Tools for Thought

In response to my last post, one reader, Tommy, took issue with a couple of points I raised. I’ll let my response to his stand for the most part, but in re-reading one of his objections I realized that some of the wording of my original post was misleading. I wrote “Why put an action on your list or calendar if you’re not going to do it?”, to which Tommy asked, “how can you at the point of thinking about something know if you’ll do this in the future or not? Can you see into the future?”

What I should have written in the original was: Why put it down on an action list if you know you’re not committed to taking action on it? By “you’re not going to do it” I meant “you’re not confident that you’ll get to it.” The reason I’m being pedantic about this is that it has serious implications for how I believe we should relate to our lists. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this list integrity.

Suppose someone organizes his lists by context. Suppose further that he carries a notebook wherever he goes, using it mainly as a capture tool. A some point he decides to write a novel, so he puts “Draft novel outline” on your @Anywhere list, when in fact he does all of his creative writing at the computer.

Technically, the recorded context is legitimate, since he really could draft his outline on paper. Theoretically, the notebook might even be a more appropriate context, since he can work anywhere, anytime. But if he knows deep down that he’s more willing and likely to write at a computer, he’ll gloss over the item what he looks at his @Anywhere list. It would be more strategic for him to put it on his @Computer list. The more writing tasks he puts on his @Anywhere list that he would rather do at the computer, the less responsive he becomes to that list. His conceptual categories don’t match his behavioral realities.

Categorizing Committed and Uncommitted Actions

Whenever I do a weekly review, I invariably put things on my lists that in hindsight were unrealistic. Last week I intended to review a book that I had mixed feelings about, and couldn’t come to an internal consensus on it. The moment I recognized my ambivalence, I moved the review from Projects to Someday/Maybe for it to incubate (I wasn’t being paid, so no editors were harmed by my laziness). I reevaluate my commitments all the time. When I see something on an action list that elicits a lack of resolution, I’ll do one of the following:

• Decide that the action was either folly or past its timing, and remove it from the list
• Recognize that the action is unclear in some way, and debug it (e.g. not granular enough, poorly worded, wrong context, has an unarticulated dependency, etc.)
• Hand it off to someone more qualified (e.g. a tax advisor)
• Move it to my Someday/Maybe list

Just as putting non-actionable items on an action list makes the whole list less actionable, a similar phenonenon happens by putting uncommitted actions with genuine action items: it reduces the integrity of the list. Reserve your action lists for things you intend to take action on as soon as possible. “As soon as possible” might end up being three weeks from now. After all, we can’t do everything at once, nor we can’t see into the future. But if you sense that you’re resisting the action, it’s time to reevaluate, eliminate or renegotiate it.

Someday/Maybe

Everything I’ve said above is useless without a Someday/Maybe list that you take as seriously as your other lists. Someday/Maybe tends to be underutilized, since many people think of it as a procrastination list, but you can’t procrastinate on something you’ve decided not to take action on. But if you put something on an action list, then resist following through on it, that’s procrastination. If you suspect you’ll think about something again if you eliminate it from your system, use Someday/Maybe to track it and keep it out of your head.

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