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Reference Material . . . is anything you simply keep for information as needed,
Decoration . . . means pictures of family, artwork, and fun and inspiring things pinned to your bulletin board.
Equipment
What If an Item Is Too Big to Go in the In-Tray? If you can’t physically put something in the in-tray, then write a note on a piece of letter-size plain paper to represent it.
Be sure to date it,
possible so you’re appropriately retrenched and have “drawn the battle lines.”
Be Careful of the Purge-and-Organize Bug!
it’s OK, so long as you have a major open window of time to get through the whole process (at least a whole week). Otherwise you’ll
need to break it up into chunks and capture them as little projects or actions to do, with reminders in your system, like “Purge four-drawer cabinet” or “Clean office closet.”
unless you’re thoroughly familiar with this workflow-processing model and have implemented it previously, I recommend that you treat those lists as items still to be processed, like everything else in “in.”
Often in the capturing process someone will run across a piece of paper or a document that causes her to say, “Oh, my God! I forgot
about that! I’ve got to deal with that!”
If that happens to you, first ask yourself if it’s something that really has to be handled before you get through this initial implementation time. If so, best deal with it immediately so you get it off your mind. If not, go ahead and put it into “in.”
If you can’t deal with the action in the moment, and you still just have to have the reminder right in front of you, go ahead and create an “emergency” stack somewhere close at hand.
Mental Gathering: The Mind Sweep
It’s much better to overdo this process than to risk missing something.
recommend that people transfer their voice mails onto paper notes and put those into their in-trays,
E-mails are best left where they are, because of their volume and the efficiency factor of dealing with them within their own subsystem.
It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.
Process the top item first. Process one item at a time. Never put anything back into “in.”
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.”
Most people get to their in-tray or their e-mail and look for the most urgent, most fun, easiest, or most interesting stuff to deal with first. “Emergency scanning”
“The first time you pick something up from your in-tray, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in ‘in.’”
Write them on a Someday/Maybe list. Put a reminder of them on your calendar or in a tickler file.
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 action,” again, means the next physical, visible activity that would be required to move the situation toward closure.
The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to Do
physical, visible activities.
Deciding isn’t really an action, because actions take time, and deciding doesn’t. There’s always some physical activity that can be done to facilitate your decision making.
Do it (if the action takes less than two minutes). Delegate it (if you’re not the most appropriate person to do the action). Defer it into your organization system as an option for work to do later.
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. . . .
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
“Am I the best person to be doing it?” If not, hand it off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format.
Although any of these options can work, I would (with some exceptions) recommend them in the above order, top to bottom.
Tracking the Handoff If you do delegate an action to someone else, and if you care at all whether something happens as a result, you’ll need to track it.
It’s important that you record the date on everything that you hand off to others.
These actions will have to be written down somewhere and then organized in the appropriate categories so you can access them when you need to. For the moment, go ahead and put Post-its on the pieces of paper in “in,” with the action written on them, and add these to the Pending stack of papers that have been processed.
Again, I define a project as any outcome you’re committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete.
begs a very big question: What does something mean to you? It turns out that much of what people are trying to organize has not been clarified, as per the previous chapter.
A
list
The categories must be kept visually, physically, and psychologically separate, to promote clarity.
you shouldn’t bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you’ll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change.
When I refer to a “list,” keep in mind that I mean nothing
more than a grouping of items with some similar characteristic.
(1) a file folder or container with separate paper notes for the items within the category; (2) an actual list on a titled piece of paper (often within a loose-leaf organizer or planner); or (3) an inventory of items on ...
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You’ll want to sort all of this into groupings that make sense to you so you can review them as options for work to do when you have time. You’ll also want to divide them in the most appropriate way physically to organize those groups, whether as items in folders or on lists, either paper based or digital.
two basic kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get to them, around your other calendar items (some perhaps with a final due date).
What many want to do, however, based on perhaps old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that actually might not, and that might then have to be moved to following days. Resist this impulse.
You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run.
the only things in there are those that you absolutely have to get done, or k...
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