Tools for Thought

“Do it now!” is often good advice, but depending on what needs to be done, now is not necessarily the most strategic action choice. Many times we prioritize our reactions to information based on how recently it entered our world, or how much emotional charge it carries. Acting on any intention the moment it occurs may even be a form of procrastination when priorities are taken into account. We want to do better than react to latest-and-loudest.

A task can be done, delegated or deferred. Since we can only do one thing at a time, but often think of more things faster than we can act on them, the discipline of collecting and processing any thought other than the one thing we’re actively doing is the master key to maintaining focus. Trying to keep one thing in mind while working on another inevitably compromises one of the two. Attention is diverted from the active task in the effort to hold the unrelated information in short-term memory — “mental RAM.”

There’s no way to do everything at once. There’s no way to do even more than one thing at once. What’s usually called multitasking is actually rapid switching between single tasks. Juggling rote tasks doesn’t consume mental RAM, but as soon as one task requires concentration, it becomes essential to eliminate secondary tasks to prevent the overhead of regrouping.

As soon as a new thought occurs that’s not immediately actionable or applicable to what you’re currently doing, write it down. Then process what you’ve collected by deciding if there’s any action required on it, and if so, identify the successful outcome and the next action. Otherwise, decide if it’s just a thought you can scrap or stage for review at a later date.

There are four placeholders, or “buckets” for deferring work in a trusted task management system:

• A Next Actions list for tasks with no time dependencies
• A calendar for hard landscape items that are time dependent
• A Someday/Maybe list, if it’s a potential project with no commitment on, except for evaluating in a Weekly Review
• A tickler file for items to review at a later date, but not during a Weekly Review

Anyone implementing a thorough GTD system will review next actions, the calendar and the Someday/Maybe list at least once a week during a scheduled self-consulting session called a Weekly Review, which will be discussed later in this series. The tickler file defers an item until a specific date, at which time it goes into the intray for processing.

Determining the appropriate placeholder for each processed item, as well as filing non-actionable reference material, is know as the organizing phase, following the collecting and processing phases.