Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  • Career goals

  • Service

  • Family

  • Relationships

  • Community

  • Health and energy

  • Financial resources

  • Creative expression

  And then moving down a level, within your job, you might want some reminders of your key areas of responsibility, your staff, your values, and so on. A list of these might contain points like:

  • Team morale

  • Processes

  • Timelines

  • Staff issues

  • Workload

  • Communication

  All of these items could in turn be included on the lists in your personal system, as reminders to you, as needed, to keep the ship on course, on an even keel.

  The More Novel the Situation, the More Control Is Required

  The degree to which any of us needs to maintain checklists and external controls is directly related to our unfamiliarity with the area of responsibility. If you’ve been doing what you’re doing for a long time, and there’s no pressure on you to change in that area, you probably need minimal external personal organization to stay on cruise control. You know when things must happen, and how to make them happen, and your system is fine, status quo. Often, though, that’s not the case.

  Many times you’ll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you’re more familiar with what you’re doing. If your CEO suddenly disappeared, for example, and you had instantly to fill his shoes, you’d need some overviews and outlines in front of you for a while to ensure that you had all the mission-critical aspects of the job handled. And if you’ve just been hired into a new position, with new responsibilities that are relatively unfamiliar to you, you’ll want a framework of control and structure, if only for the first few months.

  There have been times when I needed to make a list of areas that I had to handle, temporarily, until things were under control. For instance, when my wife and I decided to create a brand-new structure for a business we’d been involved with for many years, I took on areas of responsibility I’d never had to deal with before—namely, accounting, computers, marketing, legal, and administration. For several months I needed to keep a checklist of those responsibilities in front of me to ensure that I filled in the blanks everywhere and managed the transition as well as I could. After the business got onto “cruise control” to some degree, I no longer needed that list.

  Checklists can be highly useful to let you know what you don’t need to be concerned about.

  Checklists at All Levels

  Be open to creating any kind of checklist as the urge strikes you. The possibilities are endless—from “Core Life Values” to “Things to Take Camping.” Making lists, ad hoc, as they occur to you, is one of the most powerful yet subtlest and simplest procedures that you can install in your life.

  To spark your creative thinking, here’s a list of some of the topics of checklists I’ve seen and used over the years:

  • Personal Affirmations (i.e., personal value statements)

  • Job Areas of Responsibility (key responsibility areas)

  • Travel Checklist (everything to take on or do before a trip)

  • Weekly Review (everything to review and/or update on a weekly basis)

  • Training Program Components (all the things to handle when putting on an event, front to back)

  • Clients

  • Conference Checklist (everything to handle when putting on a conference)

  • Focus Areas (key life roles and responsibilities)

  • Key People in My Life/Work (relationships to assess regularly for completion and opportunity development)

  • Organization Chart (key people and areas of output to manage and maintain)

  • Personal Development (things to evaluate regularly to ensure personal balance and progress)

  Get comfortable with checklists, both ad hoc and more permanent. Be ready to create and eliminate them as required. Appropriately used, they can be a tremendous asset in personal productivity.

  If in fact you have now collected everything that represents an open loop in your life and work, processed each one of those items in terms of what it means to you and what actions are required, and organized the results into a complete system that holds a current and complete overview—large and small—of all your present and “someday” projects, then you’re ready for the next phase of implementation in the art of stress-free productivity—the review process.

  8

  Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional

  THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you’re doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control.

  If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with all the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won’t get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which, as you should know by now, it doesn’t do very effectively.

  All of this means your system cannot be static. In order to support appropriate action choices, it must be kept up to date. And it should trigger consistent and appropriate evaluation of your life and work at several horizons.

  There are two major issues that need to be handled at this point:

  • What do you look at in all this, and when?

  • What do you need to do, and how often, to ensure that all of it works as a consistent system, freeing you to think and manage at a higher level?

  A real review process will lead to enhanced and proactive new thinking in key areas of your life and work. Such thinking emerges from both focused concentration and serendipitous brainstorming, which will be triggered and galvanized by a consistent personal review of your inventory of actions and projects.

  What to Look At, When

  Your personal system and behaviors need to be established in such a way that you can see all the action options you need to see, when you need to see them. This is really just common sense, but few people actually have their processes and their organization honed to the point where they are as functional as they could be.

  When you have access to a phone and any discretionary time, you ought to at least glance at the list of all the phone calls you need to make, and then either direct yourself to the best one to handle or give yourself permission to feel OK about not bothering with any of them. When you’re about to go in for a discussion with your boss or your partner, take a moment to review the outstanding agendas you have with him or her, so you’ll know that you’re using your time most effectively. When you need to pick up something at the dry cleaner’s, first quickly review all the other errands that you might be able to do en route.

  A few seconds a day is usually all you need for review, as long as you’re looking at the right things at the right time.

  People often ask me, “How much time do you spend looking at your system?” My answer is simply, “As much time as I need to to feel comfortable about what I’m doing.” In actuality it’s an accumulation of two seconds here, three seconds there. What most people don’t realize is that my lists are in one sense my office. Just as you might have Post-its and stacks of phone slips at your workstation, so do I on my “Next Actions” lists. Assuming that you’ve completely collected, processed, and organized your stuff, you’ll most likely take only a few brief moments here and there to access your system for day-to-day reminders.

  Looking at Your Calendar First

  Your most frequent review will probably be of your daily
calendar, and your daily tickler folder if you’re maintaining one, to see the “hard landscape” and assess what has to get done. You need to know the time-and-space parameters first. Knowing that you have wall-to-wall meetings from 8:00 A.M. through 6:00 P.M., for example, with barely a half-hour break for lunch, will help you make necessary decisions about any other activities.

  ... Then Your Action Lists

  After you review all your day- and time-specific commitments and handle whatever you need to about them, your next most frequent area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context. If you’re in your office, for instance, you’ll look at your lists of calls, computer actions, and in-office things to do. This doesn’t necessarily mean you will actually be doing anything on those lists; you’ll just evaluate them against the flow of other work coming at you to ensure that you make the best choices about what to deal with. You need to feel confident that you’re not missing anything critical.

  Frankly, if your calendar is trustworthy and your action lists are current, they may be the only things in the system you’ll need to refer to more than every couple of days. There have been many days when I didn’t need to look at any of my lists, in fact, because it was clear from the front end—my calendar—what I wouldn’t be able to do.

  The Right Review in the Right Context

  You may need to access any one of your lists at any time. When you and your spouse are decompressing at the end of the day, and you want to be sure you’ll take care of the “business” the two of you manage together about home and family, you’ll want to look at your accumulated agendas for him or her. On the other hand, if your boss pops in for a face-to-face conversation about current realities and priorities, it will be highly functional for you to have your “Projects” list up to date and your “Agenda” list for him or her right at hand.

  Updating Your System

  The real trick to ensuring the trustworthiness of the whole organization system lies in regularly refreshing your psyche and your system from a more elevated perspective. That’s impossible to do, however, if your lists fall too far behind your reality. You won’t be able to fool yourself about this: if your system is out of date, your brain will be forced to fully engage again at the lower level of remembering.

  To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

  —Peter F. Drucker

  This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to have a clear head and feel in control of everything that’s going on, can you do what you need to to maintain that as an operational standard? The many years I’ve spent researching and implementing this methodology with countless people have proved to me that the magic key to the sustainability of the process is the Weekly Review.

  The Power of the Weekly Review

  If you’re like me and most other people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you’re going to have the world come at you faster than you can keep up. Many of us seem to have it in our natures consistently to entangle ourselves in more than we have the ability to handle. We book ourselves back to back in meetings all day, go to after-hours events that generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits.

  That whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, reevaluation, and reprocessing time to keep you in balance. There is simply no way to do this necessary regrouping while you’re trying to get everyday work done.

  The Weekly Review will also sharpen your intuitive focus on your important projects as you deal with the flood of new input and potential distractions coming at you the rest of the week. You’re going to have to learn to say no—faster, and to more things—in order to stay afloat and comfortable. Having some dedicated time in which to at least get up to the project level of thinking goes a long way toward making that easier.

  You will invariably take in more opportunities than your system can process on a daily basis.

  What Is the Weekly Review?

  Very simply, the Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again. It’s going through the five phases of workflow management—collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding involvements—until you can honestly say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”

  From a nitty-gritty, practical standpoint, here is the drill that can get you there:

  Loose Papers Pull out all miscellaneous scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and so on that have crept into the crevices of your desk, clothing, and accessories. Put it all into your in-basket for processing.

  Process Your Notes Review any journal entries, meeting notes, or miscellaneous notes scribbled on notebook paper. List action items, projects, waiting-fors, calendar events, and someday/ maybes, as appropriate. File any reference notes and materials. Stage your “Read/Review” material. Be ruthless with yourself, processing all notes and thoughts relative to interactions, projects, new initiatives, and input that have come your way since your last download, and purging those not needed.

  Previous Calendar Data Review past calendar dates in detail for remaining action items, reference information, and so on, and transfer that data into the active system. Be able to archive your last week’s calendar with nothing left uncaptured.

  Upcoming Calendar Look at future calendar events (long- and short-term). Capture actions about arrangements and preparations for any upcoming events.

  Empty Your Head Put in writing (in appropriate categories) any new projects, action items, waiting-fors, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured.

  Review “Projects” (and Larger Outcome) Lists Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that at least one current kick-start action for each is in your system.

  Review “Next Actions” Lists Mark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to capture.

  Review “Waiting For” List Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items.

  Review Any Relevant Checklists Is there anything you haven’t done that you need to do?

  Review “Someday/Maybe” List Check for any projects that may have become active and transfer them to “Projects.” Delete items no longer of interest.

  Review “Pending” and Support Files Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.

  Be Creative and Courageous Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to your system?

  This review process is common sense, but few of us do it as well as we could, and that means as regularly as we should to keep a clear mind and a sense of relaxed control.

  The Right Time and Place for the Review

  The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it. Once your comfort zone has been established for the kind of relaxed control that Getting Things Done is all about, you won’t have to worry too much about making yourself do your review—you’ll have to to get back to your personal standards again.

  Until then, do whatever you need to, once a week, to trick yourself into backing away from the daily grind for a couple of hours—not to zone out, but to rise up at least to “10,000 feet” and catch up.

  If you have the luxury of an office or work space that can be somewhat isolated from the people and interactions of the day, and if you have anything resembling a typical Monday-to-Friday workweek, I recommend that you block out two hours early every Friday afternoon for the review. Three factors make this an ideal time:

  “Point of view” is that quint-essentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing t
hings to an essential relevant and manageable minimum. . . . In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources.

  —Paul Saffo

  • The events of the week are likely to be still fresh enough for you to be able to do a complete postmortem (“Oh, yeah, I need to make sure I get back to her about ...”).

  • When you (invariably) uncover actions that require reaching people at work, you’ll still have time to do that before they leave for the weekend.

  • It’s great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.

  You may be the kind of person, however, who doesn’t have normal weekends. I, for example, often have as much to do on Saturday and Sunday as on Wednesday. But I do have the luxury(?) of frequent long plane trips, which provide an ideal opportunity for me to catch up. A good friend and client of mine, an executive in the world’s largest aerospace company, has his own Sunday-night ritual of relaxing in his home office and processing the hundreds of notes he’s generated during his week of back-to-back meetings.