This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.
—Kerry Gleeson
At least a portion of your mind is really kind of stupid, in an interesting way. If it had any innate intelligence, it would remind you of the things you needed to do
only when you could do something about them
.
Do you have a flashlight somewhere with dead batteries in it? When does your mind tend to remind you that you need new batteries? When you notice the dead ones! That’s not very smart. If your mind had any innate intelligence, it would remind you about those dead batteries only when you passed live ones in a store. And ones of the right size, to boot.
Between the time you woke up today and now, did you think of anything you needed to do that you still haven’t done? Have you had that thought more than once? Why? It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxieties about what you should be doing and aren’t.
It seems that most people let their minds run a lot of the show, especially where the too-much-to-do syndrome is concerned. You’ve probably given over a lot of your “stuff,” a lot of your open loops, to an entity on your inner committee that is incapable of dealing with those things effectively the way they are—your mind.
Rule your mind or it will rule you.
—Horace
Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. The reason most organizing systems haven’t worked for most people is that they haven’t yet transformed all the “stuff” they’re trying to organize. As long as it’s still “stuff,” it’s not controllable.
Most of the to-do lists I have seen over the years (when people had them at all) were merely listings of “stuff,” not inventories of the resultant real work that needed to be done. They were partial reminders of a lot of things that were unresolved and as yet untranslated into outcomes and actions—that is, the real outlines and details of what the list-makers had to “do.”
We need to transform all the “stuff” we’re trying to organize into actionable stuff we need to do.
“Stuff” is not inherently a bad thing. Things that command our attention, by their very nature, usually show up as “stuff.” But once “stuff” comes into our lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and clarify its meaning. That’s our responsibility as knowledge workers; if “stuff” were already transformed and clear, our value, other than physical labor, would probably not be required.
At the conclusion of one of my seminars, a senior manager of a major biotech firm looked back at the to-do lists she had come in with and said, “Boy, that was an amorphous blob of undoability!” That’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what passes for organizing lists in most personal systems. The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things; they haven’t yet realized how much and what they need to organize in order to get the real payoff. They need to gather everything that requires thinking about and then
do
that thinking if their organizational efforts are to be successful.
The Process: Managing Action
You can train yourself, almost like an athlete, to be faster, more responsive, more proactive, and more focused in knowledge work. You can think more effectively and manage the results with more ease and control. You can minimize the loose ends across the whole spectrum of your work life and personal life and get a lot more done with less effort. And you can make front-end decision-making about all the “stuff” you collect and create standard operating procedure for living and working in this new millennium.
Before you can achieve any of that, though, you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do
that,
as we’ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all:
• you don’t manage five minutes and wind up with six;
• you don’t manage information overload—otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you’d blow up; and
• you don’t manage priorities—you
have
them.
Instead, the key to managing all of your “stuff” is managing your
actions.
Managing Action Is the Prime Challenge
What you
do
with your time, what you
do
with information, and what you
do
with your body and your focus relative to your priorities—those are the real options to which you must allocate your limited resources. The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to
do
at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage
actions
.
That may sound obvious. However, it might amaze you to discover how many next actions for how many projects and commitments remain undetermined by most people. It’s extremely difficult to manage actions you haven’t identified or decided on. Most people have dozens of things that they need to do to make progress on many fronts, but they don’t yet know what they are. And the common complaint that “I don’t have time to ” (fill in the blank) is understandable because many projects seem overwhelming—and
are
overwhelming because you can’t
do
a project at all! You can only do an action related to it. Many actions require only a minute or two, in the appropriate context, to move a project forward.
The beginning is half of every action.
—Greek proverb
In training and coaching thousands of professionals, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they themselves may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.
Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.
I have discovered over the years the practical value of working on personal productivity improvement from the bottom up, starting with the most mundane, ground-floor level of current activity and commitments. Intellectually, the most appropriate way
ought
to be to work from the top down, first uncovering personal and corporate missions, 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-today level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective.
Getting current on and in control of what’s in your in-basket and on your mind right now, and incorporating practices that can help you
stay
that way, will provide the best means of broadening your horizons. A creative, buoyant energy will be unleashed that will better support your focus on new heights, and your confidence will increase to handle what that creativity produces. An immediate sense of freedom, release, and inspiration naturally comes to people who roll up their sleeves and implement this process.
You’ll be better equipped to undertake higher-focused thinking when your tools for handling the resulting actions for implementation are part of your ongoing operational style. There are more meaningful things to think about than your in basket, but if your management of that level is not as efficient as it could be, it’s like trying to swim in baggy clothing.
Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.
—Vaclav Havel
Many executives I have worked with during the day to clear the decks of their mundane “stuff” have spent the following evening having a stream of ideas and visions about their company and their future. This happens as an automatic consequence of unsticking their workflow.
Horizontal and Vertical Action Management
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. Imagine your psyche constantly scanning your environment like police radar; it may land on any of a thousand different items that invite or demand your attention during any twenty-four-hour period: the drugstore, the housekeeper, your aunt Martha, the strategic plan, lunch, a wilting plant in the office, an upset customer, shoes that need shining. You have to buy stamps, deposit that check, make the hotel reservation, cancel a staff meeting, see a movie tonight. You might be surprised at the volume of things you actually think about and have to deal with just in one day. You need a good system that can keep track of as many of them as possible, supply required information about them on demand, and allow you to shift your focus from one thing to the next quickly and easily.
“Vertical” control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects. For example, your inner “police radar” lands on your next vacation as you and your spouse talk about it over dinner—where and when you’ll go, what you’ll do, how to prepare for the trip, and so on. Or you and your boss need to make some decisions about the new departmental reorganization you’re about to launch. Or you just need to get your thinking up to date on the customer you’re about to call. 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.
The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get things 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.
The Major Change: Getting It All Out of Your Head
There is no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you keep things only in your head. As you’ll discover, the individual behaviors described in this book are things you’re already doing. The big difference between what I do and what others do is that I capture and organize 100 percent of my “stuff”
in and with objective tools at
hand, not in my mind.
And that applies to
everything
—little or big, personal or professional, urgent or not. Everything.
There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.
I’m sure that at some time or other you’ve gotten to a place in a project, or in your life, where you just
had
to sit down and
make a list
. If so, you have a reference point for what I’m talking about. Most people, however, do that kind of list-making drill only when the confusion gets too unbearable and they just
have
to do something about it. They usually make a list only about the specific area that’s bugging them. But if you made that kind of review a characteristic of your ongoing life- and work style, and you maintained it across all areas of your life (not just the most “urgent”), you’d be practicing the kind of “black belt” management style I’m describing.
There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.
I try to make intuitive choices based on my options, instead of trying to think about what those options
are
. I need to have
thought
about all of that already and captured the results in a trusted way. I don’t want to waste time thinking about things more than once. That’s an inefficient use of creative energy and a source of frustration and stress.
And you can’t fudge this thinking. Your mind will keep working on anything that’s still in that undecided state. But there’s a limit to how much unresolved “stuff” it can contain before it blows a fuse.
The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.
For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally. And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted “bucket” that you know you’ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you
worried
about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased.
The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t
do
anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something
all the time
. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing
right now
. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.