Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  These next actions should be put on separate “Agenda” lists for each of those people and for that meeting (assuming that you attend it regularly). Professionals who keep a file folder to hold all the things they need to go over with their boss already use a version of this method. If you’re conscientious about determining all your next actions, though, you may find that you’ll need somewhere between three and fifteen of these kinds of lists. I recommend that separate files or lists be kept for bosses, partners, assistants, spouses, and children. You should also keep the same kind of list for your attorney, financial adviser, accountant, and/or computer consultant, as well as for anyone else with whom you might have more than one thing to go over the next time you talk on the phone.

  If you participate in standing meetings—staff meetings, project meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, whatever—they, too, deserve their own files, in which you can collect things that will need to be addressed on those occasions.

  Often you’ll want to keep a running list of things to go over with someone you’ll be interacting with only for a limited period of time. For instance, if you have a contractor doing a significant piece of work on your house or property, you can create a list for him for the duration of the project. As you’re walking around the site after he’s left for the day, you may notice several things you need to talk with him about, and you’ll want that list to be easy to capture and to access as needed.

  Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add “Agendas” ad hoc, as needed, quickly and simply. For example, inserting a page for a person or a meeting within an “Agenda” section in a loose-leaf notebook planner takes only seconds, as does adding a dedicated “Memo” in a PDA’s “Agenda” category.

  “Read/Review” You will no doubt have discovered in your in-basket a number of things for which your next action is to read. I hope you will have held to the two-minute rule and dispatched a number of those quick-skim items already—tossing, filing, or routing them forward as appropriate.

  To-read items that you know will demand more than two minutes of your time are usually best managed in a separate physical stack-basket labeled “Read/Review.” This is still a “list” by my definition, but one that’s more efficiently dealt with by grouping the documents and magazines themselves in a tray and/or portable folder.

  For many people, the “Read/Review” stack can get quite large. That’s why it’s critical that the pile be reserved only for those longer-than-two-minute things that you actually want to read when you have time. That can be daunting enough in itself, but things get seriously out of control and psychologically numbing when the edges of this category are not clearly defined. A pristine delineation will at least make you conscious of the inventory, and if you’re like most people, having some type of self-regulating mechanism will help you become more aware of what you want to keep and what you should just get rid of.

  It’s practical to have that stack of reading material at hand and easy to grab on the run when you’re on your way to a meeting that may be late starting, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, or a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting to get your teeth cleaned. Those are all great opportunities to crank through that kind of reading. People who don’t have their “Read/Review” material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be processed.

  Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

  —Jean de La Bruysre

  Organizing “Waiting For”

  Like reminders of the actions you need to do, reminders of all the things that you’re waiting to get back from or get done by others have to be sorted and grouped. You won’t necessarily be tracking discrete action steps here, but more often final deliverables or projects that others are responsible for, such as the tickets you’ve ordered from the theater, the scanner that’s coming for the office, the OK on the proposal from your client, and so on. When the next action on something is up to someone else, you don’t need an action reminder, just a trigger about what you’re waiting for from whom. Your role is to review that list as often as you need to and assess whether you ought to be taking an action such as checking the status or lighting a fire under the project.

  You’ll probably find it works best to keep this “Waiting For” list close at hand, in the same system as your own “Next Actions” reminder lists. The responsibility for the next step may bounce back and forth many times before a project is finished. For example, you may need to make a call to a vendor to request a proposal for a piece of work (on your “Calls” list.) Having made the call, you then wait for the vendor to get back to you with the proposal (the proposal goes to your “Waiting For” list). When the proposal comes in, you have to review it (it lands in your “Read/Review” stack-basket). Once you’ve gone over it, you send it to your boss for her approval (now it’s back on your “Waiting For” list). And so on.7

  You’ll get a great feeling when you know that your “Waiting For” list is the complete inventory of everything you care about that other people are supposed to be doing.

  Using the Original Item as Its Own Action Reminder

  The most efficient way to track your action reminders is to add them to lists or folders as they occur to you. The originating trig ger won’t be needed after you have processed it. You might take notes in the meeting with your boss, but you can toss those after you’ve pulled out any projects and actions associated with them. While some people try to archive voice-mails that they still need to “do something about,” that’s not the most effective way to manage the reminders embedded in them.

  Keep actionable e-mails and paper separated from all the rest.

  There are some exceptions to this rule, however. Certain kinds of input will most efficiently serve as their own reminders of required actions, rather than your having to write something about them on a list. This is particularly true for some paper-based materials and some e-mails.

  Managing Paper-Based Workflow

  Some things are their own best reminders of work to be done. The category of “Read/Review” articles, publications, and documents is the most common example. It would obviously be overkill to write “Review Fortune magazine” on some action list when you could just as easily toss the magazine itself into your “Read/ Review” basket to act as the trigger.

  Another example: people who find it easier to deal with bills by paying them all at one time and in one location will want to keep their bills in a folder or stack-basket labeled “Bills to Pay” (or, more generically, “Financial to Process”). Similarly, receipts for expense reporting should be either dealt with at the time they’re generated or kept in their own “Receipts to Process” envelope or folder.8

  The specific nature of your work, your input, and your workstation may make it more efficient to organize other categories using only the original paper itself. A customer-service professional, for instance, may deal with numerous requests that show up in a standard written form, and in that case maintaining a basket or file containing only those actionable items is the best way to manage them.

  Whether it makes more sense to write reminders on a list or to use the originating documents in a basket or folder will depend to a great extent on logistics. Could you use those reminders somewhere other than at your desk? If so, the portability of the material should be considered. If you couldn’t possibly do that work anywhere but at your desk, then managing reminders of it solely at your workstation is the better choice.

  Whichever option you select, the reminders should be in visibly discrete categories based upon the next action required. If the next action on a service order is to make a call, it should be in a “Calls” group; if the action step is to review information and input it into the computer, it should be labeled “At Computer.” Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all the documents of one typ
e (e.g., service requests) are kept in a single tray, even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone call, another needs data reviewed, and still another is waiting for someone to get back with some information—but they’re all sorted together. This arrangement can cause a person’s mind to go numb to the stack because of all the decisions that are still pending about the next-action level of doing.

  My personal system is highly portable, with almost everything kept on lists, but I still maintain two categories of paper-based reminders. I travel with a “Read/Review” plastic file folder and another one labeled “Data Entry.” In the latter I put anything for which the next action is simply to input data into my computer (business cards that need to get into my telephone/address list, quotes for my “Quotes” database, articles about restaurants I want to put on my “Travel—Cities” sublists, etc.).

  Managing E-mail-Based Workflow

  Like some paper-based materials, e-mails that need action are sometimes best as their own reminders—in this case within the tracked e-mail system itself. This is especially likely to be true if you get a lot of e-mail and spend a lot of your work time with your e-mail software booted up. E-mails that you need to act on may then be stored within the system instead of having their embedded actions written out on a list.

  Many of my clients have found it helpful to set up two or three unique folders on their e-mail navigator bars. True, most folders in e-mail should be used for reference or archived materials, but it’s also possible to set up a workable system that will keep your actionable messages discretely organized, outside of the “in” area itself (which is where most people keep them).

  I recommend that you create one folder for any longer-than-two-minute e-mails that you need to act on (again, you should be able to dispatch many messages right off the bat by following the two-minute rule). The folder name should begin with a prefix letter or symbol so that (1) it looks different from your reference folders and (2) it sits at the top of your folders in the navigator bar. Use something like the “@” sign in Microsoft or the dash (“-”) in Lotus, which sort into their systems at the top. Your resulting “@ACTION” folder will hold those e-mails that you need to do something about.

  Next you can create a folder titled “@WAITING FOR,” which will show up in the same place as the “@ACTION” folder. Then, as you receive e-mails that indicate that someone is going to do something that you care about tracking, you can drag them over into the “@WAITING FOR” file. It can also hold reminders for anything that you delegate via e-mail: when you forward something, or use e-mail to make a request or delegate an action, just save a copy into the “@WAITING FOR” file.9

  Some applications (such as Lotus Notes) allow you to file a copy of an e-mail into one of your folders as you send it (with a “Send and File” button). Others (e.g., Outlook) will simultaneously save only into your universal “Sent Mail” folder. In the latter case, what seems to work best for many is to copy (“cc” or “bcc”) themselves when they delegate via e-mail, and then to pull that copy into their “@WAITING FOR” folder. (It’s relatively easy to program Outlook to automatically send any e-mail that you “cc” to yourself into a designated folder, which would replicate the process just described.)

  Getting E-mail “In” to “Empty” The method detailed above will enable you to actually get everything out of your e-mail in-basket, which will be a huge boon to your clarity about and control of your day-to-day work. You’ll reclaim “in” as “in,” so anything residing there will be like a message on your answering machine—a blinking light telling you you need to process something! Most people use their e-mail “in” for staging still-undecided actionable things and reference, a practice that rapidly numbs the mind: they know they’ve got to reassess everything every time they glance at the screen. If you never had more than a screenful of e-mails, this approach might be reasonably functional, but with the volume most professionals are dealing with these days, that doesn’t apply.

  It requires much less energy to maintain e-mail at a zero base than at a thousand base.

  Again, getting “in” empty doesn’t mean you’ve handled everything. It means that you’ve DELETED what you could, FILED what you wanted to keep but don’t need to act on, DONE the less-than-two-minute responses, and moved into your reminder folders all the things you’re waiting for and all your actionable e-mails. Now you can open the “@ACTION” file and review the e-mails that you’ve determined you need to spend time on. Isn’t that process easier to relate to than fumbling through multiple screens, fearing all the while that you may miss something that’ll blow up on you?

  A Caution About Dispersing Reminders of Your Actions

  “Out of sight, out of mind” is not really out of mind.

  There’s an obvious danger in putting reminders of things you need to do somewhere out of sight. The function of an organization system is primarily to supply the reminders you need to see when you need to see them, so you can trust your choices about what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing). Before you leave the office for the day, the actionable e-mails that you still have pending must be reviewed individually, just like your “Calls” or “At Computer” lists. In essence, “@ACTION” is an extension of your “At Computer” list and should be handled in exactly the same fashion. Your paper-based “Pending” workflow must likewise be assessed like a list if the paper materials are being used as your only reminders.

  Distributing action triggers in a folder, on lists, and/or in an e-mail system is perfectly OK, as long as you review all of the categories to which you’ve entrusted your triggers equally, as required. You don’t want things lurking in the recesses of your systems and not being used for their intended purpose: reminding you.

  In order to hang out with friends or take a long, aimless walk and truly have nothing on your mind, you’ve got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. And you need to be able to do that in a few seconds, not days.

  Organizing Project Reminders

  Creating and maintaining one list of all your projects (that is, again, every commitment or desired outcome that may require more than one action step to complete) can be a profound experience! You probably have more of them than you think. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend that initially you make a “Projects” list in a very simple format, similar to the ones you’ve used for your lists of actions: it can be a category in a digital organizer, a page in a loose-leaf planner, or even a single file folder labeled “PROJECTS,” with either a master list or separate sheets of paper for each one.

  The “Projects” List(s)

  The “Projects” list is not meant to hold plans or details about your projects themselves, nor should you try to keep it arranged by priority or size or urgency—it’s just a comprehensive index of your open loops. You actually won’t be working off of the “Projects” list during your day-to-day activities; for the most part, your action lists and any ad hoc tasks that come up will constitute your tactical in-the-moment focus. Remember, you can’t do a project, you can only do the action steps it requires.

  The real value of the “Projects” list lies in the complete review it can provide (at least once a week), allowing you to ensure that you have action steps defined for all of your projects, and that nothing is slipping through the cracks. A quick glance at this list from time to time will enhance your underlying sense of control. You’ll also know that you have an inventory available to you (and to others) whenever it seems advisable to evaluate workload(s).

  A complete and current “Projects” list is the major operational tool for moving from tree-hugging to forest management.

  One List, or Subdivided?

  Most people find that one list is the best way to go because it serves as a master inventory rather than as a daily prioritizing guideline. The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your open loops and options so your mind can more e
asily make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.

  Frankly, it doesn’t matter how many different lists of projects you have, so long as you look at the contents of all of them as often as you need to, since for the most part you’ll do that in one fell swoop during your Weekly Review.

  Some Common Ways to Subsort Projects

  There are some situations in which it makes good sense to subsort a “Projects” list. Let’s look at these one by one.

  Personal/Professional Many people feel more comfortable seeing their lists divided up between personal and professional projects. If you’re among them, be advised that your “Personal” list will need to be reviewed as judiciously as your “Professional” one, and not just saved for weekends. Many actions on personal things will need to be handled on weekdays, exactly like everything else. And often some of the greatest pressures on professionals stem from the personal aspects of their lives that they are letting slip.

  Delegated Projects If you’re a senior manager or executive, you probably have several projects that you are directly responsible for but have handed off to people who report to you. While you could, of course, put them on your “Waiting For” list, it might make better sense to create a “Projects—Delegated” list to track them: your task will be simply to review the list regularly enough to ensure that everything on it is moving along appropriately.

  Specific Types of Projects Some professionals have as part of their work several different projects of the same type, which in some instances it may be valuable to group together as a sublist of “Projects.” For example, I maintain a separate category called “Projects to Deliver,” a chronological listing of all the upcoming seminars, coaching, and consulting assignments I’ve committed to. These events are “projects” like the rest, in that I need to keep noting whether things are moving along on and in place for them until they’re completed. But I find it helpful to see them all organized on one list, in the order in which they are coming up on my calendar, apart from my other projects.