Tools for Thought

A key concept in the Getting Things Done method is maintaining a strict separation between actionable and non-actionable items. “Anytime you blend actionable and non-actionable things into one area,” David Allen notes in his Getting Things Done…Fast seminar recordings, “you go numb to the area.” This is why GTD refers to “Next Action” lists rather than To Do lists. One of the problems with To Do lists is that they don’t filter action items by context. If you’re at work, looking at a list that includes tasks that can only be done at home reduces the list’s effectiveness as a focus tool. The goal in GTD is to intelligently dumb down a list so that you don’t have to mentally re-sort what can and can’t be done each time you look at it. An @Computer list should only have items that can be done at the computer, not the errands to done when you’re out. You don’t need to think about what to do next if you’ve already thought about it (conclusively), then look at the results of that thinking when it’s time to act.

But sometimes there’s another level of actionability within a context. You may be at a computer, but some items require internet access, others don’t. The usual recommendation to handle this split is to create another list, something like @Computer-Online. The problem I had with this approach is that while it works great in theory, I always found that in practice, I never remembered to look at both lists. Something in my brain insisted on a “one context-one list” policy. Or I was just lazy. I believe it’s more reliable to design systems that factor in laziness than to depend to exceptional discipline, which, after all, is exceptional.

One day at work I was getting tired of having to sort though two dozen items in my @Office list just to find the work-related phone calls (in GTD, if a call needs to be made from the office, it goes on the @Office list rather than the @Calls list, which are for calls that can be made from any phone). So I started using a feature on the Palm Desktop I never used before on my task list items: priority codes. Palm uses a numeric assignments from 1 to 5 to designate priorities in descending order, but my intention was not to use this feature to actually establish priorities. The object was to group similar tasks by the same numerical assignment, so they would block together on the list.

So in the above example, I assigned a priority code of 2 to all of my @Office phone calls. Since items not manually assigned a code are priority 1 by default, the 2 items automatically got thrown to the bottom of the @Office list. I could now see all of my @Office calls in one glance, without having to create a separate @Calls-Office list and actually remember to look at it. I can see the entire list of things at work to do next, but still have a fast track to seeing which calls still need to made.

The @Computer-Online list never worked for me. I had a bias toward that list, and wound up “forgetting” my offline @Computer list — which, it just so happens, often contained the more labor-intensive, higher-yield activities, like writing and project planning. So I assigned the items that required connectivity a 2 priority. Again, I could see my entire @Computer list, but now my eyes naturally scanned down the offine actions first. It really helps to have the offline options in front of your face when you’re in a cafe without wireless. It also makes the entire list more readable, because even though it’s technically one list, the online-offline actions are effectively separated, making it unnecessary to scan down each item to reassess whether or not its genuinely actionable.

I also segment my Project list into two categories: writing and everything else. Since writing pays the bills, those projects are the open loops I need to track in between weekly reviews.

A couple of warnings. First, add priority assignments on the Palm Desktop, not on the handheld. When you add them on your Treo, for example, the number gets assigned correctly, but the positioning is often not maintained. If you want to add a 2 priority item on the handheld, for some reason, you have to scroll to the bottom of the list and add it as the last item. Since I do most of my collection on paper and process what I’ve collected at the desktop for synchronizing with the handheld, I don’t have worry about reordering items.

Second, the goal of this technique is refining context classification, not prioritization. Since priority codes are assigned in descending order, you would have to manually assign a number to every task that wasn’t a top priority. There are other reasons for avoiding list prioritization that have more to do with GTD methodology. Read Getting Things Done for David Allen’s take on prioritized lists.

I’ve also learned the hard way that it’s easy to get carried away with grouping tasks together using this method. I used to have my @Anywhere list sorted by items that could I could literally do anywhere (e.g. on the Treo or in the Moleskine), and those that were fairly accessible (e.g. reading a book that was either on my person or in my car). That was more trouble than it was worth. There’s no need to fear overengineering a system if you have no hesitation about reversing course.