key for trash, a “tickler” file or calendar for material that’s incubating, and a good filing system for reference information.
Actionable This is the YES group of items, stuff about which something needs to be done. Typical examples range from an e-mail requesting your participation in a corporate service project on such-and-such a date to the notes in your in-basket from your face-to-face meeting with the group vice president about a significant new project that involves hiring an outside consultant.
Two things need to be determined about each actionable item:
1. | What “project” or outcome have you committed to? and
2. | What’s the next action required?
If It’s About a Project . . . You need to capture that outcome on a “Projects” list. That will be the stake in the ground that reminds you that you have an open loop. A Weekly Review of the list (see page 46) will bring this item back to you as something that’s still outstanding. It will stay fresh and alive in your management system until it is completed or eliminated.
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.
—Elbert Hubbard
What’s the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you’ve collected; if you answer it appropriately, you’ll have the key substantive thing to organize. The “next action” is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.
Some examples of next actions might be:
• Call Fred re tel. # for the garage he recommended.
• Draft thoughts for the budget-meeting agenda.
• Talk to Angela about the filing system we need to set up.
• Research database-management software on the Web.
These are all real physical activities that need to happen. Reminders of these will become the primary grist for the mill of your personal productivity-management system.
Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options:
1. | Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.
2. | Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity.
3. | Defer it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists.
Organize
The outer ring of the workflow diagram shows the eight discrete categories of reminders and materials that will result from your processing all your “stuff.” Together they make up a total system for organizing just about everything that’s on your plate, or could be added to it, on a daily and weekly basis.
For nonactionable items, the possible categories are trash, incubation tools, and reference storage. If no action is needed on something, you toss it, “tickle” it for later reassessment, or file it so you can find the material if you need to refer to it at another time. To manage actionable things, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you’re waiting for.
All of the organizational categories need to be physically contained in some form. When I refer to “lists,” I just mean some sort of reviewable set of reminders, which could be lists on notebook paper or in some computer program or even file folders holding separate pieces of paper for each item. For instance, the list of current projects could be kept on a page in a Day Runner; it could be a “To Do” category on a PDA; or it could be in a file labeled “Projects List.” Incubating reminders (such as “after March 1 contact my accountant to set up a meeting”) may be stored in a paper-based “tickler” file or in a paper- or computer-based calendar program.
WORKFLOW DIAGRAM—ORGANIZING
Projects
I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things that you might not normally call projects are going to be on your “Projects” list. The reasoning behind my definition is that if one step won’t complete something, some kind of stake needs to be placed in the ground to remind you that there’s something still left to do. If you don’t have a placeholder to remind you about it, it will slip back into RAM. Another way to think of this is as a list of open loops.
A Partial “Projects” List
Get new staff person on board
August vacation
Staff off-site retreat
Publish book
Finalize computer upgrades
Update will
Finalize budgets
Finalize new product line
Get comfortable with new contact-management software
Get reprints of Fortune article
Get a publicist
Finish new orchard planting
R&D joint-venture video project
Produce new training compact disk
Establish next year’s seminar schedule
Orchestrate a one-hour keynote presentation
Get proficient with videoconferencing access
Finalize employment agreements
Install new backyard lights
Establish formal relationships with South American rep
Finalize staff policies and procedures
Get a new living-room chair
Projects do not need to be listed in any particular order, whether by size or by priority. They just need to be on a master list so you can review them regularly enough to ensure that appropriate next actions have been defined for each of them.
You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it “done.” The list of projects is the compilation of finish lines we put before us, to keep our next actions moving on all tracks appropriately.
Project Support Material
For many of your projects, you will accumulate relevant information that you will want to organize by theme or topic or project name. Your “Projects” list will be merely an index. All of the details, plans, and supporting information that you may need as you work on your various projects should be contained in separate file folders, computer files, notebooks, or binders.
Support Materials and Reference Files Once you have organized your project support material by theme or topic, you will probably find that it is almost identical to your reference material and could be kept in the same reference file system (a “Wedding” file could be kept in the general-reference files, for instance). The only difference is that in the case of active projects, support material may need to be reviewed on a more consistent basis to ensure that all the necessary action steps are identified.
I usually recommend that people store their support materials out of sight. If you have a good working reference file system close enough at hand, you may find that that’s the simplest way to organize them. There will be times, though, when it’ll be more convenient to have the materials out and instantly in view and available, especially if you’re working on a hot project that you need to check references for several times during the day. File folders in wire standing holders or in stackable trays within easy reach can be practical for this kind of “pending” paperwork.
The Next-Action Categories
As the Workflow Diagram makes clear, the next-action decision is central. That action needs to be the next physical, visible behavior, without exception, on every open loop.
Any less-than-two-minute actions that you perform, and all other actions that have already been completed, do not, of course, need to be tracked; they’re done. What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day
(enter these in your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your “Next Actions” lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a “Waiting For” list).
Calendar
Reminders of actions you need to take fall into two categories: those about things that have to happen on a specific day or time, and those about things that just need to get done as soon as possible. Your calendar handles the first type of reminder.
Three things go on your calendar:
• time-specific actions;
• day-specific actions; and
• day-specific information.
Time-Specific Actions This is a fancy name for appointments. Often the next action to be taken on a project is attending a meeting that has been set up to discuss it. Simply tracking that on the calendar is sufficient.
Day-Specific Actions These are things that you need to do sometime on a certain day, but not necessarily at a specific time. Perhaps you told Mioko you would call her on Friday to check that the report you’re sending her is OK. She won’t have the report until Thursday, and she’s leaving the country on Saturday, so Friday is the time window for taking the action—but anytime Friday will be fine. That should be tracked on the calendar for Friday but not tied to any particular time slot—it should just go on the day. It’s useful to have a calendar on which you can note both time-specific and day-specific actions.
Day-Specific Information The calendar is also the place to keep track of things you want to know about on specific days—not necessarily actions you’ll have to take but rather information that may be useful on a certain date. This might include directions for appointments, activities that other people (family or staff) will be involved in then, or events of interest. It’s also helpful to put short-term “tickler” information here, too, such as a reminder to call someone after the day they return from a vacation.
No More “Daily To-Do” Lists Those three things are what go on the calendar, and nothing else! I know this is heresy to traditional time-management training, which has almost universally taught that the “daily to-do list” is key. But such lists don’t work, for two reasons.
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
—Michael McGriffy, M.D.
First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time. Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment. Trying to keep a list in writing on the calendar, which must then be rewritten on another day if items don’t get done, is demoralizing and a waste of time. The “Next Actions” lists I advocate will hold all of those action reminders, even the most time-sensitive ones. And they won’t have to be rewritten daily.
Second, if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do. If I have to call Mioko on Friday because that’s the only day I can reach her, but then I add five other, less important or less time-sensitive calls to my to-do list, when the day gets crazy I may never call Mioko. My brain will have to take back the reminder that that’s the one phone call I won’t get another chance at. That’s not utilizing the system appropriately. The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments.
The “Next Actions” List(s)
So where do all your action reminders go? On “Next Actions” lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization.
Any longer-than-two-minute, nondelegatable action you have identified needs to be tracked somewhere. “Call Jim Smith re budget meeting,” “Phone Rachel and Laura’s moms about sleepaway camp,” and “Draft ideas re the annual sales conference” are all the kinds of action reminders that need to be kept in appropriate lists, or buckets, to be assessed as options for what we will do at any point in time.
If you have only twenty or thirty of these, it may be fine to keep them all on one list labeled “Next Actions,” which you’ll review whenever you have any free time. For most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150. In that case it makes sense to subdivide your “Next Actions” list into categories, such as “Calls” to make when you’re at a phone or “Project Head Questions” to be asked at your weekly briefing.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
—Albert Einstein
Nonactionable Items
You need well-organized, discrete systems to handle the items that require no action as well as the ones that do. No-action systems fall into three categories: trash, incubation, and reference.
Trash
Trash should be self-evident. Throw away anything that has no potential future action or reference value. If you leave this stuff mixed in with other categories, it will seriously undermine the system.
Incubation
There are two other groups of things besides trash that require no immediate action, but this stuff you will want to keep. Here again, it’s critical that you separate nonactionable from actionable items; otherwise you will tend to go numb to your piles, stacks, and lists and not know where to start or what needs to be done.
Say you pick up something from a memo, or read an e-mail, that gives you an idea for a project you might want to do someday, but not now. You’ll want to be reminded of it again later so you can reassess the option of doing something about it in the future. For example, a brochure arrives in the mail for the upcoming season of your local symphony. On a quick browse, you see that the program that really interests you is still four months away—too distant for you to move on it yet (you’re not sure what your travel schedule will be that far out), but if you are in town, you’d like to go. What should you do about that?
There are two kinds of “incubate” systems that could work for this kind of thing: “Someday/Maybe” lists and a “tickler” file.
“Someday/Maybe” It can be useful and inspiring to maintain an ongoing list of things you might want to do at some point but not now. This is the “parking lot” for projects that would be impossible to move on at present but that you don’t want to forget about entirely. You’d like to be reminded of the possibility at regular intervals.
Typical Partial “Someday/Maybe” List
Get a bass-fishing boat
Learn Spanish
Take a watercolor class
Get a sideboard for the kitchen
Build a lap pool
Get Kathryn a scooter
Take a balloon ride
Build a wine cellar
Take a trip through Montana
Learn Photoshop software capabilities
Set up a not-for-profit foundation
Create promotional videos of staff
Find Stafford Lyons
Get a digital video camera
Northern Italy trip
Apprentice with my carpenter
Spotlight our artwork
Build a koi pond
Digitize old photos and videos
Have a neighborhood party
Set up remote-server access at home
You’ll probably have some subcategories in your master “Someday/Maybe” list, such as
• CDs I might want
• Videos to rent
• Books to read
• Wine to taste
• Weekend trips to take
• Things to do with the kids
• Seminars to take
You must review this list periodically if you’re going to get the most value from it. I suggest you include a scan of the contents in your Weekly Review (see page 46).
“Tickler” File The most elegant version of holding for review is the “tickler” file, sometimes also referred to as a “suspended??
? or “follow-on” file. This is a system that allows you to almost literally mail something to yourself, for receipt on some designated day in the future.
Your calendar can serve the same function. You might remind yourself on your calendar for March 15, for example, that your taxes are due in a month; or for September 12, that Swan Lake will be presented by the Bolshoi at the Civic Auditorium in six weeks.
For further details, refer to chapter 7.
Reference Material
Many things that come your way require no action but have intrinsic value as information. You will want to keep and be able to retrieve these as needed. They can be stored in paper-based or digital form.
Paper-based material—anything from the menu for a local take-out deli to the plans, drawings, and vendor information for a landscape project—is best stored in efficient physical-retrieval systems. These can range from pages in a loose-leaf planner or notebook, for a list of favorite restaurants or the phone numbers of the members of a school committee, to whole file cabinets dedicated to the due-diligence paperwork for a corporate merger.
Electronic storage can include everything from networked database information to ad hoc reference and archive folders located in your communication software.
The most important thing to remember here is that reference should be exactly that—information that can be easily referred to when required. Reference systems generally take two forms: (1) topic- and area-specific storage, and (2) general-reference files. The first types usually define themselves in terms of how they are stored—for example, a file drawer dedicated to contracts, by date; a drawer containing only confidential employee-compensation information; or a series of cabinets for closed legal cases that might need to be consulted during future trials.