Tools for Thought

Our priorities are based on our time frames. When we eat an ice cream, we’ve made short-term enjoyment a priority over long-term health and vitality. When we postpone dinner with family and stay late at the office to complete a project, we’re making another priority choice. These may or may not be the right priorities, depending on their context and personal values. To keep our priorities congruent with our values, at helps to categorize them by levels of focus.

To clarify the impact and implications of your actions and projects, review them against your horizons of focus.

Horizontal and Vertical Focus

From moment to moment, we make choices of what to do and what not to do. The total impact of our lives is the sum of these choices. Each completed action satisfies some need in a broader context. Mundane tasks, like shopping, satisfy subsistence needs, contributing to your overall health. Researching a car purchase has implications for the image you project, and the transportation necessary to support yourself and your family. When we write down, think about or review discrete actions like grocery shopping or reading “Consumer Reports,” we are employing horizontal focus.

Horizontal focus refers to anything on the level of actions: errands, reading, phone calls, face-to-face conversations, purchases, drafts, email and so on. We need horizontal focus — it’s the level of practicality that turns visionary aspirations into visible pathmarks. We need the single step that gets the thousand mile journey out of our heads and onto the earth.

Horizontal focus is necessary but not sufficient. Particularly in the wage earning service sector, routine often prevents workers from looking beyond an immediate task, and they wind up spinning their wheels, being busy without being productive in a purposeful sense. Even many professional workers have trouble escaping the busy trap. A single action, like writing an email, consumes more time and attention than the overall value it adds in the scheme of things.

Vertical focus is the scheme of things. Here we add perspective to our action choices. In GTD, we look vertically at five horizons of focus, using altitude metaphors:

1. Runway: Next Actions — the immediate tasks we need to track to move a project forward
2. 10,000 feet: Projects — any outcome that takes more than one action step to accomplish
3. 20,000 feet: Areas of Focus — the aspects of our lives that need to be reviewed for balance
4. 30,000 feet: Short-Term Goals — outcomes that we intend to accomplish within 1 to 2 years
5. 40,000 feet: Lifestyle Goals — the long-term vision (5 years and beyond) of our ideal lifestyle
6. 50,000 feet: Life Purpose — the impact we would like to have on the world

If it’s not obvious, the specific timelines of the time-based horizons are somewhat arbitrary. We can think of a three-year goal as 30,000 feet, and it’s possible to realize at least some aspects of our ideal lifestyle in less than 5 years. Some people will quibble about the scope of “projects” encompassing everything from getting a round of venture capital to buying a sofa. Some people organize their life planning into quarterly goals. Use the time frames that make sense to you, in the language that make sense to you.

Runway and 10,000-foot levels have been discussed previously as Outcome and Action. Notice that two of the horizons in the list above are not part of a timeline. For the 20,000-foot level, areas of focus (not to be confused with horizons of focus), we list and examine the categories of our lives that matter to use. For instance:

• Marriage and family
• Finance
• Health and fitness
• Friendships
• Career goals
• Fun and recreation
• Creative expression
• Politics and community

These focus areas will vary from person to person — some people aren’t involved in politics and community, for instance — so it’s important to choose the values that truly matter to you personally; don’t just inherit someone else’s platitudes.

The value in constructing the focus areas list is that you can use it to make sure that you have at least something on your project list that represents fulfillment in each of these areas. You can use it during the weekly review to ensure that your project list is reasonably well balanced. You don’t want to fill your idle time with work just because you didn’t take fun seriously enough to incorporate it into your system. Look at each area and ask yourself if there are any projects, process projects or someday/maybes that still need to be captured.

The 50,000-foot level, raises an existential question, “What is my purpose here on the planet?”, that some people can answer with enviable clarity. For most of us, it’s a question we have to revisit periodically, answering it with intuition that grows more articulate over time through engagement and experience.

If necessary, reframe the question in a way you may find more answerable: “What impact would I like to have on the world?”, “What value do I have to offer?”, “What would be the most fulfilling expression of my life energy?”, “What is the legacy I would like to leave?”, and so on. When in doubt, think of the most reasonable, honest answer you can, even if you sense that it’s incomplete on some level, and put that down as your working 50,000-foot purpose; then examine it against your other horizons of focus and see they’re in accord, adjusting if necessary.