by David Allen
Volunteer
Communications to make/get
Family
Friends
Professional
Initiate or respond to:
Phone calls
Letters
Cards
Upcoming events
Special occasions
Birthdays
Anniversaries
Weddings
Graduations
Holidays
Travel
Weekend trips
Vacations
Social events
Cultural events
Sporting events
R&D—things to do
Places to go
People to meet/invite
Local attractions
Administration
Financial
Bills
Banks
Investments
Loans
Taxes
Insurance
Legal affairs
Filing
Waiting for . . .
Mail order
Repair
Reimbursements
Loaned items
Medical data
RSVPs
Home/household
Landlords
Property ownership
Legal
Real estate
Zoning
Taxes
Builders/contractors
Heating/air-conditioning
Plumbing
Electricity
Roofing
Landscape
Driveway
Walls/floors/ceilings
Decoration
Furniture
Utilities
Appliances
Lightbulbs/wiring
Kitchen things
Washer/dryer/vacuum
Areas to organize/clean
Computers
Software
Hardware
Connections
CD-ROM
E-mail/Internet
TV
VCR
Music/CDs/tapes
Cameras/film
Phones
Answering machine
Sports equipment
Closets/clothes
Garage/storage
Vehicle repair/maintenance
Tools
Luggage
Pets
Health care
Doctors
Dentists
Specialists
Hobbies
Books/records/tapes/disks
Errands
Hardware store
Drugstore
Market
Bank
Cleaner
Stationer
Community
Neighborhood
Schools
Local government
Civic issues
The “In” Inventory
If your head is empty of everything, personally and professionally, then your in-basket is probably quite full, and likely spilling over. In addition to the paper-based and physical items in your in-basket, your inventory of “in” should include any resident voice-mails and all the e-mails that are currently staged in the “in” area of your communication software. It should also include any items on your organizer lists for which you have not yet determined next actions.
Connection is completed when you can easily see the edges to the inventory of everything that is complete.
I usually recommend that clients download their voice-mails onto paper notes and put those into their in-baskets, along with their whole organizer notebooks, which usually need significant reassessment. If you’ve been using something like a Palm PDA or Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Organizer for anything other than calendar and telephone/address functionality, I suggest you print out any task and to-do lists and put them, too, into your in-basket. E-mails are best left where they are, because of their volume and the efficiency factor of dealing with them within their own minisystem.
But “In” Doesn’t Stay in “In”
When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to take the next step. You don’t want to leave anything in “in” for an indefinite period of time, because then it would without fail creep back into your psyche again, since your mind would know you weren’t dealing with it. Of course, one of the main factors in people’s resistance to collecting stuff into “in” is the lack of a good processing and organizing methodology to handle it.
That brings us to the next chapter: “Getting ‘In’ to Empty.”
6
Processing: Getting “In” to Empty
ASSUMING THAT YOU have collected everything that has your attention, your job now is to actually get to the bottom of “in.” Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve collected. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.
When you’ve finished processing “in,” you will have
1. | trashed what you don’t need;
2. | completed any less-than-two-minute actions;
3. | handed off to others anything that can be delegated;
4. | sorted into your own organizing system reminders of actions that require more than two minutes; and
5. | identified any larger commitments (projects) you now have, based on the input.
To get an overview of this process, you may find it useful here to refer to the Workflow Diagram on page 120. The center column illustrates all the steps involved in processing and deciding your next actions.
This chapter focuses on the components in the diagram’s center column, the steps from “in” to next action. You’ll immediately see the natural organization that results from following this process for each of your open loops. For instance, if you pick up something from “in” and realize, “I’ve got to call Andrea about that, but I’ve got to do it on Monday, when she’s in her office,” then you’ll defer that action immediately and enter it into your calendar for Monday.
WORKFLOW DIAGRAM—PROCESSING
I recommend that you read through this chapter and the next one, on organizing your actions, before you actually start processing what you’ve collected in “in.” It may save you some steps. When I coach clients through this process, it invariably becomes a dance back and forth between the simple decision-making stage of processing the open loops and the trickier task of figuring out the best way to enter these decisions in a client’s particular organization system.
Many of my coaching clients, for example, are eager to get set up personally on a PDA organizer that will synchronize with Microsoft Outlook, which their company is using for e-mail and scheduling. The first thing we have to do (after we’ve collected the in-basket) is make sure all their hardware and software are working. Then we clean up (print out and erase, usually) everything they have previously tried to organize in their Outlook task lists and put it all into “in.” Then we establish some working categories such as “Calls,” “Errands,” “Agendas,” “At Computer,” and so on. As we begin to process the in-basket, the client can go immediately to his computer and type his action steps directly into the system he will ultimately depend on.
If you’re not sure yet what you’re going to be using as a personal reminder system, don’t worry. You can begin very appropriately with the low-tech initial process of notes on pieces of paper. You can always upgrade your tools later, once you have your system in place.
Processing Guidelines
The best way to learn this model is by doing. But there are a few basic rules to follow:
• Process the top item first.
• Process one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into “in.”
Top Item First
Even if the second item down is a personal note to you from the president of your country, and the top item is a piece of junk mail, you’ve got to process the junk mail first! That’s an exaggeration to make
a point, but the principle is an important one: 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.” You’re going to get to the bottom of the basket as soon as you can anyway, and you don’t want to avoid dealing with anything in there.
Process does not mean “spend time on.”
Emergency Scanning Is Not Processing
Most people get to their in-basket or their e-mail and look for the most urgent, most fun, or most interesting stuff to deal with first. “Emergency scanning” is fine and necessary sometimes (I do it, too). Maybe you’ve just come back from an off-site meeting and have to be on a long conference call in fifteen minutes. So you check to make sure there are no land mines about to explode and to see if your client has e-mailed you back OK’ing the big proposal.
But that’s not processing your in-basket; it’s emergency scanning. When you’re in processing mode, you must get into the habit of starting at one end and just cranking through items one at a time, in order. As soon as you break that rule, and process only what you feel like processing, and in whatever order, you’ll invariably begin to leave things unprocessed. Then you will no longer have a functioning funnel, and it will back up all over your desk and office.
LIFO or FIFO?
Theoretically, you should flip your in-basket upside down and process first the first thing that came in. As long as you go from one end clear through to the other within a reasonable period of time, though, it won’t make much difference. You’re going to see it all in short order anyway. And if you’re going to attempt to clear up a big backlog of e-mails staged in “in,” you’ll actually discover it’s more efficient to process the last-in first because of all the discussion threads that accumulate on top of one another.
The in-basket is a processing station, not a storage bin.
One Item at a Time
You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to your psyche because you know right away what to do with it—and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmppphhh” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.
Most people also want to take a whole stack of things out of the in-basket at once, put it right in front of them, and try to crank through it. Although I empathize with the desire to “deal with a big chunk,” I constantly remind clients to put back everything but the one item on top. The focus on just one thing forces the requisite attention and decision-making to get through all your stuff. And if you get interrupted (which is likely), you won’t have umpteen parts of “in” scattered around outside the tray and out of control again.
The Multitasking Exception
There’s a subtle exception to the one-item-at-a-time rule. Some personality types really need to shift their focus away from something for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it. When I see this going on with someone, I let him take two or sometimes three things out at once as he’s processing. It’s then easier and faster for him to make a choice about the action required.
Remember, multitasking is an exception—and it works only if you hold to the discipline of working through every item in short order, and never avoid any decision for longer than a minute or two.
Nothing Goes Back into “In”
There’s a one-way path out of “in.” This is actually what was meant by the old admonition to “handle things once,” though handling things just once is in fact a bad idea. If you did that, you’d never have a list, because you would finish everything as soon as you saw it. You’d also be highly ineffective and inefficient, since most things you deal with are not to be acted upon the first time you become aware of them. Where the advice does hold is in eliminating the bad habit of continually picking things up out of “in,” not deciding what they mean or what you’re going to do about them, and then just leaving them there. A better admonition would be, “The first time you pick something up from your in-basket, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in “in.”
The Key Processing Question: “What’s the Next Action?”
You’ve got the message. You’re going to deal with one item at a time. And you’re going to make a firm next-action decision about each one. This may sound easy—and it is—but it requires you to do some fast, hard thinking. Much of the time the action will not be self-evident; it will need to be determined.
On that first item, for example, do you need to call someone? Fill something out? Get information from the Web? Buy something at the store? Talk to your secretary? E-mail your boss? What? If there’s an action, its specific nature will determine the next set of options. But what if you say, “There’s really nothing to do with this”?
I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.
—Stephen Bayne
What If There Is No Action?
It’s likely that a portion of your in-basket will require no action. There will be three types of things in this category:
• Trash
• Items to incubate
• Reference material
Trash
If you’ve been following my suggestions, you’ll no doubt already have tossed out a big pile of stuff. It’s also likely that you will have put stacks of material into “in” that include things you don’t need anymore. So don’t be surprised if there’s still a lot more to throw away as you process your stuff.
Processing all the things in your world will make you more conscious of what you are going to do and what you should not be doing. One director of a foundation I worked with discovered that he had allowed way too many e-mails (thousands!) to accumulate—e-mails that in fact he wasn’t ever going to respond to anyway. He told me that using my method forced him to “go on a healthy diet” about what he would allow to hang around his world as an incompletion.
It’s likely that at some point you’ll come up against the question of whether or not to keep something for future reference. I have two ways of dealing with that:
• When in doubt, throw it out.
• When in doubt, keep it.
Take your pick. I think either approach is fine. You just need to trust your intuition and be realistic about your space. Most people have some angst about all of this because their systems have never really been totally functional and clear-edged before. If you make a clean distinction between what’s reference and supplies and what requires action, and if your reference system is simple and workable, you can easily keep as much material as you can accommodate. Since no action is required on it, it’s just a matter of physical space and logistics.
Filing experts can offer you more detailed guidelines about all this, and your CPA can provide record-retention timetables that will tell you how long you should keep what kinds of documentation. My suggestion is that you make the distinction about whether something is actionable or not. Once it’s clear that no action is needed, there’s room for lots of options.
