Getting Things Done (22 page)

To return to the previous example of moving into a new house, you could have a folder labeled “New House” containing all the plans and details and notes about the landscaping and the kitchen and the basement. In your Weekly Review, when you came to “Finish new home renovations” on your “Projects” list, you’d pull out the “New House” file and thumb through all your notes to ensure that you weren’t missing any possible next actions. Those actions would then get done, delegated, or deferred onto your action lists, and the folder would be refiled until you needed it again for doing the actions or for your next Weekly Review.

Many people who interact with prospects and clients have attempted to use client folders and/or contact-management software such as Act! to “manage the account.” The problem here is that some material is just facts or historical data that needs to be stored as background for when you might be able to use it, and some of what must be tracked is the actions required to move the relationships forward. The latter can be more effectively organized within your action-lists system. Client information is just that, and it can be folded into a general-reference file on the client or stored within a client-focused library. (I use Act! for the single great feature it offers of allowing me to cross-reference general company information and significant interactions with key people within the company. It’s just a good client-centered database.) If I need to call a client, I don’t want that reminder embedded anywhere but on my “Calls” list.

In chapter 3, I suggested that you will often have ideas that you’ll want to keep about projects but that are not necessarily next actions. Those ideas fall into the broad category of “project support materials,” and may be anything from a notion about something you might want to do on your next vacation to a clarification of some major components in a project plan. These thoughts could come as you’re driving down the freeway listening to a news story on the radio, or reading a relevant article. What do you do with that kind of material?

My recommendation here is that you consider where you’re keeping tabs on the project or topic itself, how you might add information to it in that format, and where you might store any more exten sive data associated with it. Most professionals will have several options for how to handle support materials, including attaching notes to a list item, organizing digital information in e-mail and/or databases, and maintaining paper-based files and notes in notebooks.

 

Attached Notes
Most organizing software allows you to attach a digital “note” to a list or calendar entry. If you’re keeping a “Projects” list within the software, you can go to the project you had a thought about, open or attach a “note” to it, and type in your idea. This is an excellent way to capture “back-of-the-envelope” project thinking. If your “Projects” list is paper-based, you can attach a Post-it note next to the item on your master list or, if you’re a low-tech type, on the item’s separate sheet. In any case, you’ll need to remember to look at the attachment when you review your project, to make use of the data.

 

E-mail and Databases
E-mails that might contain good information related to your projects can be held in a dedicated e-mail folder (just follow the instructions on pages 152-53 for “@ACTION” and call it something like “@PROJECTS”). You may also find it worthwhile, if you don’t have one already, to set up a more rigorous kind of digital database for organizing your thinking on a project or topic. If your company uses Lotus Notes, for example, you can create a project database either for your own private use on your PC or to be shared with others in your network.
¹⁰
It’s worth looking into some of the other types of free-form databases that are on the market, too—even just for your own use. It’s great to be able to cut and paste from the Web or from e-mails and drop data under a topic somewhere or type in your own thoughts. Be sure, also, to explore the technology and tools that you already have—just learning how to use all the lists and attachments in something like the Palm organizer may provide you with sufficient “back-of-the-envelope” capability.

 

Paper-Based Files
Having a separate file folder devoted to each project makes a lot of sense when you’re accumulating paper-based materials; it may be low-tech, but it’s an elegant solution nonetheless. Simplicity and ease of handling make for a good general-reference filing system—one that lets you feel comfortable about creating a folder for scraps of paper from a meeting.

 

Pages in Notebooks
A great advantage of paper-based loose-leaf notebooks is that you can dedicate a whole page or group of pages to an individual project. For years I maintained a midsize notebook with a “Projects” list in front and a “Project Support” section toward the back, where I always had some blank pages to capture any random thinking or plans and details about projects on my list.

 

Each of the methods described above can be effective in organizing project thinking. The key is that you must consistently look for any action steps inherent in your project notes, and review the notes themselves as often as you think is necessary, given the nature of the project.

You’ll also want to clear out many of your notes once they become inactive or unreal, to keep the whole system from catching the “stale” virus. I’ve found a lot of value in capturing these types of thoughts, more for the way it consistently helps my thinking process than because I end up using every idea (most I don’t!). But I try to make sure not to let my old thoughts stay around too long, pretending they’re useful when they’re not.

Interestingly, one of the biggest problems with most people’s personal management systems is that they blend a few actionable things with a large amount of data and material that has value but no action attached. Having good, consistent structures with which to manage the nonactionable items in our work and lives is as important as managing our action and project reminders. When the nonactionable items aren’t properly managed, they clog up the whole process.

Unactionable items fall into two large categories: reference materials and reminders of things that need no action now but might at a later date.

Much of what comes across your desk and into your life in general is reference material. There’s no action required, but it’s information that you want to keep, for a variety of reasons. Your major decisions will be how much to keep, how much room to dedicate to it, what form it should be stored in, and where. Much of that will be a personal or organizational judgment call based upon legal or logistical concerns or personal preferences. The only time you should have attention on your reference material is when you need to change your system in some way because you have too much or too little information, given your needs or preferences.

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it’s still “stuff ”—that is, they haven’t decided what’s actionable and what’s not. Once you’ve made a clean distinction about which is which, what’s left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it’s just your library. Your only decision then is how big a library you want. When you’ve fully implemented this action-management methodology, you can be as big a packrat as your space (physical and digital) will allow. As I’ve increased the size of the hard disk in my computer, I’ve kept that much more e-mail in my archives. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned, since increasing the volume of pure reference material adds no psychic weight.

There are a number of ways to organize reference material, and many types of tools to use. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the most common.

General-Reference Filing
As I’ve said, a good filing system is critical for processing and organizing your stuff. It’s also a must for dealing with the sometimes huge volume of paper-based materials that are valuable for you for one reason or another. Ideally you will already have set up a general-reference filing system as you were processing “in.” You need to feel comfortable storing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later, and your system must be informal and accessible enough that it’s a snap to file it away in your alphabetized general-reference system, right at hand where you work. If you’re not set up that way yet, look back at chapter 4 for help on this topic.

Most people seem to wind up with 200 to 400 paper-based general-reference files and 30 to 100 e-mail reference folders.

 

Large-Category Filing
Any topic that requires more than fifty file folders should probably be given its own section or drawer, with its own alpha-sorted system. For instance, if you’re managing a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paperwork, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at least a whole file drawer for those designated hobbies.

Bear in mind that if your “area of focus” has support material that could blend into other “areas of focus,” you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files. When you read a great article about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your “Garden” cabinet or in the general system with other information about home-related projects? As a general rule, it’s best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

 

Rolodexes and Contact Managers
Much of the information that you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You need to track contact information of all sorts—home and office phone numbers and addresses, cell-phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you may want to maintain information about birthdays, names of friends’ and colleagues’ family members, hobbies, favorite wines and foods, and the like. In a more rigorous professional vein, you may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates, goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff development purposes.

The telephone/address section of most of the organizers sold in the last fifty years is probably (along with the calendar) their most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track of phone numbers. It’s instructive to note that this is purely and simply reference material. No action is required—this is just information that you might need to access in the future.

So there’s no big mystery about how to organize it, aside from the logistics for your individual needs. Again, the only problem comes up when people try to make their Rolodexes serve as tools for reminding them about things they need to
do.
That doesn’t work. As long as all the actions relative to people you know have been identified and tracked in your action reminder lists, there’s no role for telephone and address systems to fill other than being a neutral address book.

The only issue then becomes how much information you need to keep and where and in what equipment you need to keep it in order to have it accessible when you want it. Nothing’s perfect in that regard, but as the small digital tools become easier to use and connect to larger databases, you’ll be able to have more information at hand with the same or less effort.

 

Libraries and Archives: Personalized Levels
Information that might be useful lives at many levels. You could probably find out pretty much
anything
if you were willing to dig deep enough. The question of how much to keep, how close, and in what form, will be a changing reality, given the variables of your needs and your particular comfort levels with data. Relative to your personal organization and productivity, this is not a core issue, so long as all of your projects and actions are in a control system that you work with regularly. Reference material in all its forms then becomes nothing more or less than material to capture and create access to according to your particular proclivities and requirements.

Some degree of consistency will always make things easier. What kinds of things do you need with you all the time? Those must go into your ubiquitous planner or PDA. What do you need specifically for meetings or off-site events? That should be put into your briefcase, pack, satchel, or purse. What might you need when you’re working in your office? That should be put into your personal filing system or your networked computer. What about rare situations relative to your job? Material needed for those could be archived in departmental files or off-site storage. What could you find anytime you might need it, on the Web? You don’t need to do anything with that information, unless you need it when you’re away from a Web connection, in which case you should print the data out when you’re online and store it in a file you can take with you.

Do you see how that personal organization of reference material is simply a logistical issue? Distinguishing actionable things from nonactionable ones is the key success factor in this arena. Once you’ve done that, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want. It’s a highly individual decision that ought to be based on the ratio of the value received to the time and effort required to capture and maintain it.