Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

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.

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.

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.

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

“Horizontal” control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.

“Vertical” control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects.

The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get things done.

There is no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you keep things only in your head.

There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them.

THE CORE PROCESS I teach for mastering the art of relaxed and controlled knowledge work is a five-stage method for managing workflow. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do.

The method is straightforward enough in principle, and it is generally how we all go about our work in any case, but in my experience most people can stand significantly to improve their handling of each one of the five stages. The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain, so all the links must be integrated together and supported with consistent standards.

I have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success with “getting organized” is simply that they have tried to do all five phases at one time.

It’s important to know what needs to be collected and how to collect it most effectively so you can process it appropriately. In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do, and that at some point in the near future you will process and review all of it.

As soon as you attach a “should,” “need to,” or “ought to” to an item, it becomes an incomplete.

In order to manage this inventory of open loops appropriately, you need to capture it into “containers” that hold items in abeyance until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what, if anything, you’re going to do about them.

1. | Every open loop must be in your collection system and out of your head. 2. | You must have as few collection buckets as you can get by with. 3. | You must empty them regularly.

These collection tools should become part of your life-style.

You should have as many in-baskets as you need and as few as you can get by with.

Implementing standard tools for capturing ideas and input will become more and more critical as your life and work become more sophisticated.

The final success factor for collecting should be obvious: if you don’t empty and process the “stuff” you’ve collected, your buckets aren’t serving any function other than the storage of amorphous material.

Not emptying your in-basket is like having garbage cans that nobody ever dumps—you just have to keep buying new ones to hold all your trash.

In order for you to get “in” to empty, your total action-management system must be in place.

Teaching them the item-by-item thinking required to get their collection buckets empty is perhaps the most critical improvement I have made for virtually all the people I’ve worked with.

1. | It’s trash, no longer needed. 2. | No action is needed now, but something might need to be done later (incubate). 3. | The item is potentially useful information that might be needed for something later (reference).

1. | What “project” or outcome have you committed to? and 2. | What’s the next action required?

What’s the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you’ve collected; if you answer it appropriately, you’ll have the key substantive thing to organize. The “next action” is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.

1. | Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined. 2. | Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity. 3. | Defer it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists.

I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step.

You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it.

What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day (enter these in your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your “Next Actions” lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a “Waiting For” list).

Reminders of actions you need to take fall into two categories: those about things that have to happen on a specific day or time, and those about things that just need to get done as soon as possible.

First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time.

Second, if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.

maintain an ongoing list of things you might want to do at some point but not now.

In order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some more elevated level. In my experience (with thousands of people), that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review.

Most people don’t have a really complete system, and they get no real payoff from reviewing things for just that reason: their overview isn’t total.

The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time.

Context

Time Available

Energy Available

Priority

Doing Predefined Work

Doing Work as It Shows Up

Defining Your Work

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly.

The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.

Instead, I’ve found the biggest gap to be the lack of a project-focusing model for