The complete set of David Allen articles

© 1990-2006 The David Allen Company. All rights reserved. www.davidallengtd.com

Mastering Workflow

1. Collect

· Capture anything and everything that has your attention in leakproof external “buckets” (your in-baskets, email, notebooks, voice mail etc.) - get them out of your short-term memory. (Use the Incompletion Trigger Lists to keep yourself “downloaded.”)

· Have as few of these collectors as you can, and as many as you need.

· Empty them regularly, by processing and organizing (below).

2. Process

· Process the items you have collected (decide what each thing means, specifically).

· If it is not actionable - toss it, “tickle” it for possible later action, or file it as reference.

· If it is actionable - decide the very next physical action, which you do (if less than two minutes), delegate (and track on “waiting for” list), or defer (put on an action reminder list or in an action folder). If one action will not close the loop, then identify the commitment as a “project” and put it on a reminder list of projects.

3. Organize · Group the results of processing your input into appropriately retrievable and reviewable categories.

The four key action categories are:

Projects - (projects you have a commitment to finish)

Calendar - (actions that must occur on a specific day or time)

Next Actions - (actions to be done as soon as possible)

Waiting For - (projects and actions others are supposed to be doing, which you care about)

· Add sub-categories of these lists if it makes them easier to use (Calls, Errands, At Home, At Computer, etc.).

· Add lists of longer horizon goals and values that influence you.

· Add checklists that may be useful as needed (job description, event trigger lists, org charts, etc.).

· Maintain a general reference filing system for information and materials that have no action, but which need to be retrievable.

· Maintain an “on-hold” system for triggers of possible actions at later dates (someday/maybe lists, calendar, tickler).

· Maintain support information files for projects as needed (can be kept in reference system or in pending area).

(continued)

© 1990-2006 The David Allen Company. All rights reserved. www.davidallengtd.com

Mastering Workflow

(continued)

4. Review

· Review calendar and action lists daily (or whenever you could possibly do any of them).

· Conduct a customized weekly review to get clean, get current, and get creative (see Weekly Review).

· Review the longer-horizon lists of goals, values, and visions as often as required to keep your project list complete and current.

5. Do

· Make choices about your actions based upon what you can do (context), how much time you have, how much energy you have, and then your priorities.

· Stay flexible by maintaining a “total life” action reminder system, always accessible for review, trusting your intuition in moment-to-moment decision-making.

· Choose to:

1- do work you have previously defined or

2- do ad hoc work as it appears or

3- take time to define your work

(You must sufficiently process and organize to trust your evaluation of the priority of the ad hoc.)

· Ensure the best intuitive choices by consistent regular focus on priorities. (“What is the value to me of doing X instead of doing Y?”) Revisit and recalibrate your commitments at appropriate intervals for the various levels of life and work (see Horizons of Focus):

· Runway - current actions (daily)

· 10,000 level - current projects (weekly)

· 20,000 level - current responsibilities (monthly)

· 30,000 level - 1-2 year goals (quarterly)

· 40,000 level - 3-5 year goals (annually)

· 50,000 level - career, purpose, lifestyle (annually +)

©David Allen Company 2008. All rights reserved. page 1 www.davidallengtd.com

Re-Grooving Critical Behavior in Real Time Knowing what to do and doing it as automatic behavior are two very different things. We can watch a video, read a book, and attend a seminar which can impart significantly useful information and perspectives. Much that is required of the new leadership style, however, is not about what we know, but about how we personally operate when the heat’s on. And we often need professional help in real time to install new behaviors, and to get and keep us at the enhanced levels we want to function.

It’s not about what we can spout at the next staff meeting (“oh god, did he take another seminar again?!”) It’s about consistently applied high-leverage responses and activities that happen on cruise control. It’s about what we can be trusted to be doing, by others and (most importantly) by ourselves, when the pressure of the real world is at hand. To rapidly make those kinds of permanent changes and enhancements to our life- and work-styles, we need models, mentors, and most importantly, personal coaches, whom we spend real time with, getting us to do the real things we really need to be doing, from now on.

As leaders we truly want to work differently. And when we suddenly know better, we want it to happen yesterday (and why not, since we know it is the thing to do?) But self-propelling strategic conduct, if it does not exist at the desired level already, will seldom occur by itself, and certainly not quickly.

We can shift our behaviors with will power, but for a very limited time. If you are strong and especially strong-headed, I’ll give you a few days. If you’re on a retreat in the mountains, with no phone, fax, or computer...maybe even a week. After that, auto pilot shows up. The intense onslaught of all of your temporal engagements is back at your door. There are too many things in the world that you need to focus your conscious attention on, and you don’t have the personal bandwidth to keep hold of the new direction. You know better, but you don’t do better. (I doubt anyone reading this doesn’t have at least a few of these little numbers in his/her internal dialogue.)

Why did I just eat three doughnuts?! Jeez, I lost my temper again! I just haven’t been able to get to the gym this week... I just haven’t had the time to update my directs on my thinking... I’ve forgotten to keep Susan in the loop on this project... I forgot to write it down... etc. etc. ad nauseum.

We all have our weak suits. And some of them may be moving into the area of mission- or values-critical. Not long ago my results-oriented personality was required to get us off the ground. But now it’s limiting senior team initiative. Not long ago my tolerance of tons of incompletions was required to stay sane and focused on what we had to do. Now I’m up against the prices I’ve paid for un-kept agreements. Growth. Maturity. New demands for new situations in new worlds.

I’m sure this book about executive coaching came to be because there is a post-Maslowian world of sophisticated people for whom improving themselves does not mean admitting to failure or being broken. Excellence, quality, reach and impact are now open-ended golden chalices out in front of the best of us. So there are things we all need and want to learn, to give us the edge we want or to unlock the potential we strive to fulfill. One of the two greatest values of a coach has always been the consultant’s role: to give us new and useful points of view.

The Coach as Personal Trainer – by David Allen

www.davidallengtd.com ©David Allen Company 2008. All rights reserved. page 2

Perspective is the slipperiest and most valuable commodity on this planet. No matter where you are, no matter how low you go, your viewing point about where you are and where you want to go and how you could get there will be a priceless commodity. We need to see “outside the box.” We need to hear non-invested opinions about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. This is, and always will be, the value of consultants.

But if we want it to happen now, and we want it to stick, we need to put ourselves in the hands of a trainer, who coaxes and coaches us through the new behaviors in real time, in the real world. We need and want someone or some thing to be the stake in the ground we can hang on to, to get us past the unconscious deep grooves of our habits. We need a tether to tie ourselves to that will hold us steady and that will be a grounding rod against the hurricanes of past conditioning and the demands of our lives that distract us from consciously controlled new behavior.

Anyone who has ever worked with a personal physical exercise trainer knows exactly what I mean. When I have really dedicated myself to changing my physiology and physical regimen, the most effective times have always been when I committed the time and money to engage someone I trusted to take me to levels of consistency and performance that my own comfort zones would not facilitate.

We need to groove new grooves in our patterns. The fastest way is to commit to a coach, whose job and contract is to hold a focus and a format that helps us retread. The new pattern needs to be cut, and the channel needs to be deepened. It could be a new way to think, a new way to feel, and/or a new way to act and respond. But if it’s a “new way” at all, it’s unfamiliar territory to the unconscious part of us, and it needs to be made much more friendly to our basic nervous system. We want to become “unconsciously competent.” We don’t want to be burdened or beholden to another person to keep us in line, forever. We know that ultimately we need to be just doing it ourselves as a way of life and work. But we have to acknowledge that the path to that freedom is not free.

I have found it useful with my clients to remind them of an old behavioral model, that identifies four stages of moving to permanently changed conduct:

(1) Unconscious incompetence “I don’t even know that I don’t know what I don’t know.” Many people just wander around in the miasma of not realizing what they don’t realize is a problem. They’re just in it, and basically numb. Pain/aspiration (and therefore change) factor = zero.

(2) Conscious incompetence “I now know where I ought to be and what I ought to be doing, but I don’t know how to get myself there, or get myself to do it.” This is the first “aha!” that we have, and now we know that things could and should be different than they are, but boy it beats me how to actually go about it! I now know that I ought to have a “collaborative culture” but I don’t actually know how or if I can do it. I know that we should be “leading edge”, in the “eye of the tornado” or facilitate “innovation”, but what do I do this afternoon? Pain/aspiration factor = variable, depending on the commitment to the new standard. This is the stage people often find themselves in after a great book, seminar, or other initial educational and eye-opening experience.

(3) Conscious competence “I know now how to make it happen, and I know I can do it, (but I have to keep reminding myself to do it, and I fall off the wagon regularly.)” Pain/aspiration factor = variable, depending on commitment to the new standard and the delta between current reality and that standard. This is the really tricky ground. We’ve been to the seminar, we’ve actually tried and tested some things to do ourselves, we’ve really gotten enthused because we know that we can do it and how to get there. But, damn! I don’t seem to be able to stay there! We set up the new system, my secretary and I agreed to some new policies about how we’d work together, we had a couple of staff meetings that broke ground for a new level of communication and openness, but golly, things seem to be back to business as usual, and I’m afraid we may have wasted all our money on the consultant! I know now how to drive the car, but I have to keep reminding


myself to keep the hands on the wheel, and to stay conscious of the car and how I’m driving it. Too often I’m getting distracted by the scenery and my habitual thinking, and I forget to focus on the new and controlled behavior I need to maintain.

(4) Unconscious competence “I just do it. I only think about it when I don’t do it, and I then have to go do it.” This is real motivation, when the word “motivation” never occurs to you. You just do it. It’s brushing teeth, taking a shower. I’d just feel awkward and uncomfortable and out of sorts if I didn’t do it. Of course I empty my voicemail and get my in-basket to “empty” every day. If I didn’t, the “scuzz factor” would be too high. Of course my staff is happy and eager to come to work. If they weren’t, it would feel too weird...we just don’t let that happen.

The unconscious competence level should be the aim. Get the behavior onto cruise control. Set the internal standard, the “set point”, so grooved into the nervous system, that you can’t stand things to be different from that. I do not have to motivate myself to purge my thinking, capture my commitments, make the required action decisions about them, and review the whole thing regularly. Why? I can’t stand the discomfort of not doing that.

Coaching is a high-leveraged way to get from stage (2) or (3) to stage (4).

I train executives in critical personal behaviors that are required in the new world of knowledge work-how to collect, process, and organize all the inputs, ideas, information and commitments that are potentially relevant to their life and work. I teach how to make action decisions when things show up, instead of when they blow up. And I give people a model of how to keep their head clear and keep everything in their life on track, with minimal effort.

It’s good to know what to do in this regard. I give seminars and write frequently to many audiences about an understandable and highly functional model for personal organization and productivity. But if the executives who recognize the potential value of implementing that in their life really want to make it happen, I have to spend real time with them, dealing with the real things in their real world.

In coaching people about dealing with workflow and personal organization, I have to have at least two contiguous days with them privately at their desk, with no outside interruptions. I have to ensure that my client applies the personal workflow model I’ve developed to the hundreds of emails, voicemails, pieces of paper, and internal thoughts (“oh yeah I need to...”’s) lying around, which they have allowed over the transom into their psychological “ten acres.” And then I need to keep following up with them, in some way, to keep the new behaviors reinforced.

They can take my seminar about that model, which is very much like watching a video about playing tennis. They’ll get totally enthused that there is a game called tennis, and what it could look and feel like playing it with excellence and ease. And they’ll get to hold a tennis racket in their hand and hit a couple of balls, to let them know that there is a connection between where they are and where they could be.

But if they really want to start to live and work in a way that has nothing on their mind and things are getting done with productive efficiency and effectiveness, then we need to get onto the court for many hours, and actually have them hit thousands of balls coming at them in a multitude of ways. We need to practice going through emails, voicemails, pieces of paper on the desk, one at a time-What is it? What does this mean to you? What are you going to do with this? What’s the next action? And we need to set up the working system that will hold the results of that process, in real time, for those real things, in a way that the person may actually use.

They may love the idea that their head could be rid of distracting thoughts and stress about what they should/could be doing, but they can not actually have that experience until they are willing to actually do the things they need to do, to make that happen.


In twenty years of teaching, consulting, and coaching hundreds of executives about and with this process, I have never seen one exception to this rule. You must be led by the hand into this experience with a coach...or it will not happen, permanently, to the level you would like it to.

The challenge is to frame and address the more subtle behaviors, the ones that limit or expand our effectiveness in the world. We need to do this in the same way many of us have identified physical exercise as a strategic behavior to install in our lives, for which we have found the coach we needed and wanted to have, to make it happen at a new cruising level.

So what are they? How would I operate differently if I were to really step up to the plate of matching my vision of how good and effective I could be? What are the things that I need to be doing more of, more consistently, that I think would get me where I want to go? And then find the person or people who have models and formats designed to keep you on the straight and narrow, to keep you re-grooving the patterns of thinking and acting that you know would serve you and the people you serve.

The really great leaders are the ones who keep the people around them whom they trust will hold their feet to the fire, and whom they give the time and permission to keep them constantly focused on the prize.

To commit to a hands-on, real time coach is not a sign of weakness. It is rather the indication of a sophisticated awareness of the effectiveness of leveraging the best tools to restructure our automatic response systems in ways that create ever greater opportunities.

For more David Allen Company tools and educational content, check out our GTD Products section at davidco.com. For our online learning center, visit GTD Connect at gtdconnect.com.


One of the biggest bottlenecks I’ve come across working one-on-one with executives in the last few years is their lack of a good instantly-at-hand filing system for reference and support information they want to access when they need it.

More than once my clients and I have stopped the work flow coaching process mid-stream, driven to the local office supply store, and bought a quality filing cabinet, a big stock of file folders, and a Brother auto-labeler with plenty of tape. Just so we could create an appropriate place to put 75% of the “stuff” lying around their desk, credenzas, and floors of their offices.

The bottom line: You each need your own personal, at-hand general reference filing system. It should take you less than 60 seconds to pick something up out of your in-basket, or print it from e-mail, decide it has no action but does have potential future value, and finish storing it into a trusted system. If it takes you longer than a minute to complete that action, you won’t do it—you’ll stack it instead.

If you have a trusted secretary or assistant who maintains that system for you, so you can put a “File as ___” post-it on the document and send it “out” to them, great. But ask yourself if you still have personally interesting or confidential support material that you need accessible at any moment, when they’re not around. If so, you’ll still need your own system, in your desk or right beside it somewhere.

Create one A-Z alpha filing system, not multiple systems. People have a tendency to want to use their files as a reminder system in addition to reference, and therefore attempt to organize their files by projects or areas of focus. This magnifies geometrically how many places something isn’t when you forget where you filed it. One simple alpha system files everything by topic, author, or company so it could only be three or four places (if you forget where it is.) The ultimate filing system files by number with a computerized cross-reference database that tags topics with specific files. If you’re not there yet (who is?) come as close as you can by creating a single, simple alpha system. It’s also very helpful visually to have alphabet tabs within the files (“A”, “B”, “C” etc.), so it’s a no-brainer to find files and where to put them on the run. It even helps to label the outside of the file drawer (“A-F”, “G-M”, etc.) for the same reason.

Keep a big, mambo stack of fresh, new, third-cut, 2-ply top file folders instantly at hand from where you sit when you process your in-basket. Have your labeler there as well. If it’s even the slightest hassle to label and file something into a new topic folder, you won’t do it, in the heat of operational life.

Purge your files once a year. That keeps them from being stale and you from feeling like it’s a black hole you’re putting things into. It gives you the freedom to keep anything you think you might want or need later.

Do you really need Pendaflex (those files that hang from wire frames)??? They’re much less efficient for rapid personal general filing than plain old freestanding files held upright by the metal sliding support in the back of the drawers of most good front-opening filing cabinets. There are only a few people who need to hang on to thick manuals and other materials that make the wide hanging files useful.

General Reference Filing – by David Allen


Unfortunately most desk file drawers are built for Pendaflex hangers, and many companies have issued side-opening Pendaflex filing cabinets as standard office furnishings. (They’re really only good for pulling out the wire and using to store office supplies!)

If you absolutely have to use Pendaflex hanging files, I recommend that you put only one file inside each hanger and label the initial file instead of the hanging file. This makes it much easier to see and find the files, and allows an alpha system to work much easier without fighting with overstuffed hangers. It also allows you to take the file into meetings, keep it temporarily on your desk for work in progress, and generally handle it more easily.

Typeset label your files! I’ve never seen an exception—anyone who has taken my advice and printed their file labels with a labeler has stuck with it, and seriously upgraded their general reference system. I don’t know why it works. I just know it works. Labelers are not cheap (expect to pay $100) but typeset labels just change the nature of files, way for the better.

We’ve always found Brother labelers to be the best and easiest to use. Frankly, you don’t need anything but the most basic functionality—I recommend the least expensive model that sits on the desk (much easier to use than the handheld ones.) At current writing, the best labeler is the Brother PT-310 (about $80). Get the AC adapter for it (it just comes initially with batteries.) Get extra black on white tape cassettes—they are the easiest to read, and you can re-use labels over each other. A few other models we have used and could recommend are the PT-15 and the PT-18R.

Never let your file drawers get more than 3/4 full! Nothing creates resistance to filing worse than overstuffed file drawers. They should always remain comfortably loose enough to get files and materials in and out with ease (and without destroying cuticles!)

Be prepared to need more filing space. If you maintain full cabinets, and discover how easy the above system is in organizing all kinds of potentially useful information, you will likely need more room for your files. Almost without exception, people I work with want more file drawer space. Both purge and archive elsewhere out-of-date material, and/or be ready to buy more cabinets. As a rule of thumb, I would have four file drawers for your personal general reference files.



Managing the flood of email messages that most of us need to interact with on a daily basis is a growing challenge. No one’s volume is diminishing. That “beast is out of the barn,” and we’re not going to be able to shove it back in! So, getting a grip on it with a good systematic approach is critical for staying sane.

If you are in the small minority of people currently able to maintain less than a screen-full of email most of the time (because your volume is low and/or you process them rapidly and consistently), your system is probably fine as-is. If you regularly have many more than that (hundreds, thousands?) residing in your email in-box, you’re dangerously subject to stress and numbness relative to your digital communication world.

Because of the volume of discrete messages and the speed with which they show up, email seems to be a unique demon, with a life of its own. In essence, however, email is no different than a desktop in-basket or an answering machine – it’s simply a collection box for incoming communication and information that needs to be assessed, processed, and organized as appropriate. And controlling email involves the same challenge as managing your physical in-basket – often too much stuff that we don’t have the time or inclination to process and organize as it comes in. So it easily becomes a swamp of “staged” or “pending” items – glanced at, perhaps even read, but not decided about or effectively organized (I have uncovered as many as 7,000 emails still festering in a client’s in-tray).

The Big Challenge

As email is simply an in-box, it needs to be emptied regularly to be maximally functional. “Empty” does not mean finishing all the work embedded in your emails – it means making decisions about what each one means and organizing it accordingly. The same procedures apply to any in-box – whether it’s the tray on your desk or your answering machine. They should be processing stations, not storage bins. Because the volume in the computer is much greater than an audio or paper-based “in,” however, getting it to zero seems particularly daunting. But there is no light at the end of the tunnel if you are merely letting things pile up there. It takes less effort to start every day or two from zero in your in-box than it does to maintain “amorphous blobs” of accumulated and unorganized “stuff” that must continually be re-read and re-assessed for what they mean.

The Basics

We have seen hundreds of unique ways people have come up with to manage their email, and many work just fine – as long as nothing is lost, the inventory does not continue to increase, and someone can easily see the emails they need to take action on. Here are some basic procedures that commonly work for everyone:

Use the DELETE key! The ease with which we trash things from our physical mail doesn’t seem to translate to the computer for many people – perhaps because emails don’t take up much physical space and they are so easily parked somewhere that’s not immediately in our face. They’re taking up psychic space, however, and deleting everything that

Getting Email Under Control – by David Allen


we don’t really need, as we encounter it, is crucial to managing the flood. When in doubt, throw it out. If you’ve let emails pile up, purging is the first thing to do. Sometimes it is easier to clean house by clicking the “From” button which will sort them by their source – you can often dump several at a time that way.

File! Use a simple storage system for stuff you want to keep as archives and support information. If you’re a “when in doubt, keep it” person, that’s fine, but don’t have it clogging up your in-basket. Make reference folders in your navigator bar and file those kinds of emails over there. It’s a lot easier to lose track of them among the five hundred or a thousand in your in-box than in a folder you can name. And your Search function can easily find most anything with a key word. Avoid using nested folders that you have to click open to find the file. One simple alpha-sorted list – by topic, theme, or person – is usually sufficient and easier to deal with on the run. Purge them when you have little windows of time with nothing better to do.

Complete the < 2-minute ones! The infamous two-minute rule is crucial for email management. Anything you can deal with in less than two minutes, if you’re ever going to do it at all, should be done the first time you see it. It takes longer to read it, close it, open it, and read it again than it would to finish it the first time it appears. In a heavy email environment, it would not be unusual to have at least a third of them require less than two minutes to dispatch.

Organize emails that require action and follow-up! If you’ve deleted, filed, and finished your < two-minute emails, you’re left with only two kinds: (1) those that require more than two minutes to deal with and (2) those that represent something you’re waiting on from others. A simple and quick way to get control is to create two more folders in your navigator bar – “Action” and “Waiting For” and file them accordingly. These folders should be visually distinct from your reference folders and should sit at the top of your folder list, which can be accomplished by making them all caps with a prefix punctuation like the @ symbol or a hyphen (whichever will sort the folders to the top).

If you’ve deleted, filed, finished, or sorted your emails into action-reminding folders, you’re left with an empty in-basket. Now, at least, it will be much easier to review and evaluate a more complete inventory of your work at hand; and you’ll find it’s a lot easier to focus – on email or on anything else.

The On-Going Challenge

You must consistently review actionable emails. Once you get your in-basket to zero, it will feel fantastic. But you can’t ignore the batch of ACTION emails you’ve organized. The problem with computers as reminder tools is the out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome. If you’re not reviewing them regularly enough, they will start to gnaw on your psyche, creating even more avoidance and bad feelings. People leave emails in their in-basket to begin with for the same reason they pile things on their desk, thinking, “If it’s in front of me, I won’t lose or forget it.” Of course that seemingly practical habit of visual cuing is undermined by the volume and ambiguity of what’s in the piles. They create numbness instead of clarity. It’s much easier to assess your workload with actionable emails organized in one place. But it requires the good habit of checking on them regularly to feel OK about what you’re not doing with them at the moment.

All this takes time and mental energy. Pretending that you can get email under control without dedicating the necessary personal resources to do it leads to frustration and stress. These best practices help make the process as efficient as possible, but the freedom that comes from having them under control is still not free. Just as people have learned to accept commute time as dues they pay to live and work where they’d prefer, you must integrate the time and energy to deal with email into your life and work style.


Customized Approaches

As personal management software has continued to evolve, in both the standard desktop as well as the myriads of creative small applications and add-ins, the possibilities for variations in how to manage email abound. They can be coded, colored, and automatically filed. They can be sorted by prioritized senders. They can be deferred for retrieval at later times. They can be transferred and melded into task and to-do management functions in other parts of the software.

If you set up and begin to get used to a simple folder system for actionable emails, you might find some specialized sub-categories useful. “Read/Review” can be a folder for FYI-type emails (though printed versions of long ones are easier to manage than on screen). “To Print” can be useful if you are not at a printer regularly. Some people find that taking the time to edit the subject lines of their own stored emails to reflect the specific action they need to take is useful.

Best Practices

But no matter how you tweak it or how cool the unique features and good tricks are that you might explore and even integrate as consistent functions into your personal system, the core principles of good workflow management must be followed to foster relaxed control of the beast:

Keep actionable and non-actionable emails in separate places. It’s too complex and stressful for your brain to constantly have to re-sort it every time it looks at it. A system works much better than your psyche for that. Emails filed in reference folders that still represent things to do produce anxiety; and email in the in-basket that is only needed for retrievable information will fog up your focus. Because most people don’t have a good action-reminder system per se, they are trying to make their reference folders a system for remembering what to do, and that never really works. If reference and action reminders are separate things, it allows much more freedom and ease with keeping as much reference material as you want – it simply becomes a library.

Keep it clean. Residue seems to self-generate but it doesn’t self-destruct! Delete what you can to begin with, and purge your reference files regularly, as things get out of date and lose their value to you.

Keep them reviewed. As with any action-reminder system, if you don’t review and reassess the reminders of actions you might need to be taking, your mind will take back the job; and it doesn’t do that job very well. You’ll then avoid looking at your system and not really trust anything you’re doing because of the hidden agreements with yourself you’ve neglected to re-negotiate.

Be good at the keyboard. We would be remiss in not reminding you of one of the most important factors in email management – how fast you type and how facile you are with shortcut keys and codes. Not only is poor typing speed inefficient, it creates a resistance to engage with email that undermines all the best intentions to get on top of it. If you’re not up to at least fifty words per minute, getting there with a good typing tutor could make a world of difference.

We recommend using the simplest approach you can get by with, adhering to these basic best practices, especially if you’re somewhat starting from scratch in getting this area under control. If you are relatively sophisticated in your email management already, and setting up more complex procedures for yourself has actually made it simpler, that’s terrific. The challenge though is to keep it current, complete, and consistent – and not requiring more time and thought than is worth the payoff you may get. Your process has to be so basic and almost automatic that you will maintain it even when you don’t feel like doing it.


Email, like any powerful tool, can be a blessing or a curse. And if the tool goes with the job, you need to invest in whatever it takes to use it wisely and safely. It is a huge productivity enhancer, but when it gets away from you, it’s a severe occupational hazard.


OmniFocus, GTD, and You

Implementing the Getting Things Done® Methodology with OmniFocus

™ ®

“OmniFocus is a stellar tool for keeping track of outcomes and actions in the Mac environment. It supports simple but important practices for keeping your head clear, staying focused, and managing your commitments.”

– David Allen

GTD Workflow — Processing with OmniFocus

The Basics of GTD in OmniFocus

OmniFocus Through the Eyes of a GTD Practitioner

The Capture Process in OmniFocus

Adding items directly to the Inbox

Adding items to the Inbox with Quick Entry

Adding items to the Inbox with Clippings

Adding items to the Inbox with Apple Mail

Process and Organizing in OmniFocus

Processing the Inbox

Projects; Someday/Maybe Projects; Ticklers

Folders; Reviewing; Review Templates

Completing Actions in OmniFocus

Contexts

Time Estimates

Flagging

Perspectives

Beyond OmniFocus

Additional Help

Map of GTD and OmniFocus Concepts

Weekly Review

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GTD Workflow Diagram — Processing with OmniFocus

Is it actionable?

Projects

WaitingFor

Trash

Reviewfor Actions

Whatʼs the Next Action?

Do It

Delegate it

Defer itin communication system, and track

it on...

For me to do, specific to a day or time

For me to do, as soon as I can

NextAction

NO

Projectplans

What is it?

“IN”

Paper &digital

lists/folders

Planning

If less than2 minutes

Action reminderlists/folders/trays

Lists/folders

Calendar

Stuff

Possiblelater actions

Someday Maybelists/folders

Eliminate

Incubate

Reference

YES

Purple items can be managed with OmniFocus.

GTD Workflow Diagram © 1996-2004 David Allen & Co. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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The Basics of GTD in OmniFocus

Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a popular productivity methodology imag-ined and realized by David Allen.

GTD is a way to manage everything from your day to day stuff to those dreams you don’t yet know how to accomplish. This manual intends to ex-plore the implementation of this system in OmniFocus, assuming no previ-ous knowledge of the methodology on your part. At its simplest, GTD in OmniFocus can be summarized with the following concepts:

Capture: Capture every little thought, to-do, or idea. When an idea is safely captured and off your mind, not only are you no longer bur-dened by it, but you’ve taken the first step towards making that idea come to fruition.

Organize: Organization is an ongoing process, but OmniFocus makes it easy. You can use OmniFocus to take your ideas and turn them into manageable, bite-sized pieces. Instead of trying to tackle everything as it presents itself, you can make a game plan and take on your goals one step at a time.

Do: With many systems, setting up the list is easy; it’s the doing that’s tough. But with GTD and OmniFocus, there’s nothing to it! OmniFocus makes use of GTD’s logical system to help you be the multi-tasking dynamo you know you are.

OmniFocus, while flexible enough for nearly any methodology, is a direct implementation of these principles. Unlike most other applications, it was created with GTD in mind. With OmniFocus, you can use the system com-fortably, without trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Review: Keep in touch with your projects and actions to make sure they represent your ever-changing goals.

Process: Take a look at all your captured ideas one at a time and decide what it is and when you’ll accomplish it. That is, of course, if you are able and need to accomplish it.

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The OmniFocus interface is laid out to be as GTD-friendly as possible. However, that doesn’t mean much until we know what we’re looking for. This section will elaborate on the basics of GTD in OmniFocus.

OmniFocus Through the Eyes of a GTD Practicioner

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Inbox: This is a place to capture your stuff. Stuff is anything that has your attention, be it general home upkeep, car repairs, or even screenplay ideas — enter it all in the Inbox. It doesn’t need to be fully worked out; it just needs to make enough sense that when you re-turn to the Inbox, you can recall your intention for the entry.

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2 Actions: For something to become an action, you must first Process your Inbox. This means going through your Inbox, line by line, and deciding what each item really is. Is it actionable? If so, what’s the next action? Most of your items will become projects or actions. In GTD, a project is defined as “any desired result that re-quires more than one action step.”

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3

3 Contexts: A context is the tool, resource, or location required to complete an action. In OmniFocus, Context mode groups actions by their required context. This way, instead of working through a project action by action — which could take you to many different places or require different tools — you can consider what’s available to you now and go from there.

For example, let’s say you find yourself with a spare moment and decide to make some calls. You know you need to call your co-worker about that really important assignment, and your phone con-text shows that you need to return a call to your friend. Even though they’re from different projects, they can be accomplished with the same tool. (For more on Contexts, see page 14.)

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The Capture Process in OmniFocus

If you are distracted by what you are attempting to keep in your head, you will not be able to give your full attention to the task at hand. When every-thing is captured, your mind is a clear and can operate efficiently.

The Inbox is the central location to collect all of your important emails, your phone calls, your hastily written post-it notes, even your daydreams. Everything that requires eventual action on your part can start in the inbox. It doesn’t need to be fully developed; it just needs to get out of your mind. The first time you use OmniFocus, think of what’s on your mind and add it to the Inbox. This process is called a “mind sweep”.

In general, once your know your next action, it is useful to add an action verb: “check tire pressure”, “clean up the attic”, “search for tickets to Madagascar”. This makes things clearer when it’s time to go to action.

Adding items directly to the InboxThe easiest way to focus yourself on the Inbox is to press the Inbox but-ton on the OmniFocus toolbar. Then, press the Add Action toolbar button or simply press Return.

Adding items to the Inbox with Quick EntryYou’re not always going to be working in OmniFocus when an idea strikes. Quick Entry is a window that can be called upon at any time OmniFocus is open, even if it isn’t the active application. To open Quick Entry, press Control-Option-Space. Then, enter your item just as you would in theInbox. Press Return, and your item goes straight to the OmniFocus Inbox. Settings for Quick Entry, including its keyboard shortcut, can be cus-tomized in OmniFocus Preferences.

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Adding items to the Inbox with ClippingsOften, in order to complete your work, you need to refer to something on your computer, like an email or a web page. Clippings are bits of informa-tion that you put in your Inbox for later reference.

To get started with clippings, first open the Clippings pane of OmniFocus Preferences. In the Clippings Shortcut field, enter a shortcut. (It is best to choose an uncommon one that won’t conflict with other applications’ commands, such as F6.) Then, quit and reopen any applications where you’d like to use the shortcut.

Now, in a different application (your web browser, for example), select some text. Press your newly created shortcut, and Quick Entry appears. Enter a new title for the item if you like, then press Return to save the item to the Inbox.

Adding to the Inbox with Apple MailYou won’t always be in front of your computer when you need to enter something into OmniFocus. If you’re able to send email (for example, with your cell phone or a friend’s computer), you can send an email to yourself and have OmniFocus process it. To learn about processing actions from Mail, see page 32 of the OmniFocus manual, or the “Processing Mail mes-sages into actions” section of OmniFocus Help.

OmniFocus for iPhone has similar capture functionality to OmniFocus for Mac. Tap the New Inbox Item button on any to quickly add an inbox item from anywhere. Or, tap the Plus but-ton to add an item to the screen you’re currently looking at.

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Processing and Organizing in OmniFocus

When working with Getting Things Done®, how you process and organize your work is key. Luckily, GTD organization is logical and OmniFocus makes it a snap. Organization is important because it will determine how your raw ideas become refined into lists you can take action on; those lists are pivotal to a successful workflow. Just like real life, these lists are dy-namic. You will look over them regularly and it’s easy to change them.

Processing the InboxSet aside time to process your inbox on a daily basis or select a time to process that regularly works for you. When you look at your Inbox, espe-cially after your mind sweep, you’ll probably see a lot of different kinds of items. For now, all you need to decide is what the item is and if it is actionable — whether you intend to do something about it any time soon.

If an item is not actionable, you have three options:

Trash: If you’re not going to do it and you’re not going to have someone else do it, press Delete and stop worrying about it. Every-one thinks of more things to do than they have time for. When you decide what you’re not going to do, you’re deciding what’s really im-portant to you. Deleting gives you more time to accomplish the im-portant stuff.

Someday/Maybe: If you don’t want to lose it forever, because you might do something about it someday, turn it into a project (by drag-ging it to the Library in the sidebar) and then change its status toOn Hold.

Reference: If you clipped something that you want to remember, but isn’t necessarily actionable, you can store it for reference. Different people have different methods for storing their reference materials, including fine applications such as OmniOutliner, VoodooPad,Evernote, Yojimbo, or even text files in Finder.

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If an item is actionable, you have another three options:

Do It: If it will take less than two minutes to do the action just go ahead and do it right now. (Go ahead, we’ll wait.)

Defer It: If you can’t do it right this minute, your remaining option is to defer it. (Most of your Inbox items are probably like this.) It’s time to decide: Is it a project or is it a step to accomplish a project?

If it involves multiple steps rather than a single action turn it into a project and add at least one physical visible action that moves you towards your successful outcome.

If it is an action working toward an existing project, add it to that project via the item’s Project cell or by dragging it to the project in the sidebar.

If it is an action working toward a project that you haven’t created yet, create that project, and add the item to it. (A quick way to do this is to type the new project name into the item’s Project cell and then press Command-Return.)

Delegate It: If the action would be more efficiently completed by someone else, find the appropriate person and let them know what you expect of them. Keep track of the action in OmniFocus by as-signing it to an On Hold context, thus marking the action unavail-able for you to work on. By default, OmniFocus has a Context called Waiting, but you can also create one specific to the person who will be completing the action.

This way, if the action belongs in a project, but is not actionable by you, you will still see that the action needs to be completed instead of handing it off and watching it float into the ether. Once the other person gets back to you that they are finished with it, you can mark it complete and carry on with your part of the project.

You may find it helpful to create an action to follow up with them, adding a start and due date to remind you.

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ProjectsA project is any desired result that requires more than one action to achieve. Making a decision about the order of your actions is very impor-tant. A project where the actions need to be performed in sequence is called a sequential project. A project where the actions can be performed in any order is called a parallel project. The project type can be specified either in the outline or the Project Inspector. Often, they can only be per-formed in one order.

No matter what the project type, considering a project’s next action will make accomplishing the project easier. The next action is the first action you need to take to move a project forward; it appears in purple text. You can set the next action by dragging it above the others in the project.

Someday/Maybe IdeaSomeday/Maybe ideas are those that aren’t really on your short-term agenda — like writing your autobiography or your opus (or just cleaning out the crawlspace). You’d like to do it someday, but you’re not ready to tackle it now.

You can specify an item as Someday/Maybe by placing it in a Single Ac-tion List. To do so, create a project, open the Inspector, and use the Type control. Use the Status control to specify the list as On Hold to hide it from the ordinary OmniFocus views. You can see your On Hold projects by choosing On Hold from the project filter menu at the far left of the View Bar or from the Sidebar Filter in the View menu.

TicklersIf you can’t get to work on something right now, but it’s not too far off in the distance, you probably have a Tickler item on your hands. A tickler item, in OmniFocus, is an item with a start date in the future. This might be a marathon you might participate in or a concert you might like to see. With a start date in the future, it disappears for the time being, but is not lost forever. You can add a start date to the project or action via the in-spector or the Start column in the outline.

An item with a start date in the future doesn’t appear in ordinary OmniFocus views. But when the start date comes around, the project or action appears again, ready for you to decide what to do with it.

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FoldersFolders are a way to organize projects. Many people use folders to repre-sent life roles or areas of focus. For example, one might have folders named Work, Home, and so on. With such a system, when you are at work, you could use the Focus command on your Work folder to tem-porarily hide your Home folder and avoid being bothered by the fact that you need to call your landlord while you’re trying to focus on work.

ReviewingRegular review of your actions and projects is central to making sure the GTD methodology works. OmniFocus has a built-in Review command that can be added to the toolbar or chosen from the Perspectives menu. Choose it to group your projects by the order in which they need review. This includes projects that have no actions known as Stalled projects. Give each project a once-over to make sure it still represents your goals, and adjust it if necessary. Then, select it and use the Mark Reviewed command (available as a toolbar button and as a command in the Edit menu). Like Inbox processing, it is good to establish a time to do this regu-larly without distraction. In this system, it is recommended to do this weekly. (See the weekly review chart for more on reveiwing.)

Some people choose to use folders as a tool to implement the Horizons of Focus—Altitude Map Model. This model organizes your projects by your current actions, projects, areas of responsibility, one to two year goals, three to five year goals, and finally, general life goals. Everything from the phone call you need to make right now to how you ultimately envision for your life's purpose.

Review TemplatesThere may be other things you want to be reminded to check up on regu-larly, such as your physical inbox, your email accounts, and your mailbox at the office.

To keep track of these day-to-day items, you can create a review template: Choose Add Single-Action List from the File menu, and add actions for the things you want to keep track of. Select each action and use the In-spector to give them a due date and a repeat interval (probably one day from completion date). Then, as long as you keep up with your due Omni-Focus items, you can be sure that you’re on top of everything.

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Completing Actions in OmniFocus

No matter which system you implement, if you can’t complete your actions, it’s all for naught. Thankfully, it’s easy and logical with GTD and OmniFocus; You can consider what tools and time are available to you to decide what to do next.

Contexts

Contexts are a way to categorize actions by the tool, person, or place nec-essary to carry out the action. When you add actions, be sure to assign a context to them via the Context cell, or review the No Context list inContext Mode to add one later.

For example, let’s say you’re at the airport and you decide to make some phone calls. You have about 20 minutes, and your first call ends with time to spare. You can look at your Phone context and see several other calls that you need to make.

The phone call actions are from different projects, but the necessary tool is the same. So you quickly spot another short call you can make, from an unrelated project, and thus are able to move that project forward too. Without the context list, you might not have known that there was another phone call available.

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Time EstimatesThere may be moments where you have a bit of spare time and you’d like to make use of it. While not central, you might find time estimates useful to narrow down what’s available to you. This is especially great for actions that take an hour or less because you can say, “Okay, I have 30 minutes” and see all the actions that can be accomplished in 30 minutes or less.

To add an estimate, use the Inspector or the Estimate column in the ac-tion outline. Then to see actions that fit into the time available to you, use the Estimate filter in the View Bar.

FlaggingWhen you’re ready to get to work, you’ll likely find yourself with quite a few things you could work on. If it’s too much to concentrate on at once, you can flag certain items as being especially important to you right now.

Flagging doesn’t have any inherent meaning in OmniFocus, but you can use it, for instance, to mark the actions you intend to finish before lunch, some time today, or just sooner rather than later. Some people use flags to keep an eye on items that don’t have a hard due date, but which are particularly important. If you don’t get to them, simply unflag them.

This is equivalent to the GTD practice of writing down a special, selected list of actions to get done as soon as possible.

PerspectivesSo, you’ve Focused on your folders, you’ve whittled down your Contexts, you’ve set your Flagged filter, and you’ve set your Estimate filter. That’s a lot to do to just try and get some work done. It would be nice if you didn’t have to set all that up every time you use OmniFocus.

Well, good news! You can create a Perspective. A Perspective saves a window’s view settings for recall later. You can create a Perspective for any window state. Just like to view your Stalled projects? No problem. Just ar-range the window the way you’d like and save it as a new Perspective and add it to the toolbar with an icon of your choice, if you’d like. You can cre-ate and manage your Perspectives in the Perspectives window, available (appropriately enough) from the Perspectives menu. To learn more about Perspectives, check OmniFocus Help.

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Working With A CalendarCalendars have been around for thousands of years and it’s because they’re a great tool for what they intend to accomplish: keeping track of and managing specific allotments of time, or “hard landscape” items. For a GTD practitioner this would include capturing your fixed appointments (like meetings and trips to the dentist) as well as capturing future options or re-minders that need to occur on a specific date.

OmniFocus doesn’t mean to replace the calendar, but rather work along-side it. When deferring actions, we can either create a next action inOmniFocus (to do as soon as possible) or we can add it to the calendar (to do at a specific time).

Working With Reference MaterialNot everything that finds its way to your inbox requires action, but that doesn’t make it unimportant! Having a system to manage information you can use later is crucial. Phone numbers, addresses, coupons, take-out menus, lyrics scribbled on a napkin, and foreign currencies are all exam-ples of something you want to keep and retrieve easily as needed.

There are essentially two kinds of reference systems: one for information that’s specific to a topic or area (like with a phone number) and one for general reference (like employee files or currencies for later travel).

While much of this can be stored electronically with applications like OmniOutliner or Yojimbo, it’s good to have a physical file that is kept tidy and well-labeled.

Beyond OmniFocus16

Additional Help

The GTD methodology can greatly improve your productivity while reduc-ing your stress, but it takes time to learn its best practices. Fortunately, you’re not alone!

A good place to start is David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. You can purchase it from his website:

http://www.davidco.com/

You can also talk with other OmniFocus users on the Omni Group forums: http://forums.omnigroup.com/

Or, get in touch with our Support Ninjas via email: [email protected]

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Map of GTD & OmniFocus Concepts

Action

Area of Focus

Context

Defer

Delegate

Hard Landscape

Inbox

Next Action

Project

Review

Someday/Maybe

Stuff

Tickler

Individual action items in a project.

These areas of responsibility can be represented as folders, on which you can use the Focus command.

To see your actions grouped by context, click the Contexts toolbar button.

Make an on-hold project or use a future start date to get tasks off your plate for the time being.

Assign actions to an on-hold context until you hear back from the person you have delegated them to.

OmniFocus doesn’t replace your calendar; use iCal, Google Calendar, or any application you like.

Click the Inbox toolbar button, summon the Quick Entry window, or use the Clippings shortcut.

Each project’s next action is purple. You can use the next action filter on the View Bar to see only nextactions.

Use the Projects toolbar button to see your projects.

Use the Review command and repeating actions to make sure you’re on top of everything.

Set a project’s status to on hold if you don’t intend to do it any time soon; review these projects as needed.

Everything you put in the Inbox to become actions, projects, calendar items, or reference materials.

Give an item a future start date to file it for later.

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The Weekly Review

Get Clear

Collect Loose Papers and Materials: Gather all accumulated business cards, receipts,and miscellaneous paper-based materials into your inbox.Get "IN" to Zero: Process completely all outstanding paper materials, journal and meeting notes, voicemails, dictation, and email.Empty Your Head: Put in writing and process any uncaptured new projects, action items, waiting-for's, someday/maybe's, etc.

Get Current

Review Action Lists: Review for reminders of further action steps to record.Review Previous Calendar Data: Review past calendar in detail for remaining action items, reference data, etc. and transfer into the active system. Review Upcoming Calendar: Review upcoming calendar events — long and short term. Capture actions triggered.Review Waiting-For List: Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received ones.Review Project (and Larger Outcome) Lists: Evaluate status of projects, goals and outcomes, one by one, ensuring at least one current action item on each. Browse through project plans, support material, and any other work-in-progress material to trigger new actions, completions, waiting-for's, etc.Review Any Relevant Checklists: Use as a trigger for new actions.

Get Creative

Review Someday/Maybe List: Review for any projects which may now have become active, and transfer to "Projects".Be Creative and Courageous: Any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas to add into your system?

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© 2009 The Omni GroupOmniFocus is a trademark of the Omni GroupGTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of David Allen & Co.

To learn more about GTD and David Allen, visit his website at http://www.davidco.com/. There you can buy the GTD book and learn about the system outside the context of OmniFocus. You can also find links to articles, forums, videos, and blogs, and connect with other folks who are discovering GTD.


Exploring the high country of who you really are while expressing what you’re really about is the promise of a journal. But somewhere along the way, those same creative urges likely got you involved in an overwhelming amount of things to do, potentially distracting you from your own energy source. You’ve created relationships, a career, a family, a home each of which brings an endless stream of projects, challenges and “woulds,” “coulds,” and “shoulds.” Your visions created your life, but now your life is blinding your vision. Your creative urges got you into the park on your bicycle, but now your pants leg is caught in the bicycle chain, and you find yourself cursing the whole endeavor. Is there a way to play this game, to keep it all in balance? Can you stay connected to the source of your creativity, continue to expand its expression, and not let the results trip up the whole process?

Yes. But it’s not free, and you don’t get there by denying the world and your engagement with it, at any level. You must capture and appropriately manage the attachments and agreements with yourself that create dissonance, at every level. You must consistently offload and objectify what has your attention. You can do things to assist in detaching yourself from the details of life so you can get to the more rewarding experience of your journal. And also the act of journaling itself provides a key to that freedom.

Your business is not your busynessAre you too busy to get to your journal? Careful, because being busy is not the same thing as tending to business. Many people use their attachment to nervous activity as a way to avoid what they need to be about. And many times that more important work is best accessed and managed from the perspectives and shifts in consciousness that the journaling process fosters.

Our work exists at multiple levels. From lowest to the loftiest, we have our day-to-day actions, the projects we’re trying to complete with them, the areas of responsibility we attempt to maintain at our standards, the outcomes we want to accomplish in the future, the lifestyle expression we want to achieve, and our purpose as human beings.

Each can rightly be called your “work.” But the volume, speed, and intensity at the lower levels can easily grab your focus and cause you to lose the perspective required to keep you sane. It is so easy to sacrifice the higher orders of business for the lower. You have so many things to do today. So you don’t keep an overview of all your projects, you ignore some of the areas of your life you should focus on, you avoid drafting blueprints of positive futures, and you forget to connect back to the source of the whole game to begin with – you.

Your world can’t be ignored, nor can it be completedHow do you unhook from the pulls and pressures of your world? It would be nice if you could just shut your door, or go into the garden, and the harpies in your mind – all the niggling things to do and deal with – just went away. Or, if you could just finally get it all done, so there was nothing left to contend with. Neither is likely to happen.

Finding Your Inside Time – by David Allen


Your freedom will not come from trying to ignore all the “stuff” or by trying to complete everything – it requires truly detaching from it. But how do you do that? By getting it all out of your head, and reflecting on it all, appropriately.

Emptying “psychic RAM”Much of the stress in the professional world these days is the result of the huge volume of implicit agreements kept in the mind and not captured, clarified and organized. The first process in the coaching I do is to have my clients do a major “core dump” of everything they have attention on – personal, professional, little, or big – onto pieces of paper and into their in-basket (which usually takes one to six hours!) Then I have them decide what they really intend to do about each of them – the actions required – and park the resulting inventory of concrete things to do in appropriate categories in some personal management system they can trust to remind them of all that at the right times. Without exception, they come away with an incredible rush of released energy and inspiration. Why? They renegotiated all their agreements with themselves, so they can feel OK about what they’re not doing! They stopped the infinite loops in their psyche caused by situations they’ve told themselves need to be different but which lack the decision about what they need to do about it.

Incomplete commitments like that kept only in the mind reside in “psychic RAM” – a memory space that has no sense of past or future. It all feels like it should be happening now in this moment, which creates automatic stress and failure, because you can only do one thing at a time, not all of them. RAM must be emptied. And as you go even deeper and more reflective, there are greater depths and many more subtle “open loops” that can surface to facilitate the release of stored creative energy.

The journal as a spiritual in-basketJust making a free-form list of all the things you have attention on is a form of journaling and is at least momentarily liberating. On the most mundane level, it is capturing all of the “oh, yeah, I need to…” stuff – phone calls to make, things to get at the store, things to talk to your boss or your assistant about, etc. At this level it doesn’t usually make for a very exciting or interesting experience – just a necessary one to clear the most obvious cargo on the deck. Instead of cluttering your nice leather-bound intimate notebook with “Call Ana Maria re: her day camp suggestions,” keep a simple notepad ubiquitously at hand to collect such business-of-life details.

On the other hand, I often use my journal for “core-dumping” the subtler and more ambiguous things rattling around in my psyche. It’s like doing a current-reality inventory of the things that really have my attention –the big blips on my internal radar. These can be either negative or positive, like relationship issues, career decisions, or unexpected events that have created disturbances or new opportunities. Sometimes this is the best way to get started when nothing else is flowing – just an objectification of “what is” on my internal landscape.

Something healing and positive always happens when I express outwardly and reflect inwardly on that expression, and let nothing remain resident running around in my internal squirrel cages.

Spiritual disciplines teach that neutral observation is the first gate to real inner awareness and enlightenment. And when I just observe – what I feel, what I think, what I’m doing – it shifts me more into the one who is not my emotions, my thoughts, or my body. There is no better tool than my journal to move me into that perspective. The things that distract me lose their grip, because I release my grip on them. But that happens because I write them down and somehow the light of my own consciousness begins to dissolve the knots.


Getting up to businessThough sometimes it is enough to use the journal for a good housecleaning, refreshing the psyche and straightening some of the inner kinks, there is always more gold to mine. There are still places to go, things to see, things to know and experience. Not out in the physical world, but into those worlds wherein the meaning is found for everything you do. This is the bigger game, your real job. A conversation with your higher Self is wanting to be had. Information and inner awarenesses are waiting for an opportunity to be disclosed. Intelligent creativity is in store.

Don’t let your busy-ness get in the way of going to work. Step into your journal and take the executive chair. There may be some even more interesting loops to discover you can close, and some real executive compensation for it, where it really counts.

Clear to journal? Journal to clear...• Whenever you are feeling overwhelmed, do a “core dump” – write down on a list or separate pieces of scratch paper

absolutely everything you have attention on in the mundane worlds of your life and work. Don’t censor, organize or

analyze any of it. This is not yet a “to-do” list – it is merely an objective collection of anything that pops into your head

you might need to do or do something about. Sooner than later, go through all the items and make objective decisions

about what actions you are going to take on them, and park the results in a trusted system, to keep it out of your head.

Keep a small note pad with you at all times to continue capturing new commitments and ideas, to ensure that nothing

is allowed to crawl back up into “psychic RAM.” (This is likely to happen especially as you begin to move into reflection

and contemplation.)

• Create a list of all your projects (things you want or need to do that take more than one action to get them done). Create

a list of all the areas of responsibility you feel you need to keep your eye on (e.g. health, finances, family, staff, etc.) Ensure

you have all the projects you need for those. List any goals or visions that you have for your future. Ensure you have

projects and actions for those.

• Practice picking up your journal in the middle of a crazy day, when it makes no rational sense to do that, and just observe

and write about all the levels of consciousness you are aware of.

• Use your journal for collecting the more subtle and ambiguous things that still have your attention. Describe as completely

as possible all the main things currently on your internal radar. (This is a great way to kick-start your flow.)

• Once psychic RAM is as clear as you can get it, keep writing. Ask yourself what deeper conversation wants to happen,

to be expressed, and to be resolved. Notice anything that is not pure stillness. Give it a voice and notice where it goes,

and when it’s complete. Balance going with the flow and letting go and listening.



There are only two problems in life. Isn’t that nice to know? You only have two things you ever need to be concerned about. Not only are there only two problems–they are really quite simple. Ready?

Problem #1: You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it. Problem #2: You don’t know what you want. Anything you can define as a problem can be reduced to one or both of those statements.

Now, since there are only two problems, it follows that there are only two solutions that you will ever need. You need to make it up, and make it happen. You must decide and clarify what outcome you’re after; and you must then determine how you get from here to there.

It turns out that those two issues match the two sides of your brain. The “make it up” part relates to the right hemisphere–the imaging, gestalting, creative part of our thinking. The “make it happen” part is identified with the left side–the linear, logical, figure-it-out aspect.

Another way to understand this polarity is that if you know what you want and where you’re going, efficiency is your only improvement opportunity. Getting there with less effort is the name of your game. If, however, you’re not so sure where you’re headed or what it is exactly that you’re after, your challenge is to identify and sharpen the image, the outcome, the goal.

This dual nature of our work and our world connects with the two key questions of what we refer to as the “fundamental thought process”–What’s the desired outcome? And, what’s the next action? Those are the two questions that must be asked and answered by any of us, to determine what any of our “stuff” means to us. What do I do with this email, this piece of paper, this thought I had driving home? What outcome, if any, am I now committed to about it? What’s the next action required to move it toward that outcome? Those questions are normally answered for us or self-evident, except in a crisis. Usually we have to, in a sense, make something up (decide what we’re committed to) and make it happen (choose a next physical action to move forward on it). Welcome to “knowledge work athletics.”

So, which question do you need to answer, about what, at this point? Where do you need to put some more mental horsepower into figuring out what you’re trying to accomplish, at what horizon? And on which things do you still need to challenge yourself and others to decide the next actions to take, and who’s going to take them?

Time management? No, you can’t manage time. It’s thought management. You must lasso the wild horse of your mind with the two critical aspects of a successful ride–direction and control. Make it up, and make it happen.

Make it Up and Make it Happen

For more David Allen Company tools and educational content, check out our GTD Products section at davidco.com. For our online learning center, visit GTD Connect ® at gtdconnect.com.


One of the greatest traps in growing a business is also a pitfall for self management: if you don’t trust your system, you can’t let go of operational details and you’ll limit your ability to create at a bigger level.

Many successful entrepreneurs I have worked with over the years could be characterized (and have been, by their employees and friends) as “highly creative control freaks.” It’s understandable because usually it takes that kind of strong, directed energy to create a business, to make something out of nothing. Much like a parent will go to superhuman lengths to protect its vulnerable offspring, someone who gives birth to an enterprise almost of necessity must have skin as thick as an elephant’s and the aggressive/defensive capacity of a samurai warrior. It takes tremendous focus, determination, and, yes, a certain lack of sensitivity, to create something new and get it to stick around in this world.

That protectionism can, of course, become their undoing. In order to continue in their visionary capacity to grow and expand, they must mature not only their team and their systems but themselves as well, to prevent the strangulation of micro-management. They have to trust. But trust is not something you can just do because you should. I suppose you can develop a greater sense of overall optimism about life, but you don’t merely learn to trust - you learn to build trust. And you do that by creating a system and working it, so you can let go at that lower functional level, without letting go of the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish.

A beginner at the wheel of a car will have jerky, small movements. They are maintaining control, just at small increments of focus. Only as they learn to trust the car’s responsiveness can they let go on that level, extend their horizon, and cruise at higher speeds more easily.

Similarly, if you don’t fully trust your personal systems, you are likely to be dedicating inappropriate and unnecessary mental attention to details and content, often with a resultant negative emotional component. You’ll feel pulled, overwhelmed, and often like you’re close to losing control.

But you can’t trust your system until it’s trust-worthy. When is that? When you know you have captured all your commitments, clarified what you’re intending to do about them, decided the actions you need to take about them, and have parked reminders of those actions in places that you know you’ll look, where and when you need to.

Entrepreneurs have to break out of their comfort zone of operational control and let go, getting good people in the right places, accountable for the right things and monitored appropriately. Similarly, to keep a clear head focused creatively at the right things, you must have all the right things in your personal system and the behaviors to look at them at the right time. If you try to keep more than ten things in your mind at once, you’ll lose objectivity about their relationships with each other. Less important things will bother you more than they should, and you won’t give the tactical and strategic stuff the objective attention it deserves. And if some part of you knows that you don’t have everything captured and organized in the right place, your brain simply won’t let go of some attention to unseen details. You’ll find yourself still to some degree at the mercy of the latest and loudest. It’s the price paid for staying in the comfort zone of keeping control of it all in your head.

Are You Micro-Managing Your Mind? – by David Allen


When people begin to implement the Getting Things Done methods, they initially experience a rush of energy and creativity, while feeling more relaxed at the same time. But those positive experiences can slip away quickly without the confidence that the content of their systems are complete and current (the inventory of which could have been changed and expanded hugely with the last phone call). People have often said, “Gee, I have everything captured in the system, but my mind is still worrying and reminding me about this and that.” My question is, “How long have you been working your system?” Usually they have only recently set it up. That won’t be sufficient to build trust yet, and your mind will still try to keep control. That’s why the challenge is to keep going – to keep coming back to everything downloaded, processed, and organized. And the trick is to come back often enough for the mind to be able to let go, trusting that remembering and reminding is really being handled by something better than it is. Then you’re truly free to be thinking about things, not of them.

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.” - Gustave Flaubert



We often get questions about personal work areas: “What is the best way to organize a desk space, bookshelves, and my whole office? What special gadgets or tools can help me organize the work most efficiently? How often should I clean and organize it – assuming that it doesn’t stay neat as soon as it’s cleaned?”

I will share my thoughts about gear and workspace logistics, but keep in mind that in order to understand how it all fits together and to make this work, you should be familiar with my documents on the Workflow Diagram, General Reference Filing, the Tickler File, and the Weekly Review. All of these are available on the davidco.com website.

The workspace should function like a cockpit – all the controls easily accessible as required, allowing for maximum focus on the work at hand, quick over-viewing of work to be done, and easy ad hoc processing of all forms of input (from email, paper mail, phone, and live conversation).

BASIC HARDWARE

Here’s a basic toolkit: 1. In-basket (top basket)

2. Work-in-progress basket

3. Standing wire racks for file folders (work-in-progress support)

4. Out-basket

5. Computer

6. Printer (have one right at hand – it’ll save you hours!)

7. Clock

8. Phone/answering machine

9. Capture/communication tools – writing pad, stapler, tape; desk tray and holders for pens, post-its, paper clips, scissors, stamps

10. Labeller (for files)

11. New file folders (lots, at hand!)

12. Filing cabinets (within reach)

13. Telephone/address database

14. Calendar

15. Personal supplies (best in at-hand drawers): refills for writing instruments, batteries, business cards, stationery, envelopes, headphones, blank CDs, small tools, and the like.

Organizing Your Workspace – by David Allen


WORKSPACE FUNCTIONALITY Two types of materials belong in your workspace, and it’s very productive to sort them accordingly: 1. What belongs there permanently 2. What is in transit and incomplete

Most people have vague (if any) physical and visible distinctions between these two very different categories in their environment – what has action required and what doesn’t, because it belongs there. In our workflow coaching with executives, the first activity we have them do is sort out what stays where it is and what still needs attention. Often, too, there are many things that should be purged OUT of the environment. Sometimes a plethora of outdated “stuff” can accumulate, clogging up drawers and nooks and crannies of desk real estate.

Permanent Stuff

The only items that belong permanently in your workspace are: supplies, reference material, decoration, and equipment. Anything else goes first in the in-basket to be processed and then is either tossed, tickled, filed or coded into your action-reminder system. “Supplies” – everything you need, and use up, on a regular basis – writing and printer paper, stamps, paper clips, tissues,

ink, etc. “Reference material” – your files, ring binders, directories, manuals, lists of codes, etc.“Decoration” – wall décor, art, plants, family pictures, nostalgia, cartoons, etc. “Equipment” – furniture, phones, computers, PDAs, printers, stapler, letter opener, pens, chargers, projectors, briefcases, etc.

Keep It Current

It’s often a worthy exercise to exorcise the supplies, reference material, decoration and equipment that really aren’t any longer. Many things that start out as functional in those categories become outdated, useless, or misplaced simply by the passage of time. It’s good to regularly purge and reorganize the desk, drawers, shelves, countertops, and files. It’s very easy to go unconscious to stuff just because it’s there, undermining the sense of active utility in your environment. If you have things still around that you’re not sure if you might need again (such as miscellaneous electronic accessories), consider putting them further away from you in plastic storage bins labelled “Misc Gear,” which you can then reevaluate later as to its relevance.

Filing Styling

It is important to pay attention to the logistics of filing in your office area because, besides furniture, it requires the most space and physical movement to execute. General reference filing (also including support files for projects in progress) should be within easy reach. You should eliminate any resistance to filing a single piece of paper out of the in-basket, if it’s potentially useful information. (See my article on General Reference Filing.) If you have inherited your office and its furniture and its layout, you may be the victim of aesthetic elegance and functional unconsciousness. Standard corporate issue are side-opening filing cabinets that require hanging files, which aren’t nearly as easy to use as the front-opening types with slider blocks that hold files upright. Most people need four full file drawers for their own personal general reference filing, if they have an easy enough system to use for all the miscellaneous paper-based reference material that could be keep-worthy. Any reference material that can stand up by itself goes on your shelves, like books, thick manuals and binders (appropriately labelled). Anything else should live in its own file alphabetically in your filing cabinets.


In Transit and Incomplete Stuff

The movable stuff in the work area consists of:1. Input to be processed 2. Action reminders

Input Processing

Workspace should be organized to make it easy to process input at random times (email, voice mail, paper mail, etc.) The in-basket and your email should all be easily process-able while you’re on hold on a conference call, or waiting for someone to walk into your office. So not only the phone and the computer, but also the in-basket should be at hand’s reach. The in-basket can and should hold everything that is not yet organized, so there is no need to have a “messy desk”. Sure, I spread my stuff out to work on a project or with a client or for a meeting, but when I want to focus on something else, I need to re-gather it all and either re-file it as appropriate or toss it into “in” until I can get to it again. Of course a legal pad or some form of easy note-taking device should always be right at hand in case the phone rings or I want to check voice mail, or someone pops into the office and lets me know something that I might want to do something with later on.

Action Reminding

The action-reminder tools in a workspace consist of (1) calendar, (2) reminders of as-soon-as-I-can-get-to-it actions, and (3) overviews of projects and longer-horizon outcomes. These can be in whatever hardware you have personally chosen as the most logistically efficient for your life- and work-style. They could be in a loose-leaf planner, a software application, and/or paper-based folders and baskets.

The first thing usually accessed at hand is the calendar (and a clock), to let you know where you have to be when today. It signifies the “hard landscape” for your day, and so must be the most easily and consistently reviewed device and information. The next most accessible for review need to be the action-reminder lists, folder, or baskets. (“Gee, I don’t have to be in the meeting for another 15 minutes... what could I handle and get off my plate between now and then?”) The lists of projects, objectives, goals, visions, might-want-to’s, etc. just need to be accessible enough so, in the Weekly Review, they are perused appropriately for effective calibration of your intuitive operational focus.

KEEPING THE SYSTEM

If the workspace is organized appropriately, according to the real principles of workflow (as I’ve outlined above) it’s no big deal to keep it up. As a matter of fact, the more airtight the system is, the more out of control you can let it get! If you’re on a real roll (making money hand over fist today), who cares how clean your desk is?! With a clear system in place, it is not only easy to get things back into control, it’s actually fun. Without the system, it’s frustrating, and there always remains a vague sense of being out of control because the game hasn’t been fully structured.

The Weekly Review should be the time to get the edges back, make sure it all is in place, ready for another successful roll. But it’s also a great habit and principle – when in doubt, clean a drawer! (There’s another roll coming!)


DAVID’S PERSONAL OFFICE SPACE (come on in...!)

On my Desk

1. Two of my Fedon stacking trays – top one for IN and the underneath one for “action support” materials

2. Two Fedon wire stand-up file holder racks, for my plastic system files and work-in-progress support files (current active projects and standing meetings)

3. Laptop in port replicator stand, attached to: network, printer, external storage drive, and synchronizing connectors for PDA, iPod, digital camera, labeller, scanner, and digital recorder

4. Extra single Fedon stacking tray to corral a power strip with miscellaneous chargers

5. Fedon holder for highlighter/letter opener/scissors

6. Two Fedon organizer trays with paper clips, staple remover, stamps, post-its, pens, USB mass storage sticks, lip balm

7. Stapler

8. Scotch tape dispenser

9. Legal pad

10. World globe (small, for decoration)

11. World Atlas (Smythson)

12. Labeller (Brother PT-18)

13. Scanner (small – Canon)

In the Desk

1. Small drawers: pen refills, staple remover, batteries, business cards, flashlight, NoteTaker Wallet refills, deposit slips, USB headset

2. Deeper drawers: supply of new manila file folders, small tools, miscellaneous travel accessories, etc.

On the counter behind me

1. Heavyweight stapler 2. Printer/fax/copier (HP 2840) 3. Fedon stacking tray for OUT 4. Fedon stacking tray for Read/Review – magazines, articles

My files

In my desk: 1. Tickler file 2. Personal financial files (A-Z)


Within reach: 1. Personal DAC company files (A-Z) 2. General reference files (A-Z)

Also...

1. Two small metal cabinets with drawers for stationery, printer checks, envelopes

And on miscellaneous shelves and in the closet

1. Books 2. Printer paper 3. Larger gear


©David Allen & Company 2002-2006. All rights reserved. www.DavidAllenGTD.com page �

DavidAllen

Overtime... All the Time

Caught in the busy trap.

by David Allen

Recently while coaching a leader, I discovered another level of the busy trap—the syndrome: “If I can just do something that feels like I’m working with focus, I don’t have to deal with the angst about all the other stuff I should be doing.”

He had processed down to the last dozen or so emails—ones he wanted to keep in there because he needed to more than two minutes on each of the responses. He had already set up a category of tasks in Outlook called “At Computer.” Because I wanted him to stop using Inbox for a holding bin, and taste what it was like to get it empty, I nudged him to go ahead and move those emails out of the inbox and onto the “At Computer” list.

As he did that, you could see the light dawn. “Wow! Now I see all my work inventory in one place! And I now realize that I would let myself spend time on those emails before anything else, because that would seem the easiest choice to make. Now I can assess them immediately within the context of everything to do. They’re not lost, and they’re in proper perspective. I’ve been letting myself get sucked into the easiest being busy thing, instead of feeling better about better choices.”

Out of the busy trap.

Edit email subject lines when you store or reply or reroute. One moment of mental effort and movement on your part helps grease the processing skids for yourself and others later in assessing what this email is about, as it morphs into different things with different purposes.

Psychic RAM tends to bring to awareness items based on criteria of latest (most recent in time) and loudest (emotionally), which is hardly the most effective file-and-retrieval system. Similarly, if your system of action reminders is haphazard (post-its on the screen, phone slips on the desk, notes on your chair, people interruptions), your busy energy momentum will glom on to the easiest thing to maintain itself. But the most obviously in your face is not the best criterion for in-the-moment choices of what to do.

Stop. Do what you need to do to feel as good as you can about what you’re doing. You can never be busy enough to dispel the need to be busy. And when you choose the work you are doing, it’s a lot easier to choose not to work. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,” said Albert Einstein.


Many people have asked for our suggestions about setting up a paper planner or paper organizer.

An advantage to paper-based system is the capability of a better and faster visual overview and context. And even though the separate paper lists could be kept anywhere in a binder, it is nice to group them based upon how they are accessed.

You could put together your own paper system with products from an office supply store for about $25 (most of that cost is for the binder.) You can pay much more for classy graphics and covers and accessories, but it is not required. The only preprinted forms you might need would be calendar pages and telephone/address pages. Otherwise, you could easily get by with plain lined notebook paper, on which you could make your lists.

Size is more a matter of aesthetics and logistics. Letter-sized notebooks have the advantage of holding standard paper that can be printed or copied, and finding inexpensive forms and accessories in standard stationery stores. Mid-sized planners have the advantage of convenience of writing in places of more limited space and slightly less bulky for carrying around.

The Basics of GTD®

Maximum benefit from your paper planner will be derived when you hold to the key principles for Getting Things Done®:

1. Get everything that has your attention out of your head and capture it in a trusted place.

2. Decide and track reminders of the very next physical, visible action required to move all your commitments to completion.

3. Define and keep track of all the more-than-one-step commitments you have.

4. Consistently update and review your total inventory of commitments in order to trust your choices about what you are doing.

The Power of Sophisticated Simplicity Many years of research have proven that the systems and tools for personal productivity that have the greatest value are relatively simple. Too many lines and boxes on organizing forms, for instance, are not only unnecessary – they create more pressure than they relieve. If you have to think too much, every time you engage with the tool, it won’t serve you.

Too much structure will produce constraint instead of freedom. For practicality and ease of use, we suggest you use paper with simple formatting - lined or blank paper will be sufficient to allow for greatest flexibility. The simple formatting will serve to facilitate capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing with as little effort as possible.

At the same time, if your system is too simple, it will create too much complexity and confusion, because it will try to compress too many things together that should be kept separate and discrete. Having only a calendar and single to-do list (the typical “system” of many people) is much too basic to control the volume and complexity of commitments you probably have. You just need simple lists, but you’ll need to have more than one.

By following our suggestions for using your paper planner/organizer, you’ll discover the power of simplicity, married to a smart system design that can support a huge range of life-and work-styles.

GTD® and Paper Planners/Organizers


The Basics of Using a GTD® Paper Planner/Organizer

This is a powerful tool that can have a profound effect on your productivity and peace of mind. Though the sections are relatively simple (with no complex structures to constrain you), there is an intelligent “flow” in how the sections function and work together.

The system is primarily a way to maintain a current and complete inventory of your commitments, in all of your involvements at many horizons. It easily facilitates capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing all of the “stuff” in your mind and in your life, to ensure that you feel good about what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing!) at any moment.

Notes/In… is a trusted place to freely capture input as it occurs, without having to analyze or organize it. It is the first section, because it can come into play instantly, anywhere.

The next most frequently accessed information will be the actions you need or want to take at any time. They are best organized in three sections (and most likely viewed in this order):

Calendar… is the first place you’ll look to know what has to be handled today, and how much time you’ll have otherwise to deal with all the other things you have to do, which you’ll see on your Action Lists.

Actions Lists… which let you know all the single actions and next steps on your projects, to be done as soon as you can get to them.

Agendas… hold all the reminders for items to discuss with people and in meetings.

When you are in control of all of the above, you will next want to connect and update all your actions by reviewing:

Projects/Goals… which will remind you of the final outcomes you want to accomplish. For some of these, you will want more detailed...

Project Plans/Notes… which will ensure greater comfort that you have all the right action steps needed to move things forward effectively.

And of course at any point in time, to get something done, you might want some information, which you can store in...

Reference/Miscellaneous Information… and in Contacts

A paper system based on the GTD® methodology is structurally designed to avoid the ineffectiveness and pitfalls of other systems where important items get lost or fall through the cracks. Most other systems attempt to have one coordinating mechanism for all the entries about one topic. The reason this is ineffective is that in regards to one single project, you may have:

- Recent notes from a meeting about the project in Notes/In

- The next meeting about the project on your Calendar

- A phone call to make about it on a “Calls” list in Actions Lists

- Something to talk to your boss about in Agendas

- The project itself listed in a “Projects” list, in Projects/Goals

- A plan for the project in Project Plans/Notes

- A checklist for managing that kind of project in Reference/Miscellaneous Information

The alternative would be to organize all that data in one place, under the heading of the project. The problem would be, when you’re at a phone, or meeting with your boss, you would have to look at all your project notes to find all your phone calls and all your “at-boss” agendas. The way this system is laid out has proven to be the most effective way to stay on top of all these relationships of topics, different locations, and contexts in which you find yourself.

The key will be to examine all the contents regularly and use the tool as a thinking and coordinating catalyst. The more complete the contents and the more consistently they are reviewed, the more you’ll relax and produce results, almost automatically.


Suggested Sections for a GTD® Paper Planner/Organizer

Notes/In SectionThis section serves as a wonderfully portable IN tray or collection box. Use it as your first entry place for anything you might need to capture and clarify later. Typical uses would be:

Voice mails – Better to listen to them once, take notes, and empty voice mail each time you access it.

Meeting notes – Grab anything you might want to do something about. You can also dedicate a separate page here for each meeting, so you can save your “raw” notes for later review if needed.

Random thoughts – It’s always good to have plenty of room to capture thoughts and ideas that may have value, but which you don’t want or need to decide about at the moment.

Conversations – Have this section open, ready to take notes as you’re on the phone and when people “drop by” your desk.

The key to the power of this section is ensuring that you process and purge these notes regularly. That will build the trust necessary to allow these inputs to stay off your mind. Every day or two, make appropriate decisions about your notes, determine and capture actions and projects onto your other lists, and clean this section to “zero”.

Calendar Section - Best Practices on Using a CalendarThe calendar should be used for three things:

1. Appointments

2. Day-specific actions

3. Information for and about that day

Appointments Time-specific commitments, e.g. “2:00 pm meet with attorney.” These are tracked on the calendar within the appointments area.

Day-specific actions Things you have to do that day, though there is no specific time commitment, e.g. next Tuesday you need to “Call Margaret to confirm Wednesday meeting.”

Information What you need or want to know on that day, e.g. “Water turned off from 8-9am” or “Bruce returns from vacation.”

What doesn’t work for this section is trying to cram “daily to-do lists” onto your calendar. They too often don’t match the reality of your day, and prevent you from seeing the whole picture of all possible actions that you could do to be productive at any moment in time. The calendar serves as a quick and critical reminder of the “hard landscape” – the immovable objects in the day. When there is discretionary time, you can refer to your Action Lists in that section to assess all your options. Your Action Lists will actually contain the vast majority of your “to-do’s.”

If you still require a quick prioritization technique to keep track of the five or ten most important things to do in the next few days, use a Post-It® stuck on your calendar with that list, which you can move from day to day and edit easily.


Action Lists SectionThis section is used for the lists of the very next actions you need to do, as soon as you have the time to do them. These include the next steps on projects (“Call Joe for his suggestions about a dentist”) and single actions we need or want to do (“E-mail Daniel our pics from Hawaii”).

Because most people have dozens of these kinds of “to-do’s”, it is easiest to manage them on separate lists, organized by the context required for the action. In other words, if you need to be at your computer to take the action, put the reminder on a “Computer” list. If the action requires going to the hardware store, park that on an “Errands” list.

The most common contexts for actions (and therefore the most useful ways to categorize action reminders) are:

- Calls (from any telephone)

- Computer (e-mails and documents to write, web surfing, etc.)

- Office (requires being there)

- Home (requires being at or around your house or apartment)

- Errands (out-and-about)

- Anywhere (can do the action in any location)

- Waiting For (projects and actions others are supposed to be doing, which you care about)

- Agendas (i.e. in meetings with others. This deserves it’s own section, to follow.)

Feel free to use or start with the above suggestions and customize as you wish. For instance, if you work from home, you won’t need

a separate “Office” action list; or if you don’t travel with a computer, you might not have a separate “Computer” list, using “Office” and

“Home” for computer actions in those locations.

(TIP: Use your “Errands” page of actions to hold separate Post-It’s for the places you shop – e.g. hardware, grocery, office supply – with the

running list of items to get from those locations.)

Important: Any actions that absolutely must be done on a specific day (e.g. a call that has to be made sometime on Tuesday) should

be tracked on your calendar, not on these action lists. See our notes about use of the Calendar in that section. These Actions Lists are

essentially reminders of things that need to get done as soon as you can, after you have dealt with the “have-to’s” for today. These lists are

not re-written every day – they are simply available to remind you of all the things you need to do, when you have any discretionary time.

Agendas SectionUse this section to hold reminders of topics to cover the next time you have meetings or conversations with individuals or groups.

Set up a separate page for each of the people you interact with routinely (partner, assistant, boss, direct report, attorney, etc.). When you determine the next action on something is to “Talk to Jim about possible dates for the party,” if Jim is someone you communicate with regularly, have a page titled “Jim” to hold those items, to be handled when you and Jim meet or talk next. When you’re on the phone with him or in his office, you can then cover all the accumulated topics since the last meeting.

Also consider setting up pages to use in this way for people you may be interacting with for a limited time, such as a contractor working on your house, an attorney working on your estate plan, or the instructor for a class you’re taking.

In the same way, set up pages for each of the regular or special meetings you have with staff, boards, or committees, collecting agendas to cover at those meetings.


Projects/Goals Section

Use this section for keeping lists of the larger than single-action things you need to keep track of, such as projects to complete, goals to

accomplish, and ideal scenarios to envision.

An extremely important list to maintain is an inventory of all of your projects. Projects are any commitment that requires more than one

step to complete, but which can be finished within weeks or months. The purpose of a “Projects” list is to keep track of all the things that

are incomplete, reminding yourself about them, and continually clarifying the immediate next actions you need to put in your “action lists”

section to complete until you can mark the project off as “done.” Most people have between thirty and a hundred of such commitments.

Examples:

- Get new tires on the car.

- Extend our credit line at the bank.

- Finalize Tony’s school logistics for the fall.

- Launch the new ad campaign.

- Research day care for Barbara.

- Hire a new assistant.

- Fix the basement heater.

Projects are not “next actions” but should be used to determine next actions, which can then be tracked in your Action Lists section. A weekly review of this “Projects” list, keeping it current and updating action reminders, is a key practice for stress-free productivity.

You may want to subdivide your Projects into more than one list (e.g. Personal, Job, Kids, Home); or simply keep one complete inventory for easy overview.

Someday/Maybe

An important and very useful distinction to make in this section is to create a list of “someday/maybe” projects. These are things you might want to do, sooner or later, but don’t want to create a firm commitment right now to be taking action on them. They can range from recent projects that now need to be moved to a “back burner” until a more appropriate time (e.g. organize a staff picnic), to the more long-range ideas about things you might like to do some time in the future (learn Italian, climb Mt. Whitney, get your M.B.A.). Giving yourself permission to capture and review these kinds of creative possibilities, letting them incubate, and regularly evaluate them for possibly making them active. Most of the really great things you may be doing a few years from now will likely start on this list.

You may also want to use this section additionally to keep reminders of any larger goals and objectives. What do you want to accomplish in the next year? Three years? Five years? Customize your own lists which will help keep you focused on the bigger picture – personally and professionally.

Project Plans/Notes SectionThis is a place to hold all your thoughts, details, plans, and miscellaneous support materials for your projects.

It would be useful to set up separate pages for each of your projects for which you want to capture ideas. Even if you don’t have many ideas yet about, say, your next vacation, this would be the place to dedicate at least one page to capture any current thinking, as well as providing you a trigger or motivation to regularly focus on the project and develop it further.

Even simple projects, such as “Get new tires,” might utilize a simple page for collecting your tire size, pricing, sources, etc. Much larger projects could have computer printouts or just additional brainstorming space for reminders and idea-holders.


Reference/Miscellaneous Information SectionThis section is for all the various lists and reference materials that might be useful, interesting, and fun to have at hand.

It’s perfect for organizing information you want to be able to refer to from time to time. It’s great for maintaining checklists you will want to use for special kinds of projects and events. And it’s also a great place for those random pieces of information that you say “Where should I put this?”

For instance…

Reference Birthdays and special dates Clothing sizes for yourself and family Favorite restaurants Printed upcoming schedules for club activities, athletic and cultural events Other family members’ calendars Instructions – software applications, voice mail codes, etc. Etc.

Checklists Household maintenance chores End-of-month or end-of-year routines Workout/exercise programs Travel and special trip checklists (vacation, skiing, etc.) Etc.

Miscellaneous Jokes Post-it® parking lot (for temporary reference) Someday/maybe things to do Etc.

Contacts SectionUse this section to capture information about people and places and to record important numbers. You may choose to record names, addresses and contact numbers in a strictly alphabetical manner, one letter per page. As an alternative, you may decide to separate your contacts between personal and business, or in any other configuration which makes sense to you.


If you let the stockpile of your commitments run amuck, it creates ambient anxiety and unnecessary stress. You’ll let that happen if you’re using your psyche instead of a system to keep track of those “open loops.” Managing a complete, current, and objective inventory of your agreements, in a seamless and leak proof container (not your mind), is the only way out. You must be able to renegotiate those agreements with yourself, almost moment to moment, so they’re not inordinately pulling on your psyche and undermining your self trust. In other words, you can only feel good about what you’re not doing, when you know what you’re not doing.

Here are the keys for having nothing on your mind (other than what you want on your mind):

- Have and use a ubiquitous personal “capture” tool

• Write down any and every potentially useful idea and all should’s, need-to’s, and want-to’s, when and where they occur to you.

- Have and use pens and legal pads wherever you think, work, communicate

• Take notes while you talk, think, and listen. If the writing tools are not at hand, you’ll resist the process. Have junior legal pads at every phone.

- After you write on your pads, tear and toss the pages into your in-basket

• Keep the pads clean for new input.

- Process and clean out your in-basket daily (like you do your answering machine)

• If you avoid deciding what you’re going to do about the content of the notes, or what they mean to you, sooner than later, you’ll subvert the whole flow.

- Organize your resulting actions, projects, reference and support material accordingly • Have a good system of lists that can group things of like nature (all your calls, all the things to do for errands, etc.), plus

an easy-to-use filing system for projects notes.

- Review your lists of projects and possible actions consistently enough to trust you’re not missing anything

• At least once a week remind yourself of all projects that you are still committed to finish, and what you need to do next

on each one.

Personal Inventory Control – by David Allen


If you follow these guidelines for corralling your commitments, you’ll find that (1) you’ll become more conscious and mature about what you commit to (you will start to self-regulate more automatically), and (2) you’ll get increasingly comfortable with a big list of undone things. Both of those are critical outcomes for a sustainable life- and workstyle.

The freedom in naming your “stuff”

I have been reminded over and over again in working with executives over the years why so much of the GTD implementation process is empowering to so many people: when things we have allowed into our inner or outer world are appropriately and accurately identified for what they are and what they mean to us, we feel curiously freed from them. Accurately naming things that are in our world gives us power over them, while leaving them unnamed allows them a certain hold on our minds.

Various primitive people have beliefs that giving someone your name gives them a certain ability to exert influence over you. Whether that has any truth to it, I’m not sure. But from my own experience, when something that has potential meaning to me is named, it is more known; and when it is known, its potential hold on me is released.

For instance, if you’d just label all your crap “Crap,” you’d probably feel a lot better. If someone had to call Organization Paramedics for you because you’re so out of control, they could simply bring in a big box labeled “All the Stuff I Don’t Know What It Is or What to Do with It.” They’d scour your whole environment and throw everything in that box that fits in that category. In an hour you’d be totally organized – if you didn’t know where something was, you’d now know where it was! The best part would be that the totality of the rest of your world would not have any of that “stuff” in it, and a fresh breeze would be blowing through your psyche.

A good example of this is having a binder on a shelf without a label or title on the spine. Most people are not aware of the slight pressure that unnamed thing maintains on your brain. But if you create a very visible label for it, you’ll notice being more relaxed about it whenever you walk past it. The same is true for storage boxes and file drawers.

More subtly, do you have any problems that you haven’t identified as projects yet? Got anything you’ve been thinking about that needs clarification, resolution, or looking into, that you don’t have on a Projects list yet, which you can look at regularly to keep actions moving toward? Do you have piles of things around your office or your house that have unidentified agreements sitting within them (is this to read? to toss? to file?) Are there things that you think you need to be moving on but you haven’t defined what “moving” looks like physically or visibility yet (next action)?

If you do, then there is good news for you--there is potential energy and freedom embedded there that is available to you...if you name them! If you don’t, well, it’s just the opposite. The problem is that most people have never fully gotten to the place where everything was really categorized appropriately, according to all the different types and amounts of agreements with themselves. You won’t know how much restriction you are actually working under, until you get rid of it, and see how different you feel.

Naming anything we’re experiencing lessens its grip on us. If I’m feeling negative, when I realize it and call it “negativity” I instantly have greater freedom of choice about what to do with or about it. When I’m just in it, and haven’t recognized, acknowledged and accepted it for what it is, I am more of its victim than its master.

A big key is to name things as accurately as possible. If we mislabel, we run the risk of locking ourselves into limitation and stagnation. To say “I’m a totally disorganized person” is probably not true (you couldn’t get out of bed, if that were true).


To say “my thoughts and paperwork about my finances are disorganized” might be much more accurate and would lend direction and energy toward resolution of the situation.

Categorizing is to be used for freedom, not constriction. Many people avoid categorizing because they are avoiding making a decision about something. Should I read this article? File it? Throw it away? Pass it on to someone? But in the short-term freedom of not deciding, they then constrict themselves with the pressure that they ought to be deciding. I use my tickler file as an elegant tool to deal with this. I’ll often get things in my in-basket that I just don’t know what to do with them yet (especially particularly cool things I might want to buy). I just ask myself “when will I be smarter?” and tickle it to show up again then. It’s perfectly fine to decide not to decide. You just need name those things as such, and park them in a decide-not-to-decide system.

Disorganization is simply a discrepancy between where something is and what it means to you. The freedom comes from ensuring that everything has its proper ID badge, so it can get in the right line.

The truth that sets us free is often the one we don’t want to hear. --Unknown


This essay was taken from a Productivity Principles newsletter by David Allen. ©David Allen & Company 2001. All rights reserved. www.DavidAllenGTD.com

DavidAllen

The Play of the Day

When things get tight and tough, it’s easy to get hung up in a negative loop in your self talk: “Oh no! Things are tight and tough!” And you bemoan your fate and pander to your disappointment. In fact, such times are always great opportunities to reassess what you’re really doing and mature your thinking and focus. Tough times can be good times, as long as you know the game you are playing and the play you are making.

Easy to say. But changes in your circumstances, especially the ones that seem to be out of your control and grief-producing (a bear market, things other people do that create hardship for us, and other “accidents” of life), can catch you seriously off guard. Ever had the feeling that you just woke up on a soccer field, being run over by bigger, meaner, uglier and faster players than you, and you haven’t the vaguest idea what you are doing there? You find yourself beaten, bloody, and muddy, and from the outset things are getting worse!

To get a grip, what’s the first thing you must focus on? What the game is and where your goal is! When you wake up to the fact that you’re playing soccer and you see your target, you quickly lose interest in how beaten, bloody, or muddy you are. You’re now into the challenge!

But then, even if you know where you’re headed, you’ll still feel paralyzed and at the mercy of bigger forces than you, until you do what? Determine the next move! Left or right; pass or run. The next action.

You’re now into the game! Even if it’s a tough game, with the odds seemingly against you. (And the more that’s true, the nobler your endeavor!) The two basic and most critical elements that need to be clear, to be fully and positively engaged in what you’re doing are (1) the goal or outcome you’re intending, and (2) the next physical move to head you in that direction.

You just lost your job. What do you want to have true now in your career, and how do you need to get started on that? You just had a major setback in your health. How do you want to be feeling about your situation, and what do you need to do to make that happen? When the world has shifted on you in whatever way, what would success NOW mean for you, and what activity will move you NOW in that direction?

It’s not what’s going on in your world that is good or bad. The world just is what it is. What makes the difference to you is how you’re engaged with it. You can’t ignore it without being victimized by it in your attitude. As any performance race driver will tell you, coasting is the most dangerous behavior. You have to stay involved with the pedals. You must play. You have to get in the game you’re in.

“The business of life is to go forward.” - Samuel Johnson

“One can stand still in a flowing stream, but not in the world of men.” - Japanese Proverb

“ To fight a bull when you are not scared is nothing. And to not fight a bull when you are scared is nothing. But to fight a bull when you are scared is something.” - Unknown


We can all be more productive, as individuals and organizations. There is always value that can be added with only the resources at hand. But what increases productivity? Not more resources, as a rule. More money that produces the same result per dollar spent is no improvement. What generates more for the energy invested is the conscious insertion of at least one of four things that don’t happen by themselves: clearing, focusing, structuring, and action. (1) Cleaning and clearing. Any activity that does not handle its own waste appropriately is going to increase drag on the system and cause unnecessary effort to endure and deal with accumulated residue. What’s not needed any more? Old projects, outworn policies and procedures, old un-renegotiated commitments, hung up body toxins - anything taking up space and attention and not creating value, when removed, will increase flow and output automatically. But it takes intention and action to eliminate stuff - it becomes more and more inert if it isn’t consistently infused with conscious interest. (2) Focusing. Psychic and physical forces are automatically mobilized with a focus and rapidly dispersed and exhausted without one. What’s the purpose...for this meeting, this proposal, this vacation, this department, this desk, this job? What are we trying to do? Where are we going? Clear answers to these questions create energy which produces results with less effort. But it takes focus to direct a focus. Unattended, distraction creeps in like a thief in the night. (3) Structuring. Look around at the physical structures you see right now. They exist not as value in themselves but for what they create – comfort, protection, support, communication, focus, visibility – with minimal energy expended. With no structures we would have a heck of a time maintaining those experiences with just our own bodies. With no list of all our errands at hand when we’re out and about, we’re likely not as productive as we could be. If no one is designated to answer the phone, everyone has to waste attention on it when it rings. If my paint brushes are not in order, I’m limiting my creative expression. Structures don’t show up by themselves. Productive people are always asking: How can I better organize and streamline what I’m doing? (4) Action. It’s easier to move when you are already in motion. It takes less effort to redirect something going in the wrong direction than to get something going from a standing start. Fear of the unknown and of potential negative consequences of imperfection can easily create the analysis paralysis. If something needs to be different than it is and there is no “next action” decided yet, there will tend to be debilitating angst as well as zero motion. Initiating a simple next physical step is often the key to releasing stored energy and generating productive momentum. But it requires a concentration of intention to hold the mind steady toward a pinpoint of action. Any one of these four dynamics can improve the quality and quantity of your outputs, but each requires a conscious effort to employ. And any one of them, underemployed, can undermine it. You could have a clean, focused, active department that lacked good job descriptions, and it won’t be as effective as it could be. A team could be well structured, working overtime, with clean in-baskets, and still not be focused on what they needed to do appropriately. And you could have a hard-charging goal-oriented, organized executive with tons of incomplete communications and commitments weighing him down like an albatross.

The Productivity Investments – by David Allen


A person in sustainable high performance keeps a focus on what’s important, captures and organizes all the open loops still relevant to their life and work, and consistently takes action on expressing and completing that which is theirs to do. If you’re not operating from that place as much as you’d like, which of these productivity-relevant areas is your weak suit right now? Which might be the improvement opportunity for your organization, or for your family? Are things as clean, focused, structured, and active as they could or need to be in all meaningful areas? What would be a good investment strategy? A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment. - Walter Lippman



Perhaps the most profound result of creating a complete and accurately defined inventory of our projects is how it can propel us to do something positive and concrete about ephemeral and ambiguous situations that have our attention. We are all capable of taking dominion over every problem or challenging situation we encounter. But this doesn’t happen by itself. Nailing down the real outcome we’re committed to in those situations, when “the answer” is still not clear, takes awareness and focus. There is a subtlety and rigorous mental discipline required to create that “complete and accurately defined inventory of our projects.” Defining a “project” as “anything you’re committed to complete that takes more than one step” means that most people have between thirty and a hundred projects. Though many are somewhat obvious (hire a new assistant, set up the new computer, finish moving in), many aren’t. And as mundane as making a complete version of this kind of list may seem, it is key to masterful self-management. It’s challenging enough to get someone to write down even the most evident projects (it takes some guts to face objectively all the commitments you’ve made with yourself). And even when you think you have your “total list” of projects, it seldom is. The ones that will elude you are the projects that you can’t even see yet as projects. They are the situations you implicitly have committed to change or improve, but haven’t gotten a grip on yet. Often what will hang you up are uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or distracting circumstances you find yourself in, for which you haven’t yet gotten clear about how you’re going to relate to them. For example: • Potential professional relationships: “Acme Brick has approached us about a joint venture, but I’m not sure that’s something

we want to do right now.” “Smedley Company has asked for a proposal, but I don’t know if we even want to do work for them.”

• Sticky interpersonal situations: “My sister and her husband continue to avoid talking to me about the money they owe us.”

“I don’t know if I can stand working for the person I have as my boss much longer.”

• Personal development issues and opportunities: “I’m frustrated that I’m not further along in my career.” “I’m not sure if

I should take time to learn more computer skills.”

• Miscellaneous life and work situations: “I’m concerned about what Mom is going to do now about her house.” “We’re

frustrated about the latest changes in the policies of our organization.” “I’ve got to do something about my energy.”

“I don’t know how to deal with the troubles Jimmy is having in school this year.” Then, because people don’t in the moment “have the answer” to the situation, they don’t take the opportunity to define a project of resolution, clarification, or research. If the above inner dialogs were part of your reality, your “Projects” list might

Stalking the Wild Projects – by David Allen


begin to look something like this: “Research possible JV with Acme Brick,” “Clarify money issue with my sister,” “Evaluate career change opportunities,” “Resolve Mom’s living situation,” etc. Then, and only then, can real next actions be determined which will be the key to your positive engagement with still vague and ambiguous things. Something that has been gnawing at your psyche melts away as you “Call Maria re: suggestions for elder care options” and “E-mail Chuck/Sally/Bertrand re: meeting about Acme offer.” You don’t need the final solution to take away the pressure -- you just need forward motion toward it. Training yourself to identify all the things that are “yanking your chain” at any level of your awareness and define for each a positive result and an action to take to move toward it - that’s installing an extremely productive behavior, and a mark of significant maturity. Confusion is a word we’ve invented for an order which is not understood. - Henry Miller


DavidAllen

This essay was taken from a Productivity Principles newsletter by David Allen. ©David Allen & Company 2006. All rights reserved. www.DavidAllenGTD.com page 1

Three-Dimensional Self Management

For many years I have been teaching about the horizontal and vertical aspects of productivity. “Horizontal” represents the ability to quiet distractions and maintain a complete and total inventory of things to do across the whole spectrum of our day-to-day engagements. For instance, when you have a phone and time, you have available every call you need and want to make and your head is clear enough to make them. Basically, you’re feeling OK about what you’re not doing, because your available list of options is complete. “Vertical” represents the ability to view what you’re doing from the appropriate horizon and to shift your focus as required. You analyze your strategic plan in one moment, answer e-mails in the next, reconnect with your core values when you need to, review all your projects weekly, tweek your lifestyle visions with your partner creatively and proactively. You’re facile in your ability to frame which kind of thinking you need to be doing, about what, and when.

It’s about both control and perspective. And if self management can be interpreted as how well our actions match our priorities, or simply how good our choices are about what we’re doing, then we must have equal capability in each of these dimensions to be at our best.

Can you have one without the other – control without perspective, or vision without control? Ultimately, no. If you’re out of control, it’s almost impossible to maintain appropriate perspective. And if you can’t see things from the right altitude, you’ll lose control at some point. But relatively speaking, yes – there can be an imbalance.

On a matrix of control vs. perspective, there are four quadrants: low control and low perspective, high control and low perspective, low control and high perspective, high perspective and high control. Each of these is at least a little familiar to all of us as a state we may find ourselves in.

1. Low control, low perspective = the Victim. Driven by latest and loudest, simply reacting to relieve the most obvious and immediate pressures and pains.

2. High control, low perspective = the Micro Manager. Obsessed with containing and ordering detail, neglecting the Why question and the bigger-picture realities. Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is the extreme.

3. Low control, high perspective = the Crazy Maker. Fabulous ideas, by the minute, unrealistically overcommitting focus and resources. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is the extreme.

4. High control, high perspective = Master and Commander. Keeping the eye on the prize with attention to critical detail, holding steady with a firm but flexible hand.

Which one describes you, today, right now? Are you reading this essay to avoid getting more control or perspective, or because you have them?

DavidAllen

This essay was taken from a Productivity Principles newsletter by David Allen. ©David Allen & Company 2006. All rights reserved. www.DavidAllenGTD.com page 2

I’m in and out of each one of these configurations, several times a day. I may start out having gotten it all together, sailing ahead as the captain of my ship. I then get a crazy idea, make one phone call, and turn my world upside down. I get overcome by the new problems or possibilities and I’m crashing on rocky shoals. In my excitement or nervousness I then decide to prune another tiny branch off a maple tree outside my office (can I get control of something, please!?) No matter. The key is not forever staying at optimum perspective and control - it’s having a good GPS system and knowing how to right the vessel and get back on course when it wavers and when I get around to getting it together again.

This was the inspiration for my latest version of our public seminar, and why it’s called “Making It All Work” - to chart the currents of the waters of control and perspective (and the lack thereof), so we can more easily identify where we are and what kind of activity and focus will have the most value for us, at any moment. Most people’s initial positive experience with the Getting Things Done method is centered around the getting-control aspect - making sense and getting a handle on all the “stuff” coming at us and clogging up our brains and our lives. Rightly so, because you must pay attention to the level that most has your attention, first. But once we have things relatively stable, there must be an equal focus on the right focus. We need to know and trust why we are subscribing to that magazine in the in-basket, not just that we can park it in Read/Review. Is it something that’s getting us to where we’re going, mapping to what’s really important to us now, or just momentum from an old inspiration that needs updating, and should be cancelled? Getting Things Done® (GTD®) is about making sense of and managing multiple priorities, with the best models for rapidly gaining control and perspective - critical for self management.

But hey, what’s the third dimension?

Ah, it’s acknowledging and consciously engaging with that which constantly pulls us, guides us, and impels us toward creativity and coherence. It’s the recognition and participation with something that promotes perspective and control, almost magically, and yet transcends them. It’s the thing that, in the worst and best of circumstances and when it often makes no sense, gives us the experience of acceptance, surrender, intuition, courage, and forgiveness. It’s our heart.

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.” - Vaclav Havel

Go to GTDIQ.com and follow the simple instructions for your free GTD-Q assessment. Your relsults will be available immediately.


Why do people complain that there’s no time to get their work done? Because there is more work to do than the work they think they have to do.

Many times people we work with express frustration that they “can’t get any of their work done” because of the overwhelming amount of interruptions, email, and other inputs that show up during the course of a normal day. “I can’t get my work done, because there is so much (other) work to do!”

If you are ever in that frustrated state, it might help to understand the threefold nature of what constitutes your “work.”

You have a choice of doing three very different things when you work – pre-defined work, ad hoc work, and defining your work.

1. Pre-defined Work

This is what you would be doing all day if you got no new input or interruptions of any sort. You would probably be working off the inventory of actions and projects that you came in with – work that you have already determined needs doing. There are the phone calls you need to make, the documents you need to draft, the ideas you need to outline on the project, etc. That list of things to potentially be doing, when you have some discretionary time, would be challenging enough to sift through given your volume (most professionals have 150-200 of these discrete actions). But what you are very often faced with is the necessity (and opportunity) to do...

2. Work As It Appears The phone rings. It’s not on your lists or your calendar. But you take the call, nonetheless, and consequently spend twenty

minutes talking to a client of yours about a potentially important, or at least an interesting, topic. Before you’re off that call, your boss sends you an instant message to schedule a half hour meeting in the afternoon to update you on a new development and get your input on it. You acknowledge back “OK” while you’re still talking to the client. For that meeting, though, you know immediately that you are going to need to update two spreadsheets and surf the Web about a company that’s been on your radar pertaining to this project, before you walk in. That means do it now, or otherwise not eat lunch. In this scenario you are doing the work as it shows up to be done. You are actually defining your work rapidly in this case, and choosing to do the new stuff instead of any of the pre-determined potential activities. Many of us have whole days of this nature. We can’t get to anything on our action lists because the ad-hoc nature of the day wound up defining and requiring our total focus, non-stop.

That, added to our inventory of pre-defined work, creates a substantial volume of on-deck options for things to be doing. But then there’s the e-mail constantly filling up your in-basket. And meeting notes from last night still on the legal pad on the corner of your desk. And the fourteen voicemails that you keep saving because they mean something you might need

The Threefold Nature of Work – by David Allen


to do, but you don’t know exactly what yet. And more voicemails coming in during the day. So, in addition to all the stuff on your lists and all the stuff coming at you during the day that you have to engage with as it shows up, you know there’s still the on-going requirement to be...

3. Defining Work

This is processing and emptying your in-basket, your email, your meeting notes, etc. – assessing the new inputs and making decisions about what needs to be done about them. You may do some quick actions as you define them (a la the two-minute rule), delegate things to others (to be tracked on your “Waiting For...” list), and you will probably be adding more action items and projects to your inventory of defined work, as you review and think about the meaning of the content of those notes. “Oh yeah, I told Raphael I would call him back about possible times to meet next week...”

This activity of defining work, based upon the constant flow of new incoming information and communication, requires an average of one hour per day, for the typical professional. That’s just to stay current – not to clean up and process any backlog that may have accumulated prior to today.

So what? Everything I have described so far is common sense, or at least a common awareness about the way things really are. Here’s the rub: I have noticed that many people act as if (2) is some sort of burden to endure, and (3) is some irrelevant activity aside from their work. “I have my list of things to do. Why am I being burdened with things that aren’t on my lists, and why am I now in addition having to deal with all of these e-mails, voicemails, conversation notes, business cards, receipts, and tons of other inputs coming at me from my outside world?”

I don’t get it. It’s all your work. Some is done when it appears, and some is done when you choose to do it instead of what’s showing up. And processing input is required to trust that the inventory of your pre-defined work is complete enough to evaluate its contents against your new options of things to do.

Are you truly pretending that your boss doesn’t have the authority to reallocate your focus toward a new and unexpected priority? Get real. Are you honestly saying that now the world is at fault for reconfiguring itself to present you with things you weren’t aware of twelve hours ago? Get a grip. And how long can you honestly say you are comfortable doing anything, without checking your voicemail or e-mail?

The key is how efficiently and effectively you know how to process new stuff, and how functional your system is for maintaining and reviewing your inventory of commitments. Then you accept and manage the input processing as a critical component, you review the whole game frequently enough to know (in your gut) how to evaluate the surprises and unexpected work, and you have a sufficiently functional system for capturing and managing all the various rivers and streams of this complex environment, to feel at least OK about what you’re not doing. Master key to life.

How much of which kind of work to do, when, is the eternal dance of the workday. You can’t really do more than one of them at a time, though you can get really fast with processing work while you’re on hold on the phone, and waiting for meetings to start. There may be interruptions that are allowed that are not functional or valuable, but managing those is just tactical to your definition of your job. It’s an eternal challenge of allocating limited resources (the definition of “management”) – it’s not an inherent problem.


How much of your day and week do you need to assume is going to be ad hoc and unexpected? How much of your day really is required for cleaning up your in-baskets so that you can trust your backlog doesn’t have landmines and unseen priorities lurking? When are you dedicating critical executive time for updating your contents and maybe improving your own process for capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing your work?

Get your habits and your systems up to handling it. And get used to it.



This is an organizational tool which can be used to simplify the tracking of date-related items and to manage work flow.

It works well as an adjunct to personal planners and calendars, allowing them to be used for streamlined focus on items that require on-going review and access.

How It’s Set UpIt consists of file folders (letter or legal size) - 31 daily files are labeled “1” through “31” and twelve monthly files are labeled with the months of the year. (See diagram on page 4.)

The daily files are in the front, beginning with the files for tomorrow’s date (if today is October 5, then the first file would be “6”). The succeeding daily files would represent the days of the rest of the month (“6” through “31”). Behind the “31” file would be the monthly file for the next month (“November”), and behind it would be the daily files “1” though “5”. Behind that would be the rest of the monthly files (“December” through “October”).

This means that the next 31 days (October 6 through November 5) are represented in the front of the file; and behind that are files for the next twelve months.

The next daily file is emptied into the in-basket every day, and then re-filed at the back of the dailies (now instead of October 6, it represents November 6).

In the same way, when the next month file reaches the front (on October 31 the “November” file will be the next one, with the daily files behind it), it will be emptied into the in-basket and re-filed at the back of the monthlies, to represent November a year from now.

This is a “perpetual” file - at any time it has files for the next 31 days and the next twelve months.

How It’s Used Documents, notes, reminders of all sorts can be directly filed to automatically trigger action and/or review when needed, without loading up daily planners or getting lost in miscellaneous storage.

If you want to be reminded to handle something in the future, but don’t want or need to think about it until then, it can be “tickled” to show up exactly on the day or month you’d like to see it again.

The advantage of using file folders (instead of the old sales tickler system of index cards or even your calendar) is the ability to store the whole document or piece directly into the file (the actual form that needs to be filled out, the memo that needs reviewing then, the telephone note that needs action on a specific date, etc.)

The Tickler File – by David Allen


Some Sample Uses1. Regular reports that need to be done on a standard cycle, e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly. Put a “dummy” or blank form in

the file for the day/ month it needs to be handled, and continue to re-file it as a reminder for the next one. Status reports, evaluations, payroll taxes, etc.

2. Contact follow-up that should be acted upon after a certain period of time but which don’t need tracking until then. Calling a prospect after their fiscal year begins, requesting feedback after someone has had time to review a product or materials, calling someone after they’re going to return from trip, etc. ·

3. Reminders to do regular activities, such as: set / review goals, wax car, review someone’s performance, call a relative, clean files, back up computer data

4. Track cyclical financial matters, such as: pay rent, do taxes (file your 1040 in “January”), prepare statements, review assets, review investments

5. Manage cash flow. Tickle bills to pay for appropriate time periods (maximize cash flow, prevent overdrafts, etc.)

6. Review “maybe” actions. For instance, you may get a direct mail ad for something you might want, but cant decide about right now. Tickle the ad in our file to show up a week later, when you might be clearer about it (or for when you think you can more afford it!)

7. Follow up on delegated actions.

8. Ensure follow-up on orders/requests through the mail. (If it says “six weeks for delivery”, tickle a note [or the catalog, or ad] for review when you’d want to check on it, if it hasn’t been received).

9. Manage work flow. This is particularly useful if a special project needs all of your attention, or if you’re going out of town. Determine the next functional day you can be available to handle “regular stuff” at your desk; and empty your tickler file in your in-basket up to that date. Then review all of the papers, notes and to-dos on your plate. Everything that can wait until that future date you’ll tickle in that file, to show up after you can return to your normal routine. Everything that can’t wait should be put in front of you and handled now before you start on the project or leave town.

10. Storing tickets for concerts, theater, etc. Tickle them for the day before you need them, so you can then have them with you. In the same way tickle flyers for events that have directions, instructions, etc.

11. Ensure periodic enjoyment from inspirational writings, jokes, or whatever you’d like to see again. In general, use it for everything that inspires you to say “I’d like to be reminded of that again” but you don’t have a place to put it.

12. Reminders of birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Tickle for appropriate lead-time to get cards, presents, arrangements made.

13. Reminders of warranty expirations. Tickle for lead-time to get covered services and repairs if needed.


[Slice of life: some real things in my tickler file --DA] - Amtrak ticket for the day I need it - Web printout of a piece of software I might want - don’t want to decide about it for a couple of weeks - Fax of program agenda and directions for a seminar I’m conducting - Inspirational pamphlet (to read monthly) - Hotel confirmation fax - Store receipt for an item shipped home from another city - Confirmation letter of closing an automatically billed account (Checkfree) until next statement to verify - Inspirational postcard I wrote myself from a spiritual retreat - One-year reminder about from when I started wearing arch supports (manufacturer suggest getting refitted yearly) - Agenda for a meeting which includes a speech I’m giving - Stuff I don’t have time to deal with until I’m back from my next trip - Workbook to edit, for 3 weeks ahead of the next seminar, for capturing all the edits between now and then - Canadian money for the day I’m leaving for trip to Canada - A letter and brochure about a book in which I’ve contributed a chapter, announcing it’s launch several months from now

In order for this system to work...

1. Keep it updated every day. If you let it slide and forget to empty the file every day, then you won’t trust the system to handle important data. You’ll then have to manage those things some other way, and the tickler file will turn out to be more of a nuisance than a help. If you leave town (or don’t access the file on the weekend) then you must keep it reviewed ahead of those days. Some people prefer to have secretaries or assistants maintain this file for them.

2. Don’t store data or documents here which you or others may need access before the date filed. Tickle a copy, or a note saying “pull the X file” when you want to see the material again.


Set up on October 5

OCTOBERSEPTEMBERAUGUSTJULY

JUNEMAY

APRILMARCH

FEBRUARYJANUARY

DECEMBER5

43

21

NOVEMBER31

3029

2827

2625

2423

2221

2019

1817

1615

1413

1211

109

87

6



You can’t manage time. Time just is. You don’t mismanage five minutes and wind up with four, or six. So what is this thing that has been mislabeled for so many years, and why did it get an inappropriate name? Time management is really managing what we do, during time. But it’s easier for executives to say that time is what needs to be managed, rather than themselves. It’s easier to make time the enemy and parade our worthiness (I have so many big, important things to get done), rather than to say “I don’t keep my agreements.”

Time management is really agreement management. At the end of the day, how good you feel about what you did (and what you didn’t do) is proportional to how well you think you kept agreements with yourself. Did you do what you told yourself to do? Did you accomplish what you think should have been accomplished? Wasting time only means that you think you should have been doing something other than what you were doing. Sleep is not a waste of time if you think you need it. Taking a walk instead of rewriting your strategic plan is not a waste of time as long as you think taking a walk is the thing to do at that moment. It’s when you wind up not having done that which you’ve agreed with yourself should be done that the trouble begins.

A trait of sophisticated executive leadership is the ability to take risks. Because a healthy sense of self is required to take those risks, as you graduate in levels of responsibility it becomes increasingly important that you trust yourself. One of the greatest saboteurs of that self-trust is broken agreements. Obviously if those agreements are not kept with others – staff, customers, stakeholders – the ability to garner their support is automatically diminished. But the real victim of commitments unfulfilled is you. Nothing takes the wind out of your sails more than not keeping your agreements with yourself.

Most executives probably consider themselves relatively trustworthy. But commitment management is way more complex, subtle, and challenging than most people realize. In order to really be in the clear, you must first know what all your agreements are – and there are very few people who have them all defined and contained.

The most basic agreement is to show up at a designated location at a specific time (appointment). The most subtle and sophisticated agreement is to be doing what you think you should be doing with your life (are you fulfilling your purpose, living according to your values?) And there are all kinds of agreements lying in-between. Most executives have between forty and one hundred projects, a “project” being defined as something they want to finish that requires more than one action step (get a new car, hire an assistant, take the family skiing, launch the new product line, restructure their board, get a new set of golf clubs, etc.) Those projects are driven by ten to fifteen key areas of responsibility in their job (strategic planning, asset management, staff development, liaison with the board, etc.) and in their life (health, relationships, career, money, etc.) Add to that the responsibility of defining and communicating the vision of the company and formulating and executing both the long- and short-term strategies to get there. Moreover you can’t really do any of those things – they represent outcomes and final results. The next needed physical actions (allocation of personal resources) required to execute on all of those commitments – emails to send, phone calls to make, conversations to have, documents to draft, proposals to read – number often in the hundreds.

Time Management - What’s the Real Issue? – by David Allen


All of these agreements must be incorporated into the commonly touted best practice of “setting priorities.” And if any one of those multiple horizons of “work” has not been adequately captured, clarified, organized and reviewed, there will be to some degree a lack of trust in your own behavior.

Because this huge self-management challenge was obscured and oversimplified with the concept of “time management,” the training, methods and tools for dealing with it have been woefully inadequate. If time were the only beast to be tamed, a clock and a diary (and some efficiency) were all you really needed. Handling commitments was relegated to a simple little best practice – have a daily to-do list. But that hasn’t really worked since the telephone, and to reduce the management of the complexity of the world within which we operate at multiple levels of focus and responsibility down to a simple “ABC” categorization of a simple list for the day creates more frustration than freedom.

The real best practices of self-management for high-performing professionals now need to include a thorough capturing and clarifying of all commitments – little, big, personal and professional – into a seamless system. And in addition to the obvious high-level outcomes that must be defined and reviewed (purpose, values, vision, goals, strategies) there must be an equal rigor with deciding and tracking the much larger number of projects and actions required to get things done – all with appropriate boundaries to ensure a sustainable balance in life and work. The degree to which you feel good about what you’re doing is equal to the degree that you know what you’re not doing, and have made that OK. That’s enough of an executive challenge. It’s time to put time management behind us.



Q&A’s with David AllenQuestions:

While on vacation, how do you juggle work and play? How much time should you allot each day of your vacation to reading business email, checking up on projects, etc.? What’s the best balance of work and play? When is the best time of the day to spend on work? What organizational tools should you always bring along on your vacation?

David’s answers:

My main purpose for a vacation is to change pace and environment to refresh perspectives and energies. Things that support that are on purpose. Things that don’t, aren’t. I like to think of vacation as re-creation, i.e. an opportunity to shift gears and balance my activity and focus mix (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, social, relationships, family, etc.) If I’ve been spending a lot of energy thinking, writing, and speaking, then I want to spend some time getting physical--going for walks, exploring, swimming, jogging, etc. If I’ve been engaged in lots of physical work, then I want to read adventure novels, do some creative writing, and just hang out and socialize. Sometimes, when I’ve really been in the turbo fast lane for a while, I just like to do nothing, with a vengeance!

The main thing I want to keep on a vacation is a clear head--lack of distraction. That should be the criterion for how much of what kind of “work” to take with me or to stay connected and current with. If I’m lying on the beach and I keep thinking about what’s in voicemail or email, then I’d better check it so I can tan with a clear head. There’s a fine line, though, between checking in with the office to stay clear, and checking in with the office as an addiction or comfort zone of the pressure and pace of professional engagement. Because most people have some version of that habit, I would suggest erring toward the unplugged side of the equation. But if you must, to keep a clear deck, then of course do them as soon as you can in the day so that all those things can be put to bed early.

Many times we actually can afford to take off for mini-vacations, not constrained to “be in the office”, simply because we have the ability to be in touch from wherever, handling the necessities of our commitments with our clients and companies. Complaining about “having to do work” in those situations is a bit absurd. I have made business calls from my sailboat, so that I could actually go out sailing all day. You do as much as you need to do, to be able to keep doing what you’re doing!

Some specific suggestions:

1. The last place in the world to have a thought twice is on vacation. That’s why you should always have at least a low-tech “capture” kind of tool with you, even in the most remote places, doing the most remote things. I have a small wallet for credit cards and driver’s license that also has a tiny notepad and pen. I may not process the note (decide actions and input information) until I’m back in the groove, but the potential value that the thought might add is not lost. I also travel with a file folder or large envelope labeled “IN” for tossing notes, business cards, receipts, etc. for dealing with back at the office. The

Managing Work on a Vacation


more senior and sophisticated your professional roles, the more likely your best thoughts about work won’t happen at work! They may happen on the vacation. And invariably people meet others to expand their network, and get new ideas and good information while socializing. And if you’re traveling it’s great to keep track of places to go, things to do, in case you want to go there again. If a key benefit of recreation is to get a fresh perspective, then protect your investment and be ready to take advantage of it’s outputs.

2. It is common sense to do your best before you start a vacation to catch up, clean up, and get proactive and current in all your work-related agreements and commitments, handling all the details in plenty of time. Be sure that you identify “Vacation” as a project as soon as it’s on your radar, and that you continue to define and complete all the action steps as soon as they can be done. Too many people need half their vacation to recover from the last two days before they leave!

3. If you have support and admin staff, give them relevant contact information and clarify what might constitute an “emergency” ahead of time to use it, and allow them to filter all communications.

4. Block out at least a full day or two on your calendar for catching up when you return. It is just shy of stupid to not prepare ahead of time for the invariable accumulated pile of details to adjudicate.

In conclusion, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about being involved with professional things on a vacation. It all depends on the many variables in your situation. But the assumption that work and fun are mutually exclusive is not a healthy one. If you have to have a vacation because your job is too stressful or no fun, you might want to change jobs, career, or your mindset about it all.


©David Allen & Company 2002-2006. All rights reserved. www.davidallengtd.com page �

DavidAllen

The Weekly Review

So, OK folks, this may seem like more hokey stuff-I-should-do-but-never-do stuff. Honestly, this is what I do to keep myself sane and in control. This is not theoretical or out of some book. This is literally, blow-by-blow, what I do at least once a week. It is the one factor upon which your success with Mind Like Water technology hinges. Do it, it lives and grows. Don’t do it, it dies. If you don’t yet have this habit, then I recommend that you insert into your calendar for the next four Friday’s--”do weekly review”. Review this for the first couple of weeks, and then it will probably become second nature to you. I suggest, also, that you consider creating your own customized weekly review checklist with reminders that are unique to your life. I keep my own personal Weekly Review as a list in my Treo so I can remind myself of what I need to think about to get to a clean slate. - DA

This is the critical behavior to make personal organization a vital, dynamic reality, and for fully implementing the Action to Outcome method. A great time to do it is early Friday afternoon, as it will invariably surface small actions which could get completed if you can catch people still at work.

Collect Loose Papers and MaterialsGather all accumulated business cards, receipts, and miscellaneous paper-based materials into your in-basket.

Get “IN” to zeroProcess completely all outstanding paper materials, journal and meeting notes, voicemails, dictation, and e-mails.

Empty Your HeadPut in writing and process any uncaptured new projects, action items, waiting-for’s, someday-maybe’s, etc.

Review Action ListsMark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to record.

Review Previous Calendar DataReview past calendar in detail for remaining action items, reference data, etc., and transfer into the active system.

Review Upcoming Calendar Review upcoming calendar events - long and short term. Capture actions triggered.

Review Waiting-For ListRecord appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received ones.

©David Allen & Company 2002-2006. All rights reserved. www.davidallengtd.com page �

DavidAllen

Review Project (and Larger Outcome) ListsEvaluate status of projects, goals and outcomes, one by one, ensuring at least one current action item on each. Browse through project plans, support material & any other work-in-progress material to trigger new actions, completions, waiting-for’s, etc.

Review Any Relevant ChecklistsUse as a trigger for any new actions.

Review Someday/Maybe ListReview for any projects which may now have become active, and transfer to “Projects.” Delete items no longer of interest.

Be Creative & CourageousAny new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas to add into your system???

ps: Here’s an email that I got from someone who was implementing this process. It might be useful for some of you, just beginning to build in the review as a regular habit... DA

“I have a suggestion to pass on to those adding the weekly review process to their personal organizational strategy. Be patient and keep trying! My inboxes at home and at work, as well as my other input channels like notes and e-mail, were out of control for so long that I’m still going through and cleaning them out to make them manageable - and I took the seminar in early October! Being a single mother who works fulltime I also get more interruptions than I get even small blocks of time to concentrate, but I’m not giving up. I know that David does counsel patience, but I can say from personal experience that this is crucial to having success with the process. So remind new weekly reviewers to keep at it, as it may take several tries to get all the way through and then get it the the point where it’s manageable. Putting these strategies to work for me have helped immensely.” - Ginny @ MIT

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