Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
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Summary
This may be my most referenced book of all time - I pick it up off the bookshelf a couple of times per year when I feel like I can improve some aspect of my executive function. It shows how to manage all tasks (work, family, personal) as a series of systems in this book. It has allowed me to never forget to get things done, but also helped me prioritize and clear my head of tasks so I can actually have capacity to think. It's taught me how to prioritize what's important to me rather than have a flood of other people's problems take over my day.
It's taken me years to implement these systems (and I still make tweaks to my systems on a regular basis), but the methods described in this book have helped me. If you start trying to do what the book teaches, I recommend picking your biggest pain point and implement the techniques to solve that first. Once you’ve built that habit, move on to the next technique.
Notes and Quotes
Flow chart of the GTD process:
"stuff"
│
▼
┌───────────┐
│ In-basket │
└─────┬─────┘
│
▼
┌───────────┐
│What is it?│
└─────┬─────┘
│
▼
┌────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐
│Is it actionable?│──no───▶│ Trash │
└───────┬────────┘ ├─────────────────┤
│ │ Someday/maybe │
yes │(tickler file) │
│ ├─────────────────┤
┌─────────────┐ │ │ Reference │
│ Projects │◀──────┤ │(retrievable │
│ (planning) │ │ │ when required) │
└──────┬──────┘ ▼ └─────────────────┘
│ ┌──────────────┐
┌──────▼─────┐│ What's the │
│Project plans││ next action?│
│(review for ││ │
│ actions) │└──────┬───────┘
└────────────┘ │
▼
┌──────────────────────────┐
│Will it take < 2 minutes? │
└─────────────┬────────────┘
┌──────┴──────┐
yes no
│ │
▼ ┌────┴────┐
┌────────┐ │ │
│ Do it │ ▼ ▼
└────────┘┌────────┐┌────────┐
│Delegate││ Defer │
│ it ││ it │
└───┬────┘└───┬────┘
│ │
▼ ▼
┌─────────┐ ┌────────────┐
│ Waiting │ │ Calendar │
│(for │ │(specific │
│someone) │ │ time) │
└─────────┘ ├────────────┤
│Next actions│
│(as soon as │
│ I can) │
└────────────┘
Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. —David Kekich (p. 30)
Part 1: The Art of Getting Things Done
IT'S POSSIBLE FOR a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control. That's a great way to live and work, at elevated levels of effectiveness and efficiency. It's also the best way to be fully present with whatever you're doing, appropriately engaged in the moment. It's when time disappears, and your attention is completely at your command. (p. 36)
In just the last half of the twentieth century, what constituted "work" in the industrialized world was transformed from assembly line, make-it-and-move-it kinds of activity to what the late Peter Drucker so aptly termed "knowledge" work. (p. 39)
Work nowadays doesn't usually have a distinct "end" - it can go on forever if you don't stop it. It also doesn't help that your work now stretches with coworkers across departments and time zones. You need a system for maintaining a clear head and a "positive sense of relaxed control."
Little seems clear for very long anymore, as far as what to do at the office, at home, on the plane, in the car, and at the local café—on the weekend, on Monday morning, on waking at three a.m., and on "vacation"; and what or how much input may be relevant to doing it well. We're allowing in huge amounts of information and communication from the outer world and generating an equally large volume of ideas and agreements with others and ourselves from the inner world. And we haven't been well equipped to deal with this huge number of internal and external commitments. (p. 42)
Nothing is really new in this high-tech, globally wired world, except how frequently it is. (p. 42)
Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact or underreact. (p. 48)
Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your thoughts about what you need to do, your children, or your boss will lead to less effective results than you'd like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don't operate with a mind like water. (p. 48)
A basic truism I have discovered over decades of coaching and training thousands of people is that most stress they experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept. Even those who are not consciously "stressed out" will invariably experience greater relaxation, better focus, and increased productive energy when they learn more effectively to control the "open loops" of their lives. (p. 50)
Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors: First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through. Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly. (p. 51)
But what created that? Not "getting organized" or "setting priorities." The answer is, thinking. Not a lot; just enough to solidify your commitment about a discrete pressure or opportunity and the resources required dealing with it. People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it. If you actually did this suggested exercise, you were required to structure your thinking toward an outcome and an action, and that does not usually happen without a consciously focused effort. Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not. (p. 53)
Note (p. 53): Thinking about a todo and taking the time to figure out the next action is what relieves stress. Not knowing what to do is stressful. People do not carve out enough time to think - they react.
As Peter Drucker wrote: "In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved." (p. 54)
Most often, the reason something is on your mind is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcome is; This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. (p. 54)
They need to gather everything that requires thinking about and then do that thinking if their organizational efforts are to be successful. (p. 58)
Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because what "doing" would look like, and where it happens, hasn't been decided. (p. 60)
Getting things done requires two basic components: defining (1) what "done" means (outcome) and (2) what "doing" looks like (action). (p. 61)
Intellectually, the most appropriate way ought to be to work from the top down, first uncovering personal and organizational purpose and vision, then defining critical objectives, and finally focusing on the details of implementation. The trouble is, however, that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective. (p. 61)
You need to control commitments, projects, and actions in two ways—horizontally and vertically. Horizontal control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved. (p. 62)
Vertical control, in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects. (p. 63)
This is "project planning" in the broad sense. It's focusing in on a single endeavor, situation, or person and fleshing out whatever ideas, details, priorities, and sequences of events may be required for you to handle it, at least for the moment. (p. 63)
The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get them done. Appropriate action management lets you feel comfortable and in control as you move through your broad spectrum of work and life, while appropriate project focusing gets you clear about and on track with the specifics needed. (p. 63)
There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done. (p. 63)
2. Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Steps of Mastering Workflow
We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with. (p. 69)
This constitutes the management of the horizontal aspect of our lives, incorporating everything that we need to consider at any time, as we move forward moment to moment. (p. 69)
Capture
In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do or at least decide about, and that at some point in the near future you will process and review all of it. (p. 72)
The final success factor for capturing should be obvious: if you don't empty and process the stuff you've collected, your tools aren't serving any function other than the storage of amorphous material. Emptying the contents does not mean that you have to finish what's there; it just means that you have to decide more specifically what it is and what should be done with it, and if it's still unfinished, organize it into your system. (p. 78)
Note (p. 79): I should only check my email inbox to quickly scan for anything urgent or from a superior. Otherwise, I should only check my inbox when I have time to read through everything and process it. That's why sometimes I am left with read emails in my inbox - I read them during a time when I didn't have time to choose what to do with them.
Clarify
Two things need to be determined about each actionable item: (p. 84)
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 will keep reminding you that you have an open loop until it is finished. (p. 84)
What's the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you've captured; if you answer it appropriately, you'll have the key substantive thing to organize. (p. 85)
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. (p. 85)
Organize
Note (p. 88): All 8 of these outer items are places were tasks get stored.
Projects I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step. (p. 90)
The reasoning behind my definition is that if one step won't complete something, some kind of goalpost needs to be set up to remind you that there's something still left to do. (p. 90)
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." (p. 91)
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. (p. 91)
Note (p. 91): This is what goes in Obsidian, and not in Todoist.
The Next-Action Categories
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 those on 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). (p. 92)
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. (p. 93)
The "Next Actions" List(s) So where do your entire action reminders go? On Next Actions lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization and orientation. (p. 95)
Any longer-than-two-minute, non-delegatable action you have identified needs to be tracked somewhere. (p. 95)
Nonactionable Items You need well-organized, discrete systems to handle things that require no action as well as those that do. No-action systems fall into three categories: trash, incubation, and reference. (p. 96)
Trash Trash should be self-evident. Throw away, shred, or recycle anything that has no potential future action or reference value. (p. 96)
Incubation There are two other groups of things besides trash that require no immediate action but that 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. (p. 96)
There are two kinds of incubation tools that could work for this kind of thing: Someday/Maybe lists and a tickler system. 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. (p. 97)
These items are of the nature of "projects I might want to do, but not now . . . but I'd like to be reminded of them regularly." 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. (p. 98)
You'll probably have some other types of information that are similar to Someday/Maybe but that probably need a review only when you have an urge to engage in a particular kind of activity. These would be lists such as: Books to read Wines to taste Recipes to try Movies to rent Weekend trips to take Things my kids might like to do Seminars to take Web sites to surf (p. 98)
Tickler System A second type of things to incubate are those you don't want or need to be reminded of until some designated time in the future. (p. 98)
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. (p. 99)
Reflect
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 truly have to be handled that day. (p. 102)
After checking your calendar, you'll most often turn to your Next Action lists. These hold the inventory of predefined actions that you can take if you have any discretionary time during the day. (p. 102)
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. (p. 102)
Critical Success Factor: The Weekly Review
All of your 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 captured, clarified, and organized. (p. 103)
Note (p. 103): The weekly review doesn't have to be a set time each week. On a podcast I heard David Allen mention he does his whenever he starts feeling anxious about not knowing what he has going on - that's when he does his "weekly" review.
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. (p. 103)
Engage
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 clean up your e-mails will always be an intuitive call, but with the proper orientation you can feel much more confident about your choices. You can move from hope to trust in your actions, immediately increasing your energy and effectiveness. (p. 104)
There will always be a long 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 captured, clarified, organized, and reflected on all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgment with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work and values. (p. 105)
- The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? At that moment there are four criteria you can apply, in this order: context, time available, energy available, and priority. (p. 106)
Context You are always constrained by what you have the capability to do at this time. A few actions can be done anywhere (such as 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. (p. 106)
Time Available When do you have to do something else? Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing any actions that require more time. (p. 106)
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. (p. 106)
Priority Given your context, time, and energy available, what action remaining of your options will give you the highest payoff? You're in your office with a phone and a computer, you have an hour, and your energy is 7.3 on a scale of 10. Should you call the client back, work on the proposal, process your 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 intuition and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment. (p. 107)
- The Threefold Model for Identifying 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 (p. 107)
Doing Predefined Work When you're doing predefined work, you're working from your Next Actions lists and calendar—completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, or managing your workflow. (p. 107)
Doing Work as It Shows Up Often things come up ad hoc—unsuspected, unforeseen—that you either have to or choose to engage in 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. (p. 107)
Defining Your Work Defining your work entails clearing up your in-tray, your digital messages, 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. (p. 108)
- The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work (p. 108)
Horizon 5: Purpose and principles Horizon 4: Vision Horizon 3: Goals Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountabilities Horizon 1: Current projects Ground: Current actions (p. 109)
Ground: Current Actions This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take— (p. 109)
Horizon 1: Current Projects Generating most of the actions that you currently have in front of you are the thirty to one hundred projects on your plate. (p. 109)
Horizon 2: Areas of Focus and Accountabilities You create or accept your projects and actions because of the roles, interests, and accountabilities you have. These are the key areas of your life and work 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. These are not things to finish but rather to use as criteria for assessing our experiences and our engagements, to maintain balance and sustainability, as we operate in our work and our world. (p. 110)
Horizon 3: Goals What you want to be experiencing in 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 accountabilities 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. (p. 110)
Horizon 4: Vision Projecting three to five years into the future generates thinking about bigger categories: organization strategies, environmental trends, career and lifestyle transition circumstances. Internal factors include longer-term career, family, financial, and quality-of-life aspirations 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. (p. 110)
Horizon 5: Purpose and Principles This is the big-picture view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? What really matters to you, no matter what? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what the work really is. It is the ultimate job description. All goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it. (p. 111)
3. Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning
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. (p. 112)
Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project or situation 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. (p. 112)
1 | Defining purpose and principles 2 | Outcome visioning 3 | Brainstorming 4 | Organizing 5 | Identifying next actions (p. 115)
But is the process described in the previous section the way your committee is planning the retreat? Is it how your IT team is approaching the new system installation? Is it how you're organizing the wedding or thinking through the potential merger? Have you envisioned wild success about anything lately? Have you clarified the primary purpose of the project and communicated it to everyone who ought to know it? And have you agreed on the standards and behaviors you'll need to adhere to in order to make it successful? (p. 118)
Note (p. 118): Etc…. Most people don't do this vertical kind of project planning - going through the 5 steps - even though it should be done before doing horizontal work (tasks).
Have you envisioned success and considered all the innovative things that might result if you achieved it? Have you gotten all possible ideas out on the table—everything you need to take into consideration that might affect the outcome? Have you identified the mission-critical components, key milestones, and deliverables? Have you defined all the aspects of the project that could be moved on right now, what the next action is for each part, and who's responsible for what? (p. 118)
Think of your purpose. Think of what a successful outcome would look like: where would you be physically, financially, in terms of reputation, or whatever? Brainstorm potential steps. Organize your ideas. Decide on the next actions. (p. 119)
Purpose It never hurts to ask the why question. Almost anything you're currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at this top level of focus. Why are you going to your next meeting? What's the purpose of your task? Why are you having friends over for dinner? (p. 122)
Purpose defines success. It's the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy, (p. 124)
Principles
A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: "I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they . . ." (p. 127)
You may want to begin by asking yourself, "What behavior might undermine what I'm doing, and how can I prevent it?" That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards. (p. 127)
Vision/Outcome
Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the what instead of the why. What will this project or situation really be like when it successfully appears in the world? (p. 127)
The Power of Focus
When you focus on something—the vacation you're going to take, the meeting you're about to go into, the project you want to launch—that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn't have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality. (p. 128)
Suffice it to say that something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want. (p. 130)
Clarifying Outcomes
We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we're trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks complete as effectively and efficiently as possible. (p. 131)
Brainstorming
Once you know what you want to happen and why, the how mechanism is brought into play. When you identify with some picture in your mind that is different from your current reality, you automatically start filling in the gaps, or brainstorming. (p. 132)
Capturing Your Ideas
The most popular of these concepts and techniques is called mind mapping, a name coined by Tony Buzan, a British researcher in brain functioning, to label this process of brainstorming ideas into a graphic format. In mind mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it. (p. 132)
Note (p. 133): The how doesn't matter. All brainstorming software essentially does the same thing.
For instance, if I found out that I had to move my office, I might think about computers, changing my business cards, all the connections I'd have to change, new furniture, moving the phones, purging and packing, and so on. If I capture these thoughts graphically it might start to look something like this: (p. 133)
Distributed Cognition
The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn't have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It's as if your mind were to say, "Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you're not collecting them in some trusted way, I won't give you that many. But if you're actually doing something with the ideas—even if it's just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another," etc. (p. 134)
Few people can hold their focus on a topic for more than a couple of minutes without some objective structure and tool or trigger to help them. Pick a big project you have going right now and just try to think of nothing else for more than thirty seconds. This is pretty hard to do unless you have a pen and paper in hand and use one of those "cognitive artifacts" as the anchor for your ideas. Then you can stay with it for hours. (p. 135)
Brainstorming Keys
Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basic principles, however, can be summed up as follows: Don't judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize. Go for quantity, not quality. Put analysis and organization in the background. (p. 135)
Organizing
Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences of events, and/or priorities. What are the things that must occur to create the final result? In what order must they occur? What is the most important element to ensure the success of the project? (p. 138)
This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points scribbled on the back of an envelope to heavy-horsepower project-planning software. When a project calls for substantial objective control, you'll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a Gantt-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole. (p. 138)
The Basics of Organizing The key steps here are: Identify the significant pieces Sort by (one or more): components sequences priorities Detail to the required degree (p. 138)
Next Actions
The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving. The question to ask here is, "What's the next action?" (p. 139)
The Basics Decide on next actions for each of the current "moving parts" of the project. Decide on the next action in the planning process, if necessary. (p. 139)
How Much Planning Do You Really Need to Do?
How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind. (p. 141)
In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. (p. 141)
In the prior two chapters, I covered the basic models of how to stay maximally productive and in control, with minimal effort, at the two most basic levels of our life and work: the actions we take and the projects we enter into that generate many of those actions. (p. 144)
The fundamentals remain true—you must be responsible for collecting all your open loops, applying a front-end thought process to each of them, and managing the results with organization, review, and action. (p. 144)
For all those situations that you have any level of commitment to complete, there is a natural planning process that occurs to get you from here to there. Leveraging that five-phase model can often make the evolution easier, faster, and more productive. (p. 144)
Part 2: Practicing Stress-Free Productivity
IN PART 2 we'll move from a conceptual framework and limited application of workflow mastery to full-scale implementation and best practices. (p. 147)
4. Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools
It is information and suggestions you will very likely want to revisit at some point, to glean a new level of application, as you get started down the GTD path. (p. 147)
Some consciousness needs to be applied to keep one's potentially huge digital library functional, versus a black hole of data easily dumped in there with a couple of keystrokes. "I don't need to organize my stuff, because the search feature can find it sufficiently" is, from what I've experienced, quite suboptimal as an approach. We need to have a way to overview our mass of collected information with some form of effective categorization. (p. 168)
6. Clarifying: Getting "In" to Empty
Getting "in" to empty doesn't mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you've captured. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you're going to do with it. (p. 198)
To get an overview of this process, you may find it useful here to refer to the Workflow Diagram (p. 198)
This chapter focuses on the components in the diagram's center column, the steps from "in" to next action. (p. 200)
Note (p. 210): Things you may want but not right now go to these two places
What do you do with these kinds of things? There are two options that could work: Write them on a Someday/Maybe list. Put a reminder of them on your calendar or in a tickler file. (p. 213)
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. (p. 213)
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. (p. 214)
Note (p. 214): This is why it's better to put in inbox, then when processing to other spots you figure out the next action.
The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to Do (p. 214)
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. (p. 215)
You'll tend to resist noticing it, which leads to procrastination. (p. 215)
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. (p. 216)
This last step in getting to the bottom of "in" requires a shift in perspective from the single-action details to the larger picture—your projects. Again, I define a project as any outcome you're committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete. (p. 223)
I hope you're able to see the very practical reason for defining projects as broadly as I do: if the action step you've identified will not complete the commitment, then you'll need some stake in the ground to keep reminding you of actions you have pending until you have closure. (p. 223)
You need to make a list of projects. A "Projects" list may include anything from "Give holiday party" to "Divest the software product line" to "Finalize compensation package." The purpose of this list is not to reflect your priorities but just to ensure that you've got placeholders for all those open loops. (p. 223)
Whether you draw up your Projects list while you're initially processing your in-tray or after you've set up your action lists doesn't really matter. It just needs to be done at some point, and it must be maintained, as it's the key driver for reviewing where you are and where you want to be, and to maintain a sense of week-to-week control of your life. (p. 224)
7. Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets
If you have projects that you're not going to be doing anything about for some time, they must go on your Someday/Maybe list so you can relate to the Projects list with the rigorous action-generating focus it needs. (p. 230)
If, however, you have fifty or a hundred next actions pending, keeping all of those on one big list would make it too difficult to see what you need to see; each time you got any window of time to do something, you'd have to do unproductive re-sorting. If you happened to be on a short break at a conference, during which you might be able to make some calls, you'd have to identify the calls among a big batch of unrelated items. When you went out to do odds and ends, you'd probably want to pick out your errands and make another list. (p. 234)
Another productivity factor that this kind of organization supports is leveraging your energy when you're in a certain mode. When you're in "phone mode," it helps to make a lot of phone calls—just crank down your Calls list. When your computer is up and running and you're cruising along digitally, it's useful to get as much done online as you can without having to shift into another kind of activity. (p. 234)
It takes more energy than most people realize to unhook out of one set of behaviors and get into another kind of rhythm and tool set. And obviously, when a key person is sitting in front of you in your office, you'd be wise to have all the things you need to talk about with him or her immediately at hand. (p. 235)
The Most Common Categories of Action Reminders You'll probably find that at least a few of the following common list headings for next actions will make sense for you: Calls At Computer Errands At Office (miscellaneous) At Home Anywhere Agendas (for people and meetings) Read/Review (p. 235)
8. Reflecting: Keeping It All Fresh and Functional
THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to be free to experience more elegant, productive, and creative activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you're doing what you need to be doing, and that it's OK to be not doing what you're not doing. That facilitates the condition of being present, which is always the optimal state from which to operate. Reviewing your system on a regular basis, reflecting on the contents, and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of clarity and stability. (p. 291)
Your most frequent review will probably be of your daily calendar, and your daily tickler folder if you're maintaining one, to see the "hard landscape" and assess what has to get done. (p. 293)
After you review all your day-and time-specific commitments and handle whatever you need to about them, your next most frequent area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context. (p. 294)
The Weekly Review will also sharpen your intuitive focus on your important projects as you deal with the flood of new input and potential distractions coming at you the rest of the week. (p. 296)
What Is the Weekly Review? Very simply, the Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again and get oriented for the next couple of weeks. It's going through the steps of workflow management—capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding commitments, intentions, and inclinations—until you can honestly say, "I absolutely know right now everything I'm not doing but could be doing if I decided to." (p. 297)
Review "Next Actions" Lists (p. 298)
Review Upcoming Calendar (p. 299)
Review "Waiting For" List (p. 299)
Review "Projects" (and "Larger Outcome") Lists (p. 299)
Review Any Relevant Checklists (p. 300)
Review "Someday/Maybe" List (p. 301)
Executive Operational Review Time (p. 304)
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, test, and prioritize your decisions. (p. 305)
9. Engaging: Making the Best Action Choices
As outlined in chapter 2, 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 (p. 309)
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: Context Time available Energy available Priority (p. 309)
Doing predefined work Doing work as it shows up Defining your work (p. 316)
People often complain about the interruptions that prevent them from doing their work. But interruptions are unavoidable in life. When you become elegant at dispatching what's coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of "weird time" windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly. (p. 321)
Horizon 5: Life Horizon 4: Long-term visions Horizon 3: One-to two-year goals Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountability Horizon 1: Current projects Ground: Current actions (p. 322)
While Horizon 5 (purpose and principles) is obviously the most important context within which to set priorities, experience has shown me that when we understand and implement all the levels of work in which we are engaged, especially the Ground and Horizon 1 levels, we gain greater freedom and resources to do the bigger work that we're all about. (p. 327)
Ground The first thing to do is make sure your action lists are complete, which in itself can be quite a task. (p. 328)
Horizon 1 Finalize your Projects list. Does it truly capture all the commitments you have that will require more than one action to get done? That will define the boundaries of the kind of week-to-week operational world you're in and allow you to relax your thinking for longer intervals. (p. 328)
Horizon 2 This is the level of "current job responsibilities" and "areas of my life to maintain at an appropriate standard." What are the hats you wear, the roles you play? Professionally, this would relate to your current position and work. Personally, it would include the areas of responsibility you've taken on in your family, in your community, and of course with yourself as a functioning person. (p. 329)
Horizons 3–5 Whereas the three lower levels have mostly to do with the current state of things—your actions, projects, and areas of responsibility—from Horizon 3 up the factors of the future and your direction and intentions are primary. There is still an inventory to take at these plateaus (especially at the top level, purpose and principles, which represents an ongoing criterion for monitoring and correcting activities and behaviors), but it's more about "What is true right now about where I've decided I'm going and how I'm going to get there?" This can range from one-year goals in your job (Horizon 3) to a three-year vision for your career and personal net worth (Horizon 4) to intuiting your life purpose and how to maximize its expression (Horizon 5). (p. 332)
I'm blending the three uppermost levels together here because situations often can't easily be pigeonholed into one or another of these categories. Also, since Getting Things Done is more about the art of implementation and execution than about how to define goals and vision, I won't offer a rigorous examination here. (p. 332)
If you're involved in anything that has a future of longer than a year (marriage, kids, career, a company, an art form, a lifelong passion), you would do well to think about what you might need to be doing to manage things along that vector. (p. 334)
Questions to ask are: What are the longer-term goals and objectives in my organization, and what projects do I need to have in place related to them to fulfill my responsibilities? What longer-term goals and objectives have I set for myself, and what projects do I need to have in place to make them happen? What other significant things are happening that could affect my options about what I'm doing? (p. 334)
Let me emphasize here that setting new goals or raising your standards is not what I'm specifically advocating. I am, rather, directing your focus to what may be inherently true about these situations within your current reality. If they are there in any obvious or subtle way, then addressing them appropriately will be critical to getting into your own clear space. (p. 335)
Here are some examples of the kinds of issues that show up at this level of conversation: The changing nature of your job, given the shifting priorities of the company. Instead of managing the production of your own training programs in-house, you're going to outsource them to vendors. The direction in which you feel you need to move in your career. You see yourself doing a different kind of job a year from now, and you need to make a transition out of the one you have while exploring the options for a transfer or promotion. The organization's direction, given globalization and expansion. You see a lot of major international travel looming on the horizon for you, and given your lifestyle preferences, you need to consider how to readjust your career plans. Lifestyle preferences and changing needs. As your kids get older, your need to be at home with them is diminishing, and your interest in investment and retirement planning is growing. (p. 335)
10. Getting Projects Under Control
CHAPTERS 4 THROUGH 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level—what needs your attention and action across the horizontal landscape of your life. The last piece of the puzzle is the vertical level—the digging deep and pie-in-the-sky thinking that can leverage your creative brainpower. You may indeed have clarified outcomes and next-action steps for the various projects and situations in which you're involved, but there are times when you will feel called to enhance your relationship with some of them with more creative thinking and detailed how-to development. (p. 341)
Projects That Need Next Actions About Planning There are probably a few projects you can think of right now, off the top of your head, that you know you want to get more objectified, fleshed out, and under control. (p. 341)
If you haven't done it already, get a next action now that will start the planning process for each of these, and put it on the appropriate action list. Then proceed with further planning steps. (p. 341)
Typical Planning Steps The most common types of planning-oriented actions will be your own brainstorming and organizing, setting up meetings, and gathering information. Brainstorming Some of the projects that have your attention right now will require you to do your own free-form thinking; this is especially true of those for which you were not clear about what the next action would be when you made that decision. These should all have a next action, such as "Draft ideas re X." (p. 342)
Organizing You may have some projects for which you have already collected notes and miscellaneous support materials, and you just need to sort through them and get them into a more structured form. In this case, your next action would likely be "Organize Project X notes." (p. 342)
Setting Up Meetings Often the next progress to be made on project thinking is to set up a meeting with the people you'd like to have involved in the brainstorming and/or decision making. That usually means sending an e-mail to the whole group or to an assistant to get it calendared, or making a phone call to the primary person to nail down a day and time. (p. 343)
Gathering Information Sometimes the next task on project thinking is to gather more data. Maybe you need to talk to someone to get his or her input ("Call Bill re his thoughts on the managers' meeting"). Or you need to look through the files you just inherited from last year's conference ("Review Associate Conference archive files"). Or you want to surf the Web to get a sense of what's happening "out there" on a new topic you're exploring ("Look into college scholarship funds"). (p. 343)
If these aren't specifically next actions that can go directly on your action lists, you'll still need to capture and organize them somewhere that makes sense. Of course, the most critical tool for ensuring that nothing gets lost is your collection system—your in-tray, pen and paper, or smartphone. You need to hold all your ideas until you later decide what to do with them. (p. 343)
Part 3: The Power of the Key Principles
11. The Power of the Capturing Habit
But there are even greater implications for the fundamental principles at work here. What follows in the next three chapters is an accounting of my experience, over the past thirty years, of the subtler and often more profound effects that can transpire from the implementation of these basic principles. The longer-term results can have a significant impact on you as an individual, and they can positively affect larger organizational cultures as well. (p. 357)
When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. (p. 359)
The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn't come from having too much to do; it's the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself. (p. 359)
Note (p. 359): This is so true. When I assigned tasks for myself to get done today and I assigned too many of them at the end of the day when I'm having to reschedule them, I feel guilty like I didn't accomplish enough. However, if I don't assign things to myself, except for only the absolutely most critical things I need to do each day and then revisit my lists if I run out of tasks to do, then I feel very accomplished and stress-free.
If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences: Don't make the agreement. Complete the agreement. Renegotiate the agreement. (p. 360)
"Previously I would just tell everyone, 'Sure, I'll do it,' because I didn't know how much I really had to do. Now that I've got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity, I have had to say, 'No, I can't do that, I'm sorry.' The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed with my discipline!" (p. 361)
Maintaining an objective and complete inventory of your work, regularly reviewed, makes it much easier to say no with integrity. (p. 361)
12. The Power of the Next-Action Decision
"So, what are we doing here, and what's the next action, and who has it?" It is a learned technique of thinking, decision making, and consciously directed focus. It will happen automatically for you when the situation obviously demands it, as in a crisis, or when the pressure in a situation (from the boss, a client, your child, or the unexpected circumstance) forces a next-action decision to avert painful consequences. (p. 373)
Note (p. 373): For every piece of work in your inbox, for every project, and even for ill defined tasks, you should always be asking "what is the next action." If you are avoiding a task for some reason, it's probably because you don't know what the next action is!
Do you have a sense that any of them 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, talk to someone, surf the Web about 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 and decision making that most people haven't done about most things on their lists. (p. 374)
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 (p. 374)
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, at his computer, and his energy is about 4.2 out of 10, he can look at the list of things to do and be delighted to see "Research new tires" on it. "That's something I can do and complete successfully!" he'll think, and then he'll actually be motivated to surf the Web about it, just to experience the "win" of completing something useful in the time and energy window he's in. (p. 375)
...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. If your body responds to the pictures you give it, how are you likely to feel physically when you think about, say, doing your taxes? Are you sending yourself easy, let's go, completion, success, and "I'm a winner!" pictures? Probably not. For just that reason, what kinds of people would logically be the most resistant to being reminded about a project like that—that is, who would procrastinate the most? Of course, it would be the most creative, sensitive, and intelligent people—because their sensitivity and creativity give them the capability to produce in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project, and all the negative consequences that might occur if it isn't done perfectly! (p. 377)
If you have truly captured all the things that have your attention during the mind sweep, go through the list again now and decide on the single very next action to take on every one of them. Notice what happens to your energy. Everything on your lists and in your stacks is either attractive or repulsive to you—there's no neutral ground when it comes to your stuff. You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn't any neutral territory. You are either positively drawn toward completing the action or reluctant to think about what it is and resistant to getting involved in it. Often it's simply the next-action decision that makes the difference between the two extremes. Thinking and deciding require energy. And when you notice something unfinished in your world but haven't determined what the next action is yet, you'll tend to be reminded of your fatigue and sense of being overwhelmed! (p. 380)
In following up with people who have begun to implement this methodology, I've discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. (p. 381)
In other words, things have morphed back into "stuff" instead of starting at the action level. There are no clear next actions here, and anyone keeping a list filled with items like this would send her brain into overload every time she looked at it. (p. 381)
If you need to get your car tuned, for instance, you're going to have to figure out that next action at some point anyway. The problem is that most people wait to do it until the next action is "Call the Auto Club for tow truck!" So when do you think most people really make a lot of their next-action decisions about their stuff—when it shows up, or when it blows up? And do you think there might be a difference in the quality of their lives if they handled this knowledge work on the front end instead of the back? (p. 381)
Note (p. 382): There is no getting around picking a next action. It will get done. You can choose whether you make it in advance when clear headed vs. at the last possible second under high stress.
I have had several sophisticated senior executives tell me that installing "What's the next action?" as an operational standard in their organization was transformative in terms of measurable performance output. It changed their culture permanently and significantly for the better. (p. 382)
Note (p. 383): Try asking my team for each project what is their next action.
I've learned the hard way that no matter where we are in the conversation, twenty minutes before the agreed end time of the discussion I must force the question: "So what's the next action here?" In my experience, there is usually twenty minutes' worth of clarifying (and sometimes tough decisions) still required to come up with an answer. (p. 383)
Note (p. 383): While you may develop the skill to ask this yourself, you can guide others to think of it too by asking the question to them.
There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. —John F. Kennedy (p. 385)
Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, "So what's the next action?" People will complain only about something that they assume could be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. (p. 387)
13. The Power of Outcome Focusing
I am often asked, "How can this methodology improve an organization?" In fact, all the principles I've put forward are as applicable to an enterprise as they are to an individual. Capturing what has a group's attention, getting clarity about the inherent outcomes desired and actions required, regularly reviewing status and incorporating new realities, and consistently recalibrating and reallocating resources—all are core best practices for any team or company. (p. 400)
15. The Path of GTD Mastery
As simple as they may seem at first, building proficiency with the fundamental components of Getting Things Done—the basics—can take a while. Though it's easy to understand and agree with its concepts and principles, putting them fully into practice is not necessarily a smooth or automatic process. It's the same as with any sophisticated practice—driving a car, throwing a karate punch, or playing the flute—the beginning moves are not familiar or comfortable. Once you've done them a thousand times, however, you can manifest elegance, power, and fluidity that would be inaccessible any other way. The same may be true for you about learning GTD. (p. 417)
The good news is that it's as easy to get back into your productive groove as it may have been to get knocked out of it. It simply requires revisiting the basics: get a pen and paper and empty your head again; clean up your lists of actions and projects; identify and add new projects and next actions to bring your lists current; clean up what's leaked outside your system. (p. 425)
When a new problem explodes at work, you can get back in control quickly with a new mind sweep instead of taking everything back up into your head. You identify desired outcomes, projects, and next actions about this circumstance as soon as you can, as opposed to simply worrying about what's happened. You actually do a Weekly Review in the middle of the week because you need that kind of elevated focus to recalibrate your work, instead of reverting back to latest-and-loudest as your priority criterion. (p. 425)