Getting Things Done (25 page)

If you’re like me and most other people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you’re going to have the world come at you faster than you can keep up. Many of us seem to have it in our natures consistently to entangle ourselves in more than we have the ability to handle. We book ourselves back to back in meetings all day, go to after-hours events that generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits.

That whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, reevaluation, and reprocessing time to keep you in balance. There is simply no way to do this necessary regrouping while you’re trying to get everyday work done.

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. You’re going to have to learn to say no—faster, and to more things—in order to stay afloat and comfortable. Having some dedicated time in which to at least get up to the project level of thinking goes a long way toward making that easier.

Very simply, the Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again. It’s going through the five phases of workflow management—collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding involvements—until you can honestly say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”

From a nitty-gritty, practical standpoint, here is the drill that can get you there:

 

Loose Papers
Pull out all miscellaneous scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and so on that have crept into the crevices of your desk, clothing, and accessories. Put it all into your in-basket for processing.

 

Process Your Notes
Review any journal entries, meeting notes, or miscellaneous notes scribbled on notebook paper. List action items, projects, waiting-fors, calendar events, and someday/ maybes, as appropriate. File any reference notes and materials. Stage your “Read/Review” material. Be ruthless with yourself, processing all notes and thoughts relative to interactions, projects, new initiatives, and input that have come your way since your last download, and purging those not needed.

 

Previous Calendar Data
Review past calendar dates in detail for remaining action items, reference information, and so on, and transfer that data into the active system. Be able to archive your last week’s calendar with nothing left uncaptured.

 

Upcoming Calendar
Look at future calendar events (long- and short-term). Capture actions about arrangements and preparations for any upcoming events.

 

Empty Your Head
Put in writing (in appropriate categories) any new projects, action items, waiting-fors, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured.

 

Review “Projects” (and Larger Outcome) Lists
Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that at least one current kick-start action for each is in your system.

 

Review “Next Actions” Lists
Mark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to capture.

 

Review “Waiting For” List
Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items.

 

Review Any Relevant Checklists
Is there anything you haven’t done that you need to do?

 

Review “Someday/Maybe” List
Check for any projects that may have become active and transfer them to “Projects.” Delete items no longer of interest.

Review “Pending” and Support Files
Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.

 

Be Creative and Courageous
Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to your system?

 

This review process is common sense, but few of us do it as well as we could, and that means as regularly as we should to keep a clear mind and a sense of relaxed control.

The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it. Once your comfort zone has been established for the kind of relaxed control that
Getting Things Done
is all about, you won’t have to worry too much about making yourself do your review—you’ll
have
to to get back to your personal standards again.

Until then, do whatever you need to, once a week, to trick yourself into backing away from the daily grind for a couple of hours—not to zone out, but to rise up at least to “10,000 feet” and catch up.

If you have the luxury of an office or work space that can be somewhat isolated from the people and interactions of the day, and if you have anything resembling a typical Monday-to-Friday workweek, I recommend that you block out two hours early every Friday afternoon for the review. Three factors make this an ideal time:

You may be the kind of person, however, who doesn’t have normal weekends. I, for example, often have as much to do on Saturday and Sunday as on Wednesday. But I do have the luxury(?) of frequent long plane trips, which provide an ideal opportunity for me to catch up. A good friend and client of mine, an executive in the world’s largest aerospace company, has his own Sunday-night ritual of relaxing in his home office and processing the hundreds of notes he’s generated during his week of back-to-back meetings.

Whatever your life-style, you need a weekly regrouping ritual. You likely have something like this (or close to it) already. If so, leverage the habit by adding into it a higher-altitude review process.

The people who find it hardest to make time for this review are those who have constantly on-demand work and home environments, with zero built-in time or space for regrouping. The most stressed professionals I have met are the ones who have to be mission-critically reactive at work (e.g., high-level equities traders and chiefs of staff) and then go home to a couple of under-ten-year-old children and a spouse who also works. The more fortunate of them have a one-hour train commute.

If you recognize yourself in that picture, your greatest challenge will be to build in a consistent process of regrouping, when your world is not directly in your face. You’ll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home.

Executive Operational Review Time
I’ve coached many executives to block out two hours on their calendars on Fridays. For them the biggest problem is how to balance quality thinking and catch-up time with the urgent demands of mission-critical interactions. This is a tough call. The most senior and savvy of them, however, know the value of sacrificing the seemingly urgent for the truly important, and they create their islands of time for some version of this process.

Even the executives who have integrated a consistent reflective time for their work, though, often seem to give short shrift to the more mundane review and catch-up process at the “10,000-foot” level. Between wall-to-wall meetings and ambling around your koi pond with a chardonnay at sunset, there’s got to be a slightly elevated level of reflection and regrouping required for operational control and focus. If you think you have all your open loops fully identified, clarified, assessed, and actionalized, you’re probably kidding yourself.

Yes, at some point you must clarify the larger outcomes, the long-term goals, the visions and principles that ultimately drive and test your decisions.

What are your key goals and objectives in your work? What should you have in place a year or three years from now? How is your career going? Is this the life-style that is most fulfilling to you? Are you doing what you really want or need to do, from a deeper and longer-term perspective?

The explicit focus of this book is not at those “30,000-” to “50,000+-foot” levels. Urging you to operate from a higher perspective is, however, its
implicit
purpose—to assist you in making your total life expression more fulfilling and better aligned with the bigger game we’re all about. As you increase the speed and agility with which you clear the “runway” and “10,000-foot” levels of your life and work, be sure to revisit the other levels you’re engaged in, now and then, to maintain a truly clear head.

How often you ought to challenge yourself with that type of wide-ranging review is something only you can know. The principle I must affirm at this juncture is this:

You need to assess your life and work at the appropriate horizons, making the appropriate decisions, at the appropriate intervals, in order to really come clean.

Which brings us to the ultimate point and challenge of all this personal collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing methodology: It’s 9:22 A.M. Wednesday morning—what do you do?

Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

WHEN IT COMES
to your real-time, plow-through, get-it-done workday, how do you decide what to do at any given point?

As I’ve said, my simple answer is, trust your heart. Or your spirit. Or, if you’re allergic to those kinds of words, try these: your gut, the seat of your pants, your intuition.

That doesn’t mean you throw your life to the winds—unless, of course, it does. I actually went down that route myself with some vengeance at one point in my life, and I can attest that the lessons were valuable, if not necessarily necessary.
¹³

As outlined in chapter 2 (pages 48-53), I have found three priority frameworks to be enormously helpful in the context of deciding actions:

These happen to be shown in reverse hierarchical order—that is, the reverse of the typical strategic top-down perspective. In keeping with the nature of the
Getting Things Done
methodology, I have found it useful to once again work from the bottom up, meaning I’ll start with the most mundane levels.

Remember that you make your action choices based on the following four criteria, in order:

Let’s examine each of these in the light of how you can best structure your systems and behaviors to take advantage of its dynamics.

At any point in time, the first thing to consider is, what could you possibly do, where you are, with the tools you have? Do you have a phone? Do you have access to the person you need to talk with face-to-face about three agenda items? Are you at the store where you need to buy something? If you can’t do the action because you’re not in the appropriate location or don’t have the appropriate tool, don’t worry about it.

As I’ve said, you should always organize your action reminders by context—“Calls,” “At Home,” “At Computer,” “Errands,” “Agenda for Joe,” “Agenda for Staff Meeting,” and so on. Since context is the first criterion that comes into play in your choice of actions, context-sorted lists prevent unnecessary reassessments about what to do. If you have a bunch of things to do on one to-do list, but you actually can’t do many of them in the same context, you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering
all
of them.

If you’re stuck in traffic, and the only actions you can take are calls on your cell phone, you want to be able to pull out just your “Calls” list. Your action lists should fold in or out, based on what you could possibly do at any time.