Getting Things Done

by David Allen

  The Support Structures

  In addition to good tools ubiquitously at hand, it is productive to have accessible formats into which project thinking can be captured. Much as a pen and paper in front of you supports brainstorming, having good tools and places for organizing project details facilitates the more linear planning that many projects need.

  Create File Folders or Loose-Leaf Pages as Needed

  A good general-reference filing system, right at hand and easy to use, is not only critical to manage the general workflow process, but highly functional for project thinking as well. Often a project begins to emerge when it’s triggered by relevant data, notes, and miscellaneous materials, and for this reason, you’ll want to create a folder for a topic as soon as you have something to put in it. If your filing system is too formal (or nonexistent), you’ll probably miss many opportunities to generate a project focus sufficiently early. As soon as you return from that first meeting with your initial notes about a topic that has just emerged on the horizon, create a file and store them in it right away (after you have gleaned any next actions, of course).

  Many times, in coaching clients, I find that the mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organize random notes and potentially relevant materials gives them a significantly improved sense of control. It’s a way of physically, visibly, and psychologically getting their “arms around it.”

  If you like to work with a loose-leaf notebook or planner, it’s good to keep an inventory of fresh note paper or graph paper that you can use to set up a page on a theme or project as it shows up. While some projects may later deserve a whole tabbed section or even an entire notebook of their own, they don’t start out that way. And most of your projects may need only a page or two to hold the few ideas you need to track.

  If you don’t have a good system for filing bad ideas, you probably don’t have one for filing good ones, either.

  Software Tools

  Software is in one sense a dark black hole to explore in search of good “project management” tools. For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage. They’re appropriate only for the very small percentage of the professional world that actually needs them. The rest of us usually find bits and pieces of applications more informal and project-friendly. As I’ve noted, I have never seen any two projects that needed the same amount of detailing and structure to get them under control. So it would be difficult to create any one application that would suffice for the majority.

  Digital Outlining Most of what anyone needs to structure his or her thinking about projects can be found in any kind of application that has a simple hierarchical outlining function. I used to use a Symantec program called Grandview, and now I often use Microsoft Word for just this kind of project planning. Here’s a piece of an outline I created for one of our own planning sessions:

  The great thing about outlining applications is that they can be as complex or as simple as required. There are numerous software programs that provide this kind of basic hierarchical structuring. The trick is to find one that you feel comfortable with, so you can rapidly get familiar with how to insert headings and subheadings and move them around as needed. Until you can stop focusing on how to use the program, you’ll resist booting it up and using it to think and organize.

  It doesn’t really matter where you put this kind of thinking, so long as it’s easily accessible so you can input and review it as needed.

  Brainstorming Applications Several applications have been developed specifically to facilitate the brainstorming process. “Inspiration” was one, based on the mind-mapping techniques of Tony Buzan. It had some useful features, but me, I’ve gone back to paper and cool pen for the kind of rapid, informal thinking I usually need to do.

  The problem with digitizing brainstorming is that for the most part we don’t need to save what we brainstorm in the way we brainstormed it—the critical thing is the conclusions we develop from that raw thinking. The slick brainstorming-capture tools, like electronic whiteboards and digital handwriting-copying gear, ultimately will probably not be as successful as the manufacturers hoped. We don’t need to save creative thinking so much as we do the structures we generate from it. There are significant differences among collecting and processing and organizing, and different tools are usually required for them. You might as well dump ideas into a word processor.

  Project-Planning Applications As I’ve mentioned, most project-planning software is too rigorous for the majority of the project thinking and planning we need to do. Over the years I’ve seen these programs more often tried and discontinued than utilized as a consistent tool. When they’re used successfully, they’re usually highly customized to fit very specific requirements for the company or the industry.

  I anticipate that less structured and more functional applications will emerge in the coming years, based on the ways we naturally think and plan. Until then, best stick with some good and simple outliner.

  Attaching Digital Notes

  If you are using a digital organizer, much of the project planning you need to capture outside your head can in fact be satisfactorily managed in an attached note field. If you have the project itself as an item on a list on a Palm, or as a task in Microsoft Outlook, you can open the accompanying “Note” section and jot ideas, bullet points, and subcomponents of the project. Just ensure that you review the attachment appropriately to make it useful.

  How Do I Apply All This in My World?

  Just as your “Next Actions” lists need to be up-to-date, so, too, does your “Projects” list. That done, give yourself a block of time, ideally between one and three hours, to handle as much of the “vertical” thinking about each project as you can.

  Clear the deck, create a context, and do some creative project thinking. You’ll then be way ahead of most people.

  At the very least, right now or as soon as possible, take those few of your projects that you have the most attention on or interest in right now and do some thinking and collecting and organizing on them, using whatever tools seem most appropriate.

  Focus on each one, one at a time, top to bottom. As you do, ask yourself, “What about this do I want to know, capture, or remember?”

  You may just want to mind-map some thoughts on a piece of paper, make a file, and toss the paper into it. You may come up with some simple bullet-point headings to attach as a “note” in your software organizer. Or you could create a Word file and start an outline on it.

  Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

  —Winston Churchill

  The key is to get comfortable with having and using your ideas. And to acquire the habit of focusing your energy constructively, on intended outcomes and open loops, before you have to.

  part 3

  The Power of the Key Principles

  11

  The Power of the Collection Habit

  THERE’S MUCH MORE to these simple techniques and models than may appear at first glance. Indeed, they offer a systematic method to keep your mind distraction-free, ensuring a high level of efficiency and effectiveness in your work. That in itself would be sufficient reason to implement these practices.

  But there are even greater implications for the fundamental principles at work here. What follows in the next three chapters is an accounting of my experience, over the last twenty years, of the subtler and often more profound effects that can transpire from the implementation of these basic principles. The longer-term results can have a significant impact on you as an individual, and they can positively affect larger organizational cultures as well.

  When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for any
thing that is incomplete or unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both personally and professionally.

  The Personal Benefit

  How did it feel to go through the collecting and downloading activity? Most people say it feels so bad, and yet feels so good. How can that be?

  If you’re like most people who go through the full collection process, you probably felt some form of anxiety. Descriptive terms like “overwhelmed,” “panic,” “frustration,” “fatigue,” and “disgust” tend to come up when I ask seminar participants to describe their emotions in going through a minor version of this procedure. And is there anything you think you’ve procrastinated on in that stack? If so, you have guilt automatically associated with it—“I could have, should have, ought to have (before now) done this.”

  At the same time, did you experience any sense of release, or relief, or control as you did the drill? Most people say yes, indeed. How does that happen? Totally opposite emotional states showing up as you’re doing a single exercise, almost at the same time—anxiety and relief; overwhelmed and in control. What’s going on here?

  When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you’ll discover, as I did, the way to get rid of them. And if you experienced any positive feelings from collecting your stuff, you actually began the process of eliminating the negativity yourself.

  The Source of the Negative Feelings

  Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there’s always too much to do. If you felt bad simply because there was more to do than you could do, you’d never get rid of that feeling. Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling. It comes from a different place.

  How have you felt when someone broke an agreement with you? Told you they would meet you Thursday at 4:00 P.M. and never showed or called? How did that feel? Frustrating, I imagine. The price people pay when they break agreements in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship—a negative consequence.

  But what are all those things in your in-basket? Agreements you’ve made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don’t—voilà! anxious and overwhelmed.

  The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.

  How Do You Prevent Broken Agreements with Yourself?

  If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:

  • Don’t make the agreement.

  • Complete the agreement.

  • Renegotiate the agreement.

  All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.

  Don’t Make the Agreement

  It probably felt pretty good to take a bunch of your old stuff, decide that you weren’t going to do anything with it, and just toss it into the trash. One way to handle an incompletion in your world is to just say no!

  You’d lighten up if you would just lower your standards. If you didn’t care so much about things being up to a certain level—your parenting, your school system, your team’s morale, the software code—you’d have fewer things to do.14

  I doubt you’re going to lower your standards. But once you really understand what it means, you’ll probably make fewer agreements. I know I did. I used to make a lot of them, just to win people’s approval. When I realized the price I was paying on the back end for not keeping those agreements, I became a lot more conscious about the ones I made. One insurance executive I worked with described the major benefit he derived from implementing this system: “Previously I would just tell everyone, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’ because I didn’t know how much I really had to do. Now that I’ve got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity I have had to say, ‘No, I can’t do that, I’m sorry.’ The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed by my discipline!”

  Maintaining an objective inventory of your work makes it much easier to say no with integrity.

  Another client, an entrepreneur in the personal coaching business, recently told me that making an inventory of his work had eliminated a huge amount of worry and stress from his life. The discipline of putting everything he had his attention on into his in-basket caused him to reconsider what he really wanted to do anything about. If he wasn’t willing to toss a note about it into “in,” he just let it go!

  I consider that very mature thinking. One of the best things about this whole method is that when you really take the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make. Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don’t know the balance or the limit—it’s a lot easier to be irresponsible.

  Complete the Agreement

  Of course, another way to get rid of the negative feelings about your stuff is to just finish it and be able to mark it off as done. You actually love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you’ve completed something. If you’ve begun to complete less-than-two-minute actions as they surface in your life, I’m sure you can attest to the psychological benefit. Most of my clients feel fantastic after just a couple of hours of processing their piles, just because of how many things they accomplish using the two-minute rule.

  Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done.

  —Julia Louis Woodruff

  One of your better weekends may be spent just finishing up a lot of little errands and tasks that have accumulated around your house and in your personal life. Invariably when you capture all the open loops, little and big, and see them on a list in front of you, some part of you will be inspired (or creatively disgusted or intimidated enough) to go knock them off the list.

  We all seem to be starved for a win. It’s great to satisfy that by giving yourself doable tasks you can start and finish easily.

  Have you ever completed something that wasn’t initially on a list, so you wrote it down and checked it off? Then you know what I mean.

  There’s another issue here, however. How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days, guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.

  It’s a lot easier to complete agreements when you know what they are.

  Not only that, but if you have a boss, what do you think he or she is going to do, after noticing the high levels of competency and productivity you’re demonstrating? Right again—give you more things to do! It’s the catch-22 of professional development: the better you get, the better you’d better get.

  So, since you’re not going to significantly lower your standards, or stop creating more things to do, you’d better get comfortable with the third option, if you want to keep from stressing yourself out.

  Renegotiate Your Agreement

  Suppose I’d told you I would meet you Thursday at 4:00 P.M., but after I made the appointment, my world changed. Now, given my new priorities, I decide I’m not going to meet you Thursday at four. But instead of simply not showing up, what had I better do, to maintain the integrity of the relationship? Correct—call and change the agreement. A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.

  It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all.


  —Father Desmond Wilson

  Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, “No, not now.” Here’s the problem: it’s impossible to renegotiate agreements with yourself that you can’t remember you made!

  The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time.

  If you’re like most people, you’ve probably got some storage area at home—maybe a garage that you told yourself a while back (maybe even six years ago!) you ought to clean and organize. If so, there’s a part of you that likely thinks you should’ve been cleaning your garage twenty-four hours a day for the past six years! No wonder people are so tired! And have you heard that little voice inside your own mental committee every time you walk by your garage? “Why are we walking by the garage?! Aren’t we supposed to be cleaning it!?” Because you can’t stand that whining, nagging part of yourself, you never even go in the garage anymore if you can help it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself: