by Alison Green
Lists
Lists are the essential element of this system, and there are only two of them: a daily, which is simply a list of things you’ll do today and the only list you look at more than once a day, and the weekly-plus, a separate list that captures projects you’ll work on tomorrow or later. (Tools 11.1 and 11.2 provide samples of these two lists.) The separation keeps you from constantly reading over things you have to do in three days, which may not be relevant for today’s work and can easily become a distraction or source of stress. These lists can be electronic or on paper; the key principle is that they’re always with you in meetings and you can take notes and add to them.
How to use the daily.
The daily list is the backbone of this entire system. Everything else funnels into it, so it is the one, and the only, place you’ll check throughout the day to stay on track. In other words, no more flipping through pieces of paper or stickies or your e-mail (or your memory!) to remember what you need to get done today; you’ll just consult your daily list to stay on track.
Before you finish at the end of the day or first thing when you start work in the morning, spend five minutes revising and updating this list for the day ahead. You can do this by pulling from your weekly-plus list and looking at your e-mail and calendar.
Once you’ve created your daily list, highlight, bold, or underline the two or three big rocks of the list and do them first. (To help identify your big rocks, ask yourself this: If you were going to get only two or three things done today, what would they need to be for you to feel reasonably good at the end of the day?) You can add a section on your daily for “quick to-do’s,” or items that you can take of in just a couple of minutes, such as forwarding a document your colleague asks you to send or making reservations for a lunch meeting.
One helpful tool for your daily is the “waiting for” (w/f) section.3 W/fs are items that are due to you, in contrast to items that require action from you. Reports you request, work you delegate, and phone calls you’re expecting fall in this category. By getting your w/fs on a list and out of your head, you can better track items you’re waiting for and have a lot less anxiety about things falling through the cracks.
How to use the weekly-plus.
The weekly-plus list is a list of items you plan to accomplish at some point in the future, just not today. Its focus is on work you need to tackle this week, but it should have a separate section to capture longer-term work at the bottom (so that you can avoid having a third separate list for items that are further out in time). You’ll update this list every week, drawing from your calendar, project plans, and goals for the year and thinking critically about what you can do in the near future to move work forward.
YOUR DAILY LIST IN ACTION
Your colleague calls you in the middle of a meeting and you say you’ll call her back. To ensure that you do, add a quick note to your daily as soon as you hang up the phone.
Later that day, you ask a scatterbrained colleague in another department to send you some data you’ll need by the end of the day, and you’re not confident he’ll remember. Write “w/f data from Josh” on your daily list so that if you don’t receive the data, you’ll remember to pester him.
You have thirty free minutes between meetings. Pull out your daily and find your most important remaining item that you can make progress on in that time. Spend your time on that rather than flipping through e-mail.
YOUR WEEKLY-PLUS LIST IN ACTION
In a meeting, you agree to write a memo about the fundraising plan for 2013. You know you won’t get to it today, so you add it to your weekly-plus list. At the end of the week, you think through a couple of specific steps you can take to move the project forward (“schedule meeting with Carla to get her input; ask Priya for sample plans”).
Making sure that your communications assistant commits to stay on your team for another year is a “big rock” for you this quarter. Under the “Team” section of your weekly-plus, write, “Retain Miguel! Invite to lunch; brainstorm talking points and run by Jason in advance.”
One of your colleagues insists you read an entire series of teen vampire books. You’re not ready to commit to doing it, but you at least want to remember that she made the suggestion to you. You add the item to the Someday/Maybe section of your list (perhaps toward the bottom).
You also might take time every couple of months to review your goals for the year and make a list of your key priorities to accomplish over the next two months. You can then paste that short, bulleted list of priorities at the top of your weekly-plus, so that as you’re making plans for each week, your actions align with those priorities. To keep the rest of the weekly-plus from being one long list of items, you also might divide it into buckets of work, with sections for different projects or areas of responsibility. This demarcation helps you think through what you need to do to move each of those areas forward.
One challenge on the weekly-plus, or any other list of longer-term actions, is that big projects can sit on the list for a long time when there aren’t clear next steps to move them forward. For example, writing “plan gala dinner” is less helpful than breaking the item into a few initial steps such as “gala dinner: call printer for cost estimates on invitations; call hotel to confirm date; set up meeting with John to discuss program.” (That said, if it’s a complicated item with a separate project plan, it might be easier just to write, “See project plan.”) In general, when you have big or unwieldy items, taking the time to figure out even a few specific, actionable next steps can be immensely helpful.
One more piece that we’ve found helpful for the weekly-plus list is the “someday/maybe” section.4 This is where you capture items you aren’t committed to acting on yet but that you want to remember and consider later. Recommended reading, interesting projects, and random ideas that strike you in the middle of the night go here.
Finally, as with your daily list, your weekly-plus can have a w/f section for things you’re waiting for—in this case, items that are due beyond the current day. Remember to look closely at this list only when updating your daily each morning (or evening) so that it keeps you on track day-to-day but doesn’t distract or worry you.
“Learning simple tools like making a weekly to-do list and starring the most important items, and checking in with yourself at the end of the week, tracking whether you’re being overly ambitious or hitting your targets, has made an enormous difference. I get to feel much more satisfied, because at the end of the week, I’m able to look at a work plan and feel comfortable that I’ve accomplished it. If you lay things out that way, and can say you’ve accomplished the things that were prioritized, you can enjoy your weekend without having to worry about the things you didn’t get done.”
RICKEN PATEL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AVAAZ
Folders
As a manager, you’re probably in and out of meetings, sometimes in the office and sometimes not. You don’t want to carry around a pile of materials, but it’s essential that you always have what you need at your fingertips. The solution is to create a few key folders to funnel things into and take them with you everywhere. These folders don’t need to be paper ones; they might be electronic folders stored on your computer or electronic tablet.
Key documents. The key documents folder stores the few documents and materials that you reference often or want to keep close at hand. It might contain a list of your annual goals, your weekly-plus list, and, if you have a lot of external meetings, a one-page overview of your organization.
Action. The action folder is where you file all the materials you need for current and upcoming work as those materials come in. Don’t hesitate to put something for the holidays in this folder when it’s only July. You’ll want it at your fingertips come December rather than have to go digging through your computer or desk to find it. If your action folder gets too full, which it probably will, split it into two: one that holds projects and meetings for that week (“action—this week”) and one with material
for future weeks (“action—longer term”).
Read. Create a read folder for, well, things to read. (If you’re using paper folders, carry it around so you can take advantage of your commute or downtime between meetings.) However, be honest with yourself about what you will actually read. Be ruthless about deleting e-mails that you might read in an ideal world but that you really don’t have time to do (like your aunt’s four-page e-mail about her trip to Savannah).
YOUR FOLDERS IN ACTION
You receive an e-mailed agenda for this Tuesday’s staff meeting. Put it in your “action—this week” folder.
A vendor gives you a document that you’ll need when filling out an expense report next month. Put it in the “action—longer-term” folder.
Calendar
In addition to lists and folders, the only other piece you need is a calendar to record everything with a date attached. Start with the basics, recording all your meetings, trips, and deadlines in the calendar. Add in the blocks of time we described earlier in the chapter: specific “meetings with yourself” to work on priority projects and general work blocks so you know you’ll have time outside meetings to focus on what matters most. (See Figure 11.3.)
FIGURE 11.3. Capturing Key Items in Your Electronic Calendar
Beyond that, use your calendar to trigger actions with any sort of time frame, even ones not associated with hard dates. For these items, enter them as “all day events” (in most electronic calendar programs) and they will show up in the space above your scheduled appointments for the day. For example, you know that in roughly mid-February, you need to kick off your team’s search for summer interns. Pick a random date in early February, and add, “Kick off intern search in middle of month—ask Jesse to convene team meeting, and then assign owner,” to your calendar. Ensure that items from your calendar regularly funnel into your action plan by reviewing your calendar each day as you prepare your daily list.
TAMING THE E-MAIL BEAST
Answering e-mail could sometimes be a full-time job in itself if you let it. We’ve seen managers drowning in e-mail with no system for processing it: an in-box with thousands of unanswered (or even unread) e-mails, a constant worry about what might be in those messages, and a feeling that as soon as one e-mail is dealt with, five more arrive to take its place.
Here are some tips to get control of your e-mail:
Check e-mail only at defined periods. Consider turning off your “new messages” indicator so you aren’t tempted to cheat on this.
Apply the two-minute rule: if you can do a task in two minutes or less, do it now! Reply right away, forward it to someone else to deal with, put it in your “read” folder, delete it, or otherwise figure out what next action to take to move it forward.
Don’t create work for yourself. If you ever look at the number of e-mails you get while you’re on vacation, you’ll notice that the total (apart from spam) decreases significantly with each passing day. You might get 120 on the first day, then 100, then 80, then 40. This is a sign that when you’re around, you’re creating work for yourself. Reply to e-mails in a way that makes clear who should drive what steps and how you want people to move forward so that they don’t need to keep coming to you for every tiny step. YOUR CALENDAR IN ACTION
You hire a new staff member and need to remember to have a three-month review meeting, but your schedule is too uncertain for it to make sense to pick a hard date now. Flip ahead a couple of months on your calendar and add, “Schedule step-back with Janene for early March,” to the all-day section on a random weekday.
You have an important trip in September. Mark a day in mid-August to plan for it.
You edit a letter for your development director and cross the task off your daily. Add “w/f revised draft of letter from Julie” to the top of your calendar for Friday, and you’ll remember to follow up if you don’t receive a new version before the end of the week.
Every month you’re supposed to turn in your expense form. Record a monthly reminder, and set it to recur on the fourth Thursday of every month.
Don’t use your in-box as storage. Use it only for messages that still need to be dealt with. All others should be deleted (even in a “deleted items” folder that you never empty in case you need to retrieve the item later) or filed. Otherwise it’s harder to quickly differentiate between what you’ve already processed and what you still have to address. We know some of you reading this keep items in your in-box and use flags to highlight items for further action, but we find that people can’t resist developing such complicated color-coded systems for themselves that the system eventually breaks down.
Use e-mail folders. For instance, if you’re managing a project and are expecting feedback from six people, create a folder for the project, put all related e-mails in that folder, and then set a reminder on your calendar to deal with them. That reminder is crucial, since you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’ll spontaneously read through folders other than your in-box without a trigger.
Admit defeat, and start over. If you have such an untamed mess in your in-box that you don’t know where to start, try this. Recognize that anything in your in-box more than a week old is almost certainly forgotten. Create a folder that says, “Older stuff,” and drag everything in your in-box older than a week into there. Use the items from the past week to practice the suggestions above, and then roll forward, enjoying your newly found sense of pride in your clean in-box.
Follow these rules and you’ll typically have fewer than ten e-mails remaining in your in-box at the end of the day.
KEY POINTS
How you manage yourself and your time and how you stay organized will have a serious impact on the results you get.
At its core, time management is about maintaining and acting with clarity regarding what’s most important for you to accomplish.
The biggest time management mistake that most managers make is spending their time on what’s immediately at hand or what’s most comfortable to work on rather than what’s most important. Figure out what one or two things are most important to accomplish on any given day, and make those your priorities. Whenever possible, do them before other things have the chance to intervene.
Remember the principle of comparative advantage: you should be spending your time in the areas where you’re much better positioned to add value because the payoff will be greater.
As a manager, you should be spending your time managing, not squeezing managing in between the cracks.
Scheduling work blocks into your calendar will ensure you have time to do your most important work each week, and can prompt you to handle interruptions differently.
There are lots of different organizational systems that work well, but if nothing else, any good system should ensure that every piece of information has one designated home outside of your own head.
Additional Reading
David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).
1 As related in Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill, First Things First (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 88–89. Reprinted with permission.
2 We like David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).
3 Ibid., pp. 149–150.
4 Ibid., pp. 167–170.
TOOL 11.1
SAMPLE DAILY LIST
Today’s Big Rocks
1. Prep agenda for message training for regional directors in Ohio (see Joanne’s e-mails to me on this)
2. Draft job description for Comms Assistant (work from Development Assistant doc; also Google to see if any good samples are online)
Take five minutes at the start or end of each day to update your daily list. Keep any necessary items from yesterday and cut and paste new items from your weekly and from your calendar.
Other Action Items
Delegate to Jennie: compile a short list of good PR firms that might work for our needs
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br /> Review draft agendas for summits in Houston/D.C./Baltimore
Meet with Jason, Dave re: guidelines for policy directors for principal meetings
Birthday card for Ann
Call Sue back; stress importance of deadline
At the top of your daily, write down the key things you need to accomplish in order for the day to have been successful.
Put personal to-do items on your daily as well, so everything is in one place.
Two-Minute Tasks
Forward newsletter to Walter
Waiting For
Data from Josh by COB
Your daily should be short and contain only the work you want or need to get done that day. Keep other projects on your weekly or midrange lists so they don’t clutter your daily.
TOOL 11.2
SAMPLE WEEKLY-PLUS LIST
August 11–15
This month will be successful if: Plans for Ohio and San Francisco events are finalized; asks to five major funders are sent; summit materials are sent out.
To clarify for yourself what’s most important, write at the top of your weekly what your “big rocks” for the month are.
