Tools for Thought

For any task management system to be trustworthy, it has to be realistic. It needs to have as few placeholders as possible, but no fewer. It needs to hold as many projects and actions as we’re genuinely committed to, but no more.

The discipline of rapidly capturing new inputs and processing them into a list or calendar needs to be matched with an equally important discipline: the ability to review and reevaluate whether or not a to-do is worth doing. We need to be willing and able to take things off a list as rapidly as we put them on.

Reviewing projects and actions contains a paradox. To give reviews the full attention they need to get everything off of our minds, we need to be willing to step into the eye of the storm and escape the busy trap. That means sacrificing time that might otherwise be spend doing some of the things we’re reviewing. But it also means that while we’re “idle,” everything seems doable, and it becomes easy to confuse overpopulating an action list with “total capture.”

For most of us, a list of 35 things to do at a computer is not realistic — not in the sense that they can’t be done, but in the sense that it’s unlikely that the entire list will be scanned with full attention. Having an action list with more items than we can practically review defeats the purpose of making it in the first place. If we gloss over half the list every time we look at it, then we’re implicitly keeping half the list in our heads, even if it’s on paper.

An action list should hold commitments, not shoulds. If the list heading indicates that the items on it should be done, but the list contains items that we realistically know won’t be done, we experience cognitive dissonance. We not only become less responsive to those particular items on list, but the integrity of the entire list is nullified, and we grow numb to the list as a whole. At that point, the list is no longer a functional tool, but simply extra work, which is why people become cynical about lists.

The obvious way to reconcile the dissonance is to follow through on actually doing what we’ve written down. There’s no need to labor the point. But sometimes the best way to manage a list is to do what’s on it.

Another way of following through on our commitments is to cancel the commitments that won’t realistically be fulfilled. Only experience and intuition can effectively discern whether or not a commitment is realistic. Managing agreements necessarily requires a level of personal judgment that can’t be systematized, however much productivity geeks would prefer otherwise.

The other option is to put should-be-done and could-be-done items in an appropriately labelled category. In GTD this list is called Someday/Maybe, but whatever it’s called, the point is to put de facto uncommitted actions in a category that matches how the mind actually relates to them rather than how it’s supposed to.

A next actions list is not a capture tool. With some tasks, it’s obvious that they need to get done, so putting those on an action list is more efficient than capturing them on a notepad first. But others require more reflection.

Separating the capturing and organizing phases of task management allows space for more contemplative processing. We can jot a note, throw it in our in-basket, then process it at an appropriate time — which may or may not be at the moment the note was taken. Having a buffer between capturing and organizing (i.e. listing, scheduling, filing) gives us the opportunity to think about whether or not something is worth doing.

Finally, having the habit of regularly reviewing all action lists gives us another opportunity to prune our lists. Just because something seemed like a good idea at the time we put it on a list doesn’t mean it will seem like it’s worth doing 24 hours later — or even an hour later. Review your lists and calendar once a day — before or after processing your email, voice mail and intray — and eliminate or defer any items that don’t mesh with your current reality.