Getting Things Done (17 page)

I recommend that you read through this chapter and the next one, on organizing your actions, before you actually start processing what you’ve collected in “in.” It may save you some steps. When I coach clients through this process, it invariably becomes a dance back and forth between the simple decision-making stage of
processing
the open loops and the trickier task of figuring out the best way to enter these decisions in a client’s particular
organization
system.

Many of my coaching clients, for example, are eager to get set up personally on a PDA organizer that will synchronize with Microsoft Outlook, which their company is using for e-mail and scheduling. The first thing we have to do (after we’ve collected the in-basket) is make sure all their hardware and software are working. Then we clean up (print out and erase, usually) everything they have previously tried to organize in their Outlook task lists and put it all into “in.” Then we establish some working categories such as “Calls,” “Errands,” “Agendas,” “At Computer,” and so on. As we begin to process the in-basket, the client can go immediately to his computer and type his action steps directly into the system he will ultimately depend on.

If you’re not sure yet what you’re going to be using as a personal reminder system, don’t worry. You can begin very appropriately with the low-tech initial process of notes on pieces of paper. You can always upgrade your tools later, once you have your system in place.

The best way to learn this model is by doing. But there are a few basic rules to follow:

Even if the second item down is a personal note to you from the president of your country, and the top item is a piece of junk mail, you’ve got to process the junk mail first! That’s an exaggeration to make a point, but the principle is an important one: everything gets processed equally. The verb “process” does not mean “spend time on.” It just means “decide what the thing is and what action is required, and then dispatch it accordingly.” You’re going to get to the bottom of the basket as soon as you can anyway, and you don’t want to avoid dealing with
anything
in there.

Most people get to their in-basket or their e-mail and look for the most urgent, most fun, or most interesting stuff to deal with first. “Emergency scanning” is fine and necessary sometimes (I do it, too). Maybe you’ve just come back from an off-site meeting and have to be on a long conference call in fifteen minutes. So you check to make sure there are no land mines about to explode and to see if your client has e-mailed you back OK’ing the big proposal.

But that’s not processing your in-basket; it’s emergency scanning. When you’re in processing mode, you must get into the habit of starting at one end and just cranking through items one at a time, in order. As soon as you break that rule, and process only what you
feel
like processing, and in whatever order, you’ll invariably begin to leave things unprocessed. Then you will no longer have a functioning funnel, and it will back up all over your desk and office.

Theoretically, you should flip your in-basket upside down and process first the first thing that came in. As long as you go from one end clear through to the other within a reasonable period of time, though, it won’t make much difference. You’re going to see it all in short order anyway. And if you’re going to attempt to clear up a big backlog of e-mails staged in “in,” you’ll actually discover it’s more efficient to process the last-in first because of all the discussion threads that accumulate on top of one another.

You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with
it
. That item may be more attractive to your psyche because you
know
right away what to do with
it—
and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmppphhh” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.

Most people also want to take a whole stack of things out of the in-basket at once, put it right in front of them, and try to crank through it. Although I empathize with the desire to “deal with a big chunk,” I constantly remind clients to put back everything but the one item on top. The focus on just one thing forces the requisite attention and decision-making to get through all your stuff. And if you get interrupted (which is likely), you won’t have umpteen parts of “in” scattered around outside the tray and out of control again.

There’s a subtle exception to the one-item-at-a-time rule. Some personality types really
need
to shift their focus away from something for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it. When I see this going on with someone, I let him take two or sometimes three things out at once as he’s processing. It’s then easier and faster for him to make a choice about the action required.

Remember, multitasking is an exception—and it works only if you hold to the discipline of working through every item in short order, and never avoid
any
decision for longer than a minute or two.

There’s a one-way path out of “in.” This is actually what was meant by the old admonition to “handle things once,” though handling things just once is in fact a bad idea. If you did that, you’d never have a list, because you would finish everything as soon as you saw it. You’d also be highly ineffective and inefficient, since most things you deal with are
not
to be acted upon the first time you become aware of them. Where the advice does hold is in eliminating the bad habit of continually picking things up out of “in,” not deciding what they mean or what you’re going to do about them, and then just leaving them there. A better admonition would be, “The first time you pick something up from your in-basket, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in “in.”

You’ve got the message. You’re going to deal with one item at a time. And you’re going to make a firm next-action decision about each one. This may sound easy—and it is—but it requires you to do some fast, hard thinking. Much of the time the action will not be self-evident; it will need to be determined.

On that first item, for example, do you need to call someone? Fill something out? Get information from the Web? Buy something at the store? Talk to your secretary? E-mail your boss? What? If there’s an action, its specific nature will determine the next set of options. But what if you say, “There’s really nothing to do with this”?

It’s likely that a portion of your in-basket will require no action. There will be three types of things in this category:

If you’ve been following my suggestions, you’ll no doubt already have tossed out a big pile of stuff. It’s also likely that you will have put stacks of material into “in” that include things you don’t need anymore. So don’t be surprised if there’s still a lot more to throw away as you process your stuff.

Processing all the things in your world will make you more conscious of what you are going to do and what you should
not
be doing. One director of a foundation I worked with discovered that he had allowed way too many e-mails (thousands!) to accumulate—e-mails that in fact he wasn’t ever going to respond to anyway. He told me that using my method forced him to “go on a healthy diet” about what he would allow to hang around his world as an incompletion.

It’s likely that at some point you’ll come up against the question of whether or not to keep something for future reference. I have two ways of dealing with that:

Take your pick. I think either approach is fine. You just need to trust your intuition and be realistic about your space. Most people have some angst about all of this because their systems have never really been totally functional and clear-edged before. If you make a clean distinction between what’s reference and supplies and what requires action, and if your reference system is simple and workable, you can easily keep as much material as you can accommodate. Since no action is required on it, it’s just a matter of physical space and logistics.

Filing experts can offer you more detailed guidelines about all this, and your CPA can provide record-retention timetables that will tell you how long you should keep what kinds of documentation. My suggestion is that you make the distinction about whether something is actionable or not. Once it’s clear that no action is needed, there’s room for lots of options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is both easier and more difficult than it sounds.

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

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