Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  If you have a trusted secretary or assistant who maintains that system for you, so you can put a “File as X” Post-it on the document and send it “out” to him or her, great. But ask yourself if you still have some personally interesting or confidential support material that should be accessible at any moment, even when your assistant isn’t around. If so, you’ll still need your own system, either in your desk or right beside it somewhere.

  Success Factors for Filing

  I strongly suggest that you maintain your own personal, at-hand filing system. It should take you less than one minute to pick something up out of your in-basket or print it from e-mail, decide it needs no action but has some potential future value, and finish storing it in a trusted system. If it takes you longer than a minute to complete that sequence of actions, you have a significant improvement opportunity, since you probably won’t file the document; you’ll stack it or stuff it instead. Besides being fast, the system needs to be fun and easy, current and complete. Otherwise you’ll unconsciously resist emptying your in-basket because you know there’s likely to be something in there that ought to get filed, and you won’t even want to look at the papers. Take heart: I’ve seen people go from resisting to actually enjoying sorting through their stacks once their personal filing system is set up and humming.

  You must feel equally comfortable about filing a single piece of paper on a new topic—even a scribbled note—in its own file as you would about filing a more formal, larger document. Because it requires so much work to make and organize files, people either don’t keep them or have junked-up cabinets and drawers full of all sorts of one-of-a-kind items, like a menu for the local take-out café or the current train schedule.

  Whatever you need to do to get your reference system to that quick and easy standard for everything it has to hold, do it. My system works wonderfully for me and for many others who try it, and I highly recommend that you consider incorporating all of the following guidelines to really make reference filing automatic.

  Keep Your General-Reference Files at Hand’s Reach Filing has to be instantaneous and easy. If you have to get up every time you have some ad hoc piece of paper you want to file, you’ll tend to stack it instead of filing it, and you’re also likely to just resist the whole in-basket process (because you subconsciously know there’s stuff in there that might need filing!). Many people I have coached have redesigned their office space so they have four general-reference file drawers literally in “swivel distance,” instead of across their room.

  One Alpha System I have one A-Z alphabetical filing system, not multiple systems. People have a tendency to want to use their files as a personal organization system, and therefore they attempt to organize them by projects or areas of focus. This magnifies geometrically the number of places something isn’t when you forget where you filed it. One simple alpha system files everything by topic, project, person, or company, so it can be in only three or four places if you forget exactly where you put it. You can usually put at least one subset of topics on each label, like “Gardening—pots” and “Gardening—ideas.” These would be filed under G.

  Currently I have four file drawers for my general-reference files, and each is clearly marked on the outside—“A-E,” “F-L,” and so on—so I don’t have to think about where something goes once it’s labeled.

  Every once in a while someone has such a huge amount of reference material on one topic or project that it should be put in its own discrete drawer or cabinet. But if it is less than a half a file drawer’s worth, I recommended including it in the single general alphabetical system.

  Have Lots of Fresh Folders I keep a giant stack of fresh, new file folders instantly at hand and reachable from where I sit to process my in-basket. Nothing is worse than having something to file and not having an abundance of folders to grab from to make the process easy. At any given time I want to have an inventory of almost half a file drawer full of unused or reusable folders. Rule of thumb: reorder when the number drops below a hundred.

  Keep the Drawer Less Than Three-Quarters Full Always try to keep your file drawers less than three-quarters full. If they’re stuffed, you’ll unconsciously resist putting things in there, and reference materials will tend to stack up instead. If a drawer is starting to get tight, I may purge it while I’m on hold on the phone.

  I know almost no one who doesn’t have overstuffed file drawers. If you value your cuticles, and if you want to get rid of your unconscious resistance to filing, then you must keep the drawers loose enough that you can insert and retrieve files without effort.

  Some people’s reaction to this is “I’d have to buy more file cabinets!” as if that were something horrible. Help me out here. If the stuff is worth keeping, it’s worth keeping so that it’s easily accessible, right? And if it’s not, then why are you keeping it? It’s said that we’re in the Information Age; if there’s any validity to that, and if you’re doing anything that hinders your usage of it . . . not smart.

  You may need to create another tier of reference storage to give yourself sufficient working room with your general-reference files at hand. Material such as finished project notes and “dead” client files may still need to be kept, but can be stored off-site or at least out of your work space.

  Label Your File Folders with an Auto Labeler Typeset labels change the nature of your files and your relationship to them. Labeled files feel comfortable on a boardroom table; everyone can identify them; you can easily see what they are from a distance and in your briefcase; and when you open your file drawers, you get to see what looks almost like a printed index of your files in alphabetical order. It makes it fun to open the drawer to find or insert things.

  Perhaps later in this new millennium the brain scientists will give us some esoteric and complex neurological explanation for why labeled files work so effectively. Until then, trust me. Get a labeler. And get your own. To make the whole system work without a hitch, you’ll need to have it at hand all the time, so you can file something whenever you want. And don’t share! If you have something to file and your labeler’s not there, you’ll just stack the material instead of filing it. The labeler should be as basic a tool as your stapler.

  Get High-Quality Mechanics File cabinets are not the place to skimp on quality. Nothing is worse than trying to open a heavy file drawer and hearing that awful screech! that happens when you wrestle with the roller bearings on one of those $29.95 “special sale” cabinets. You really need a file cabinet whose drawer, even when it’s three-quarters full, will glide open and click shut with the smoothness and solidity of a door on a German car. I’m not kidding.

  Get Rid of Hanging Files If You Can At the risk of seriously offending a lot of people who are already using hanging files, I recommend that you totally do away with the hanging-file hardware and use just plain folders standing up by themselves in the file drawer, held up by the movable metal plate in the back. Hanging folders are much less efficient because of the effort it takes to make a new file ad hoc and the formality that imposes on the filing system.

  Here’s an e-mail I received recently from a senior manager who actually took my advice after avoiding it for a couple of years because of his investment in the hanging hardware:

  Your system is FANTASTIC!! I’ve completely redone my files at home and at work—it only took a combined four days to do it, but I’ve done away with Pendaflex and have gone to the manila folder system, with A-Z and nothing else. WOW! It’s so much easier. My desk for some reason is a lot neater, too, without those stacks of “to be filed” stuff hanging around!

  But If You Can’t . . . Many people are stuck with the hanging-file system, at least at work, because side-opening hanging-folder filing cabinets have become standard corporate issue. If you have to work with hanging files, then I recommend that you:

  • Label the files, not the hangers. That lets you carry the file folders for meetings and when traveling, without taking the hanger.

  In the fire
zone of real work, if it takes longer than sixty seconds to file something, you won’t file, you’ll stack.

  • Use only one file folder per hanger. This will keep the drawer visually neat and prevent the weirdness that results when multiple files make a hanger uneven. Having to recalibrate files in an alpha system every time a folder gets full is too much trouble.

  • Keep a big supply of plain hangers and new file folders in the front of your first file drawer so you can make new files and store them in a flash.

  Purge Your Files at Least Once a Year Cleaning house in your files regularly keeps them from going stale and seeming like a black hole, and it also gives you the freedom to keep anything on a whim “in case you might need it.” You know everything will be reassessed within a few months anyway, and you can redecide then what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. As I say, I purge my files while I’m on hold on the phone (or marking time on a conference call that’s dragging on and on!).

  I recommend that all organizations (if they don’t have one already) establish a Dumpster Day, when all employees get to come to work in sneakers and jeans, put their phones on do-not-disturb, and get current with all their stored stuff.5 Dumpsters are brought in, and everyone has permission to spend the whole day in purge mode. A personal Dumpster Day is an ideal thing to put into your tickler file, either during the holidays, at year’s end, or around early-spring tax-preparation time, when you might want to tie it in with archiving the previous year’s financial files.

  One Final Thing to Prepare . . .

  You’ve blocked off some time, you’ve gotten a work area set up, and you’ve got the basic tools to start implementing the methodology. Now what?

  If you’ve decided to commit a certain amount of time to setting up your workflow system, there’s one more thing that you’ll need to do to make it maximally effective: you must clear the decks of any other commitments for the duration of the session.

  If there’s someone you absolutely need to call, or something your secretary has to handle for you or you have to check with your spouse about, do it now. Or make an agreement with yourself about when you will do it, and then put some reminder of that where you won’t miss it. It’s critical that your full psychic attention be available for the work at hand.

  Almost without exception, when I sit down to begin coaching people, even though they’ve blocked out time and committed significant money to utilize me as a resource for that time, they still have things they’re going to have to do before we quit for the day, and they haven’t arranged for them yet in their own systems. “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to call this client back sometime today,” they’ll say, or “I have to check in with my spouse to see if he’s gotten the tickets for tonight.” It bespeaks a certain lack of awareness and maturity in our culture, I think, that so many sophisticated people are ignoring those levels of responsibility to their own psyche, on an ongoing operational basis.

  So have you handled all that? Good. Now it’s time to gather representatives of all of your open loops into one place.

  5

  Collection: Corralling Your “Stuff”

  IN CHAPTER 2 I described the basic procedures for collecting your work. This chapter will lead you in more detail through the process of getting all your incompletes, all your “stuff,” into one place—into “in.” That’s the critical first step in getting to the state of “mind like water.” Just gathering a few more things than you currently have will probably create a positive feeling for you. But if you can hang in there and really do the whole collection process, 100 percent, it will change your experience dramatically and give you an important new reference point for being on top of your work.

  When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did take all of twenty hours with one person (finally I told him, “You get the idea”). It can take longer than you think if you are committed to a full-blown capture that will include everything at work and everywhere else. That means going through every storage area and every nook and cranny in every location, including cars, boats, and other homes, if you have them.

  Be assured that if you give yourself at least a couple of hours to tackle this part, you can grab the major portion of things outstanding. And you can even capture the rest by creating relevant placeholding notes—for example, “Purge and process boat storage shed” and “Deal with hall closet.”

  In the real world, you probably won’t be able to keep your stuff 100 percent collected all of the time. If you’re like most people, you’ll move too fast and be engaged in too many things during the course of a week to get all your ideas and commitments captured outside your head. But it should become an ideal standard that keeps you motivated to consistently “clean house” of all the things about your work and life that have your attention.

  Ready, Set . . .

  There are very practical reasons to gather everything before you start processing it:

  1. | it’s helpful to have a sense of the volume of stuff you have to deal with;

  2. | it lets you know where the “end of the tunnel” is; and

  3. | when you’re processing and organizing, you don’t want to be distracted psychologically by an amorphous mass of stuff that might still be “somewhere.” Once you have all the things that require your attention gathered in one place, you’ll automatically be operating from a state of enhanced focus and control.

  It can be daunting to capture into one location, at one time, all the things that don’t belong where they are. It may even seem a little counterintuitive, because for the most part, most of that stuff was not, and is not, “that important”; that’s why it’s still lying around. It wasn’t an urgent thing when it first showed up, and probably nothing’s blown up yet because it hasn’t been dealt with. It’s the business card you put in your wallet of somebody you thought you might want to contact sometime. It’s the little piece of techno-gear in the bottom desk drawer that you’re missing a part for. It’s the printer that you keep telling yourself you’re going to move to a better location in your office. These are the kinds of things that nag at you but that you haven’t decided either to deal with or to drop entirely from your list of open loops. But because you think there still could be something important in there, that “stuff” is controlling you and taking up more psychic energy than it deserves. Keep in mind, you can feel good about what you’re not doing, only when you know what you’re not doing.

  So it’s time to begin. Grab your in-basket and a half-inch stack of plain paper for your notes, and let’s . . .

  ... Go!

  Physical Gathering

  Train yourself to notice and collect anything that doesn’t belong where it is forever.

  The first activity is to search your physical environment for anything that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is, permanently, and put it into your in-basket. You’ll be gathering things that are incomplete, things that have some decision about potential action tied to them. They all go into “in,” so they’ll be available for later processing.

  What Stays Where It Is

  The best way to create a clean decision about whether something should go into the in-basket is to understand clearly what shouldn’t go in. Here are the four categories of things that can remain where they are, the way they are, with no action tied to them:

  • Supplies

  • Reference material

  • Decoration

  • Equipment

  Supplies . . . include anything you need to keep because you use it regularly. Stationery, business cards, stamps, staples, Post-it pads, legal pads, paper clips, ballpoint refills, batteries, forms you need to fill out from time to time, rubber bands—all of these qualify. Many people also have a “personal supplies” drawer at work containing dental floss, Kleenex, breath mints, and so on.

  Reference Material . . . is anything you simply keep for information as needed, such as manuals for your software, the local take-out deli men
u, or your kid’s soccer schedule. This category includes your telephone and address information, any material relevant to projects, themes, and topics, and sources such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs.

  Decoration . . . means pictures of family, artwork, and fun and inspiring things pinned to your bulletin board. You also might have plaques, mementos, and/or plants.

  Equipment . . . is obviously the telephone, computer, fax, printer, wastebasket, furniture, and/or VCR.

  You no doubt have a lot of things that fall into these four categories—basically all your tools and your gear, which have no actions tied to them. Everything else goes into “in.” But many of the things you might initially interpret as supplies, reference, decoration, or equipment could also have action associated with them because they still aren’t exactly the way they need to be.

  For instance, most people have, in their desk drawers and on their credenzas and bulletin boards, a lot of reference materials that either are out of date or need to be organized somewhere else. Those should go into “in.” Likewise, if your supplies drawer is out of control, full of lots of dead or unorganized stuff, that’s an incomplete that needs to be captured. Are the photos of your kids current ones? Is the artwork what you want on the wall? Are the mementos really something you still want to keep? Is the furniture precisely the way it should be? Is the computer set up the way you want it? Are the plants in your office alive? In other words, supplies, reference materials, decoration, and equipment may need to be tossed into the in-basket if they’re not just where they should be, the way they should be.