Tools for Thought

Consider the initial steps in the GTD in-basket processing:

1. Pick up item from In
2. Ask, “What is it?”
3. Ask, “Is it actionable?”
4. [If yes] Ask, “What’s the successful outcome?”
5. Ask, “What’s the next action?”

In my opinion, there’s a glaring ommission in the algorithm, one that leads to overpopulated project and action lists. After asking, “What’s the next action?”, we should ask, “Do I want or need to act on it?”

Perhaps that’s implied when asking if something is actionable, but that’s hardly a forgone conclusion. The ability to rapidly determine the critical path to an outcome does not automatically endow someone with the ability to decide that the outcome is worth the time and effort necessary to achieve it. The skill of parsing equivocal intentions into clear outcomes and action steps needs to be filtered by good judgement.

In the standard workflow diagram, inputs are only explicitly discarded when they’re not actionable; otherwise they’re delegated or deferred. The Someday/Maybe list becomes a junk drawer for things that could be acted on, but aren’t priorities. We need some point in the decision tree that asks if we need to keep a certain items at all.

Strategic Questioning

The most strategic place to ask “Should I act on this?” is after determining the next action. Then you have enough data to make an informed judgement. If you habitually discard inputs prior to processing them, you risk thinking about them again and again. A moment of processing on the front end can save extra cycles downstream.

For instance, if there’s a piece of software that looks potentially worthwhile, I’ll spend a maximum of two minutes reading a summary of its features and viewing screenshots, then intuitively decide whether or not it’s worth invesigating further. In most cases, I conclude that it the application doesn’t provide enough return on effort, so I drop any further consideration of it — it’s out of my head and out of my system once and for all.

If I do decide that it’s worth further investigation, I’ll print out any reading on it that’s longer than two minutes for my Read/Review folder, or write down “Install X” as a next action. If the installation takes less than two minutes (e.g. Firefox extensions), I’ll install without writing the action down, but I do write “Test X” to prevent downloading things without trying them. I want to either adopt or uninstall it as soon as possible.

The worst thing you can do is respond to an input with “that’s interesting,” without reaching a conclusion on it. Is it interesting enough to spend time on? Does “interesting” mean important? When we allow things that attract our attention hover in our psyche indefinitely, their meaning to us diminishes. It becomes like watching television, where a political candidate and a brand of soap are given equal treatment between shows. Consciously decide on the meaning of everything that enters your life, and it becomes easier to consciously live a meaningful life.