Getting Things Done (24 page)

In order for the system to work, you must update it every day. If you forget to empty the daily file, you won’t trust the system to handle important data, and you’ll have to manage those things some other way. If you leave town (or don’t access the file on the weekend), you must be sure to check the folders for the days you’ll be away,
before
you go.

The last topic in personal system organization that deserves some attention is the care and feeding of checklists, those
recipes of potential ingredients
for projects, events, and areas of value, interest, and responsibility.

The most creative checklists are often generated at the back end of a good consulting process with a team or company. Good ones also show up as areas of focus for training staff or hiring into job slots.

When I’m clearing in-baskets with clients and reviewing other things they’re concerned about, we often run across little “Memos to Self” like:

What should you do with these “fuzzier” kinds of internal commitments and areas of attention?

For much of this kind of “stuff,” there is still a project and/or an action that needs to be defined. “Exercise more regularly”
really
translates for many people into “Set up regular exercise program” (project) and “Call Sally for suggestions about personal trainers” (real action step). In such cases,
inherent
projects and actions still need to be clarified and organized into a personal system.

But there
are
some things that don’t quite fit into that category.

Objectives like “Maintain good physical conditioning” or “Physical health and vitality” may still need to be built into some sort of overview checklist that will be reviewed regularly. You have multiple layers of outcomes and standards playing on your psyche and your choices at any point in time, and knowing what those are, at all the different levels, is always a good idea.

I suggested earlier that there are at least six levels of your “work” that could be defined, and that each level deserves its own acknowledgment and evaluation. A complete inventory of everything you hold important and are committed to on each of those levels would represent an awesome checklist. It might include:

And then moving down a level, within your job, you might want some reminders of your key areas of responsibility, your staff, your values, and so on. A list of these might contain points like:

All of these items could in turn be included on the lists in your personal system, as reminders to you, as needed, to keep the ship on course, on an even keel.

The degree to which any of us needs to maintain checklists and external controls is directly related to our unfamiliarity with the area of responsibility. If you’ve been doing what you’re doing for a long time, and there’s no pressure on you to change in that area, you probably need minimal external personal organization to stay on cruise control. You know when things must happen, and how to make them happen, and your system is fine, status quo. Often, though, that’s not the case.

Many times you’ll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you’re more familiar with what you’re doing. If your CEO suddenly disappeared, for example, and you had instantly to fill his shoes, you’d need some overviews and outlines in front of you for a while to ensure that you had all the mission-critical aspects of the job handled. And if you’ve just been hired into a new position, with new responsibilities that are relatively unfamiliar to you, you’ll want a framework of control and structure, if only for the first few months.

There have been times when I needed to make a list of areas that I had to handle, temporarily, until things were under control. For instance, when my wife and I decided to create a brand-new structure for a business we’d been involved with for many years, I took on areas of responsibility I’d never had to deal with before—namely, accounting, computers, marketing, legal, and administration. For several months I needed to keep a checklist of those responsibilities in front of me to ensure that I filled in the blanks everywhere and managed the transition as well as I could. After the business got onto “cruise control” to some degree, I no longer needed that list.

Be open to creating any kind of checklist as the urge strikes you. The possibilities are endless—from “Core Life Values” to “Things to Take Camping.” Making lists, ad hoc, as they occur to you, is one of the most powerful yet subtlest and simplest procedures that you can install in your life.

To spark your creative thinking, here’s a list of some of the topics of checklists I’ve seen and used over the years:

Get comfortable with checklists, both ad hoc and more permanent. Be ready to create and eliminate them as required. Appropriately used, they can be a tremendous asset in personal productivity.

 

If in fact you have now
collected
everything that represents an open loop in your life and work,
processed
each one of those items in terms of what it means to you and what actions are required, and
organized
the results into a complete system that holds a current and complete overview—large and small—of all your present and “someday” projects, then you’re ready for the next phase of implementation in the art of stress-free productivity—the review process.

Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional

THE PURPOSE OF
this whole method of workflow management is
not
to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive 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. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control.

If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with
all
the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won’t get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which, as you should know by now, it doesn’t do very effectively.

All of this means your system cannot be static. In order to support appropriate action choices, it must be kept up to date. And it should trigger consistent and appropriate evaluation of your life and work at several horizons.

There are two major issues that need to be handled at this point:

A real review process will lead to enhanced and proactive new thinking in key areas of your life and work. Such thinking emerges from both focused concentration and serendipitous brainstorming, which will be triggered and galvanized by a consistent personal review of your inventory of actions and projects.

Your personal system and behaviors need to be established in such a way that you can see all the action options you need to see,
when
you need to see them. This is really just common sense, but few people actually have their processes and their organization honed to the point where they are as functional as they could be.

When you have access to a phone and any discretionary time, you ought to at least glance at the list of all the phone calls you need to make, and then either direct yourself to the best one to handle or give yourself permission to feel OK about not bothering with any of them. When you’re about to go in for a discussion with your boss or your partner, take a moment to review the outstanding agendas you have with him or her, so you’ll know that you’re using your time most effectively. When you need to pick up something at the dry cleaner’s, first quickly review all the other errands that you might be able to do en route.

People often ask me, “How much time do you spend looking at your system?” My answer is simply, “As much time as I need to to feel comfortable about what I’m doing.” In actuality it’s an accumulation of two seconds here, three seconds there. What most people don’t realize is that my lists are in one sense my office. Just as you might have Post-its and stacks of phone slips at your workstation, so do I on my “Next Actions” lists. Assuming that you’ve completely collected, processed, and organized your stuff, you’ll most likely take only a few brief moments here and there to access your system for day-to-day reminders.

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. You need to know the time-and-space parameters first. Knowing that you have wall-to-wall meetings from 8:00 A.M. through 6:00 P.M., for example, with barely a half-hour break for lunch, will help you make necessary decisions about any other activities.

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. If you’re in your office, for instance, you’ll look at your lists of calls, computer actions, and in-office things to do. This doesn’t necessarily mean you will actually be
doing
anything on those lists; you’ll just evaluate them against the flow of other work coming at you to ensure that you make the best choices about what to deal with. You need to feel confident that you’re not missing anything critical.

Frankly, if your calendar is trustworthy and your action lists are current, they may be the only things in the system you’ll need to refer to more than every couple of days. There have been many days when I didn’t need to look at
any
of my lists, in fact, because it was clear from the front end—my calendar—what I
wouldn’t
be able to do.

You may need to access any one of your lists at any time. When you and your spouse are decompressing at the end of the day, and you want to be sure you’ll take care of the “business” the two of you manage together about home and family, you’ll want to look at your accumulated agendas for him or her. On the other hand, if your boss pops in for a face-to-face conversation about current realities and priorities, it will be highly functional for you to have your “Projects” list up to date and your “Agenda” list for him or her right at hand.

The real trick to ensuring the trustworthiness of the whole organization system lies in regularly refreshing your psyche and your system from a more elevated perspective. That’s impossible to do, however, if your lists fall too far behind your reality. You won’t be able to fool yourself about this: if your system is out of date, your brain will be forced to fully engage again at the lower level of remembering.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to have a clear head and feel in control of everything that’s going on, can you do what you need to to maintain that as an operational standard? The many years I’ve spent researching and implementing this methodology with countless people have proved to me that the magic key to the sustainability of the process is the Weekly Review.