavior in my world. There are much bigger fish to fry than worrying about leaks in the system.

  Bailing water in a leaky boat diverts energy from rowing the boat.

  I need to trust that any request or relevant information I put on a voice-mail, in an e-mail, in a conversation, or in a written note will get into the other person’s system and that it will be processed and organized, soon, and available for his or her review as an option for action. If the recipient is managing voice-mails but not e-mail and paper, I have now been hamstrung to use only his or her trusted medium. That should be unacceptable behavior in any organization that cares about whether things happen with the least amount of effort.

  When change is required, there must be trust that the initiatives for that change will be dealt with appropriately. Any intact system will ultimately be only as good as its weakest link, and often that Achilles’ heel is a key person’s dulled responsiveness to communications in the system.

  I especially notice this when I walk around organizations where in-baskets are either nonexistent, or overflowing and obviously long unprocessed. These cultures usually suffer from serious “interruptitis” because they can’t trust putting communications into the system.

  Where cultures do have solid systems, down through the level of paper, the clarity is palpable. It’s hardly even a conscious concern, and everyone’s attention is more focused. The same is true in families that have instituted in-baskets—for the parents, the children, the nanny, the housekeeper, or anyone else with whom family members frequently interact. People often grimace when I tell them that my wife, Kathryn, and I put things in each other’s in-baskets, even when we’re sitting within a few feet of each other; to them it seems “cold and mechanical.” Aside from being an act of politeness intended to avoid interrupting the other’s work in progress, the practice actually fosters more warmth and freedom between us, because mechanical things are being handled in the system instead of tying up our attention in the relationship.

  Unfortunately, you can’t legislate personal systems. Everyone must have his or her own way to deal with what he or she has to deal with. You can, however, hold people accountable for outcomes, and for tracking and managing everything that comes their way. And you can give them the information in this book. Then, at least, they’ll have no excuse for letting something fall through the cracks.

  This doesn’t mean that everyone has to do everything. I hope I have described a way to relate to our relatively new knowledge-based world that gives room for everyone to have a lot more to do than he or she can do. The critical issue will be to facilitate a constant renegotiation process with all involved, so they feel OK about what they’re not doing. That’s real knowledge work, at a more sophisticated level. But there’s little hope of getting there without having bulletproof collection systems in play. Remember, you can’t renegotiate an agreement with yourself that you can’t remember you made. And you certainly can’t renegotiate agreements with others that you’ve lost track of.

  Organizations must create a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than he or she can do, and in which it is sage to renegotiate agreements about what everyone is not doing.

  When groups of people collectively adopt the 100 perce
nt collection standard, they have a tight ship to sail. It doesn’t mean they’re sailing in the right direction, or even that they’re on the right ship; it just means that the one they’re on, in the direction it’s going, is doing that with the most efficient energy it can.

  12

  The Power of the Next-Action Decision

  I HAVE A personal mission to make “What’s the next action?” part of the global thought process. I envision a world in which no meeting or discussion will end, and no interaction cease, without a clear determination of whether or not some action is needed—and if it is, what it will be, or at least who has responsibility for it. I envision organizations adopting a standard that anything that lands in anyone’s “ten acres” will be evaluated for action required, and the resulting decisions managed appropriately. Imagine the freedom that would allow to focus attention on bigger issues and opportunities.

  When a culture adopts “What’s the next action?” as a standard operating query, there’s an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.

  Over the years I have noticed an extraordinary shift in energy and productivity whenever individuals and groups installed “What’s the next action?” as a fundamental and consistently asked question. As simple as the query seems, it is still somewhat rare to find it fully operational where it needs to be.

  One of the greatest challenges you may encounter is that once you have gotten used to “What’s the next action?” for yourself and those around you, interacting with people who aren’t asking it can be highly frustrating. It clarifies things so quickly that dealing with people and environments that don’t use it can seem nightmarish.

  We are all accountable to define what, if anything, we are committed to make happen as we engage with ourselves and others. And at some point, for any outcome that we have an internal commitment to complete, we must make the decision about the next physical action required. There’s a great difference, however, between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they blow up.

  The Source of the Technique

  I learned this simple but extraordinary next-action technique twenty years ago from a longtime friend and management-consulting mentor of mine, Dean Acheson (no relation to the former secretary of state). Dean had spent many prior years consulting with executives and researching what was required to free the psychic logjams of many of them about projects and situations they were involved in. One day he just started picking up each individual piece of paper on an executive’s desk and forcing him to decide what the very next thing was that he had to do to move it forward. The results were so immediate and so profound for the executive that Dean continued for years to perfect a methodology using that same question to process the in-basket. Since then both of us have trained and coached thousands of people with this key concept, and it remains a foolproof technique. It never fails to greatly improve both the productivity and the peace of mind of the user to determine what the next physical action is that will move something forward.

  Creating the Option of Doing

  How could something so simple be so powerful—“What’s the next action?”

  To help answer that question, I invite you to revisit for a moment your mind-sweep list (see page 113). Or at least to think about all the projects that are probably sitting around in your psyche. Do you have a sense that they haven’t been moving along as consistently and productively as they could be? You’ll probably admit that yes, indeed, a few have been a little bit “stuck.”

  If you haven’t known for sure whether you needed to make a call, send an e-mail, look up something, or buy an item at the store as the very next thing to move on, it hasn’t been getting done. What’s ironic is that it would likely require only about ten seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list. But it’s ten seconds of thinking that most people haven’t done about most things on their list.

  For example, a client will have something like “tires” on a list.

  I then ask, “What’s that about?”

  He responds, “Well, I need new tires on my car.”

  “So what’s the next action?”

  At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: “Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices.”

  That’s about how much time is required to decide what the “doing” would look like on almost everything. It’s just the few seconds of focused thinking that most people have not yet done about most of their stuff.

  It will probably be true, too, that the person who needs tires on his car has had that on his radar for quite a while. It’s also likely that he’s been at a phone hundreds of times, often with enough time and/or energy only to make just such a call. Why didn’t he make it? Because in that state of mind, the last thing in the world he felt like doing was considering all his projects, including getting tires, and what their next actions were. In those moments he didn’t feel like thinking at all.

  What he needed was to have already figured those things out. If he gets that next-action thinking done, then, when he happens to have fifteen minutes before a meeting, with a phone at hand, and his energy at about 4.2 out of 10, he can look at the list of options of things to do and be delighted to see “Call tire store for prices” on it. “That’s something I can do and complete successfully!” he’ll think, and then he’ll actually be motivated to make the call, just to experience the “win” of completing something useful in the time and energy window he’s in. In this context he’d be incapable of starting a large proposal draft for a client, but he has sufficient resources for punching phone numbers and getting simple information quickly. It’s highly probable that at some point soon he’ll look at the new set of tires on his car and feel on top of the world.

  Defining what real doing looks like, on the most basic level, and organizing placeholder reminders that we can trust, are master keys to productivity enhancement.

  The secret of

  getting ahead is

  getting started.

  The secret of

  getting started is

  breaking your

  complex

  overwhelming

  tasks into small

  manageable tasks,

  and then starting

  on the first one.

  —Mark Twain

  These are learnable techniques, and ones that we can continue to get better at.

  Often even the simplest things are stuck because we haven’t made a final decision yet about the next action. People in my seminars often have things on their lists like “Get a tune-up for the car.” Is “Get a tune-up” a next action? Not unless you’re walking out with wrench in hand, dressed for grease.

  “So, what’s the next action?”

  “Uh, I need to take the car to the garage. Oh, yeah, I need to find out if the garage can take it. I guess I need to call the garage and make the appointment.”

  “Do you have the number?”

  “Darn, no . . . I don’t have the number for the garage. Fred recommended that garage to me, and I don’t have the number. I knew something was missing in the equation.”

  And that’s often what happens with so many things for so many people. We glance at the project, and some part of us thinks, “I don’t quite have all the pieces between here and there.” We know something is missing, but we’re not sure what it is exactly, so we quit.

  Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.

  “So, what’s the next action?”

  “I need to get the number. I guess I could get it from Fred.”

  “Do you have Fred’s number?”

  “I have Fred’s number!”

  So the next action really is “Call Fred for the number of the garage.”

  Did you notice how many steps had to be tracked back before we actually got to the real next action
on this project? That’s typical. Most people have many things just like that on their lists.

  Why Bright People Procrastinate the Most

  It’s really the smartest people who have the highest number of undecided things in their lives and on their lists. Why is that? Think of how our bodies respond to the images we hold in our minds. It appears that the nervous system can’t tell the difference between a well-imagined thought and reality.

  To prove this to yourself, picture yourself walking into a supermarket and going over to the brightly lit fruit-and-vegetable section. Are you there? OK, now go to the citrus bins—oranges, grapefruits, lemons. Now see the big pile of yellow lemons. There’s a cutting board and a knife next to them. Take one of those big yellow lemons and cut it in half. Smell that citrus smell! It’s really juicy, and there’s lemon juice trickling onto the board. Now take a half lemon and cut that in half, so you have a quarter lemon wedge in your hands. OK, now—remember how you did this as a kid?—put that quarter of a lemon in your mouth and bite into it! Scrunch!

  Bright people have the capability of freaking out faster and more dramatically than anyone else.

  If you played along with me, you probably noticed that the saliva content in your mouth increased at least a bit. Your body was actually trying to process citric acid! And it was just in your mind.