I still see errors and omissions in the series, so I’m still editing the content for a later revision, but in the meantime, please feel free to download and distribute the existing copies at will. The PDF is a beautifully formatted 2-column version, and the RTF is equally well formatted, complete with clickable links. Mr. Fuller went above and beyond the call of duty here, and I can thank him enough.

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But sometimes we need to approach a problem or a project in a new way, even at the expense of efficiency. Instead of pursuing the first idea that occurs to us, we need to open up our menu of options.

To brainstorm on a problem, capture the obvious solutions first, then allocate a period of time to think of as many alternative solutions as possible without judging them. Then reexamine all solutions.

A good time period to start with is three minutes. Within the three minutes, continue to generate alternatives, even if — especially if — you come up with a good solution well before the time period ends. Use all of the time you’ve allocated. You can pick shorter periods or longer periods. But shorter periods tend not to be long enough to think of many new approaches. Longer periods, like 30 minutes, will tend to yield mostly minor variations on few fundamentally different approaches.

An Example

Someone want to cancel his cell phone account due to poor coverage and poor customer service, but he’s still under contract and would have to pay an early termination fee. The obvious options would be:

• Cancel and pay the fee
• Wait for the contract to expire

Then he lists some alternatives, without worrying about whether or not they’re usable. They may not be usable in the form they’re first expressed, but might be with some modification. In any case, he forges ahead:

• Demand unlimited roaming, threatening to cancel if not honored
• Downgrade to the carrier’s cheapest plan, porting his main number to a new carrier
• See if the charges can be expensed by his company for the remainder of the contract, using a new phone and carrier for personal calls
• Call CS and answer “no” when asked if he’s satisfied with his service

None of these are particularly sound alternatives, but they may lead to a creative accommodation. Let’s look at the second example: downgrading. He might currently be paying $60 a month on his current plan. He finds that he can get a bare bones plan (100 minutes per month, no text messing, etc.) for $20. Doing some research, he discovers that another carrier is offering a plan for $40 a month that’s nearly identical to the $60 plan he signed up for 10 months ago. So he adds the second carrier, using their line for his primary phone (with or without number portability), then dumps the unwanted carrier when the contract expires. He might even be able to combine that alternative with the third one — getting one of the lines expensed by his company.

In the fourth example, he can either make a call to customer service on some routine pretext, or use the first option, demanding unlimited roaming. At the end of the call, when he’s asked if he’s satisfied with his service, he tells the representive that he’s not. In many cases, negative feedback gets escalated, and someone in management calls back the customer to see if there’s some way to improve the situation.

He may end up opting for the obvious approaches, but by brainstorming he now has three times as many options as before, none of which are exclusive. Any of these approaches can be further examined for improvement opportunities: What would it take to make this solution work?

Brainstorming for Problems

Sometimes the difficulty in solving a problem lies in how we’ve defined “the” problem. Framing a problem a certain way frames the array of potential solutions. Someone wants to reduce her fast food consumption. Alternative problem definitions might be:

• Finding more time to cook at home
• Finding meals that are quick to prepare
• Becoming more proficient at cooking
• Ordering fast food in smaller sizes and quantities
• Transitioning to a diet low in sodium, fat, carbohydrates, etc.
• Minimizing or avoiding exposure to fast food venues

She expands way she defines the problem first, creating alternative problems, then takes each or any one or these and brainstorms alternative solutions.

Just because we think of a problem or solution in a certain way first doesn’t make it the best way. By generating alternatives, we create a broader context for deciding the best course of action. If the first, obvious approach turns out to be the best one, we’ve lost nothing by thinking beyond it.

Free Association

In addition to generating alternatives, we may need to simply capture aspects of a problem to make sure that our attention has covered a sufficiently broad scope. Several diagramming options like mind maps are applicable, but in many cases all that’s required is a simple checklist. Applying checklists to the fast food example:

• saving money
• eating less
• cooking
• health
• meal times
• exercise
• menu options
• convenience
• appetite
• habit

And so on. Any of these considerations can be expanded into its own checklist. An outliner, like OmniOutliner or Microsoft Word’s Outline View, provides a good structure for nested checklists: lists can be expanded, collapsed and reordered. As with brainstorming, define a time interval to generate considerations, and keep free associating until you reach the end of that period.

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.

We can also batch our discussions with individuals. Instead of walking over to a coworker’s desk every time we come across an issue that needs to be discussed, we can take a moment to evaluate the urgency of the matter, and in the likely event that it’s actually not an emergency, batch it in a running track of issues that accumulate during the day.

Create a list called Agendas, with the names of everyone with whom you need to discuss non-emergency issues, then list the topics within each of those entries

Agendas is another list among the others to track in your system: Next Actions (Context Lists), Projects, Waiting For and Someday/Maybe. While the latter ones are flat lists, the Agendas list is nested. In an electronic organizer, each person’s name is a line item in Agendas, and each line item has a note attachment, within which the issues are added.

If you maintain a list with only a few people, an alternative to a nested list is simply having a separate flat list for each individual — @John, @Susan, etc. — then make each issue a line item. This is a good way to manage agendas if you’re using a paper-based system. Depending on the nature of your work, it may be a better idea to use an Agendas folder instead of just a list. This allows you to have any support documents relevant to the conversations right at hand.

Potential Problems

Beware. When batching several topics into one conversation, the other person — not accustomed to consolidated discussions — may dislike the perceived additional time it takes. Despite the obvious fact that interrupting someone 12 times a day takes more time than handling 12 topics in one sitting, many people are so used to asking and answering question at a time that an agendas list will seem like a burden.

Just because you have all topics in one list doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to cross everything off the list in a single discussion. There’s a point of diminishing returns where efficiency and effectiveness diverge. You may only get to work off a few topics at a time before the other person has to return or move on to some other task. Pick the highest priority items on the list that you can fit in his or her window of time, and do the best you can.

In some cases, all you have to do is point out the advantage of handling everything at once: “I could see that you were busy, and I didn’t want to keep interrupting you, so I decided to these things until we both had time to talk.”

Finally, reevaluate your list, and see if there aren’t some items where another communication channel might be better suited, like IM, email, Twitter or a wiki — especially for status updates. The less interaction you need, the better the chances are that using these media would be a less time consuming and disruptive way to keep people in the loop.

The object of the weekly review is to batch our thinking about everything we have to do during the week into a single session. Then during the week, we work off of the calendar and action lists that hold the results of that thinking. If the calendar and lists go unreviewed during the week, the purpose of having them is defeated. Not only do we need to remind ourselves of what to do each day; we also need to reevaluate what not to do, and remove, defer or delegate it.

To keep your system current, schedule a Daily Review, in which you:

1. Process your intray, email inbox and voice mail
2. Do a mind sweep
3. Review your calendar
4. Review your action lists

The last three shouldn’t take long — 10 or 15 minutes at the most. The most time consuming component of the weekly review, reviewing the project list (aside from adding new projects), is not necessary here. Processing will take the most time, commonly an hour to 90 minutes.

Does anyone have that much time? Think of it this way: you can handle the load piecemeal throughout the day, regrouping each time you chip away at your inbox, or you can batch process the bulk of your new inputs into a single session. Keep in mind that what’s being processed is work, not something in addition to it. It doesn’t go away just because it’s not processed.

If processing is the your first order of business each morning, you have the security and serenity of knowing that your inbox doesn’t have any time bombs lurking in middle of the stack. And when new inputs arrive during the day, it’s much easier to process them in real time if desired, because they’re not part of a mass of unexamined priorities.

What about the oft-repeated advice not to check email in the morning? Here we’re not “checking” email; we’re processing it, responding immediately to under-two-minute messages, deleting or filing irrelevant or inactionable ones, and moving actionable ones to an @Action or Follow-Up folder — extracting any projects or next actions.

By methodically processing email instead of haphazardly checking it, we get if off of our minds and into the system. When it’s time to start working, we’re not preoccupied with our inbox because we’ve made decisions on everything that needs to be done with what has now been cleared from it.

Hard landscape items on calendars are as valuable for seeing the discretionary time between them for working off action lists as they are for tracking the appointments themselves. For calendars, action lists, and other support material to work effectively, they need to be examined and updated regularly; otherwise they fall into disuse, and the mind takes up the slack for tracking actions and projects, which is unscalable. The short-term memory space, the “mental RAM,” that defines our attention span is too limited to track dozens of projects simultaneously.

Many people are surprised to find that when they collect and process everything in their lives for the first time (paperwork, email, verbal commitments, inchoate plans), they typically wind up with 40 to 60 projects and 100 to 200 next actions. This load is overwhelming directly to the degree it’s kept in the mind instead of an external system. The system needs to be complete and current for the mind to trust it. The goal is to keep your mind clear.

To maintain a trusted system, schedule a meeting with yourself at least once per week — a Weekly Review — to add missing actions and projects, to eliminate completed ones, to eliminate or reevaluate ones that are stuck, to update support materials, and to reconsider active projects and someday/maybe options.

Schedule the weekly review in advance. As with physical exercise, weekly review sessions should be done to a protocol, not on a whim. Doing a weekly review when the mood strikes is a formula for failure.

How long should a weekly review take?

The honest answer is: as long as it takes to no longer have anything on your mind. As you complete your review, you reach a tipping point where you can start to feel your stress and preoccupation with “all the things” you need to do melt away — it becomes like a 21st Century form of meditation. You catch up with yourself, bringing your relationship with the small and large changes in circumstance that have accrued over the last seven days into harmony.

The practical answer is: one hour. Many erstwhile adherents of GTD undermine their once-per-week discipline by either scheduling two or more hours for the weekly review, or not scheduling the review at all. If your review is excessively long (scheduled) or open-ended (unscheduled), you’ll end up looking for or creating gratuitous actions and projects to fill time.

A more refined answer is: start with one hour, then adjust the time incrementally as needed. You may actually need two hours, or possibly 30 minutes — when everything is off of your mind, you’ll know. But to get the ball rolling, commit to a one-hour dash, then reflect on whether or not you have any open loops that still need to be closed.

When should the weekly review be done?

The best way to know is to experiment. As a freelance writer I have the luxury of doing a weekly review any time, but I schedule a 90-minute block on Saturday mornings between 8:00 and 9:30 at the café around the corner from me. When I had a real Monday-to-Saturday job, I scheduled the review on Sunday morning. I personally prefer doing weekly reviews on off days, since nothing gets work off of my mind like a weekly review.

Others prefer to do their review during the workweek, in the office. A frequent opportune time is Friday afternoon, when work is winding down but coworkers, clients and vendors are still accessible. Some people schedule theirs on Wednesday to get a “second wind” in the middle of the week. I found that I was too conscious of the surrounding bustle to do a focused weekly review at work. I should have had the discipline to disengage from the commotion, but couldn’t muster it. Others find that having all their workstation’s resources at hand — from general reference files to personnel — makes a comprehensive review easier.

What should the weekly review consist of?

It’s always a good idea to work from a Weekly Review checklist to work from rather than memory. The sequence can very according to your preferences, but a checklist for a thorough review should include at least the following:

• Collect all loose papers, from receipts to contracts, and put them in your intray or “In” folder
• Process all email in your inbox until it’s empty (see Inbox Zero for the true meaning of an empty inbox)
• Review your calendar for the previous week, deleting or rescheduling items as needed
• Review your calendar for the following week and beyond, ensuring that it’s up to date, adding new items as needed
• Review any relevant project support materials, like plans and checklists
• Do a mind sweep: write down any thoughts or intentions that are potential actions or projects
• Process your papers and your mind sweep, discarding, filing or crossing off each processed item
• Review your Next Actions, eliminating now-irrelevant ones, reevaluating undone/unclear ones (they may simply need to be reworded), replacing completed ones with new ones for their respective projects
• Review your Project List, adding new projects, deleting completed and abandoned projects, ensuring that each active project has at least one next action you can take to move it forward, and moving uncommitted projects to Someday/Maybe
• Review your Someday/Maybe list, adding newly postponed items from your Project list, adding new potential projects, eliminating items no longer worth considering
• Brainstorm and capture any new ideas that may have occurred as a result of your mental housecleaning

The exercise analogy holds. The longer you wait between reviews, and harder it is to resume the habit. Your mental inventory keeps piling up, making the process of dealing with it that much more daunting. So do your best to make weekly reviews weekly.

If you don’t have enough information to commit to a project, make getting the information the project.

You want to start a speech consulting business, but keep putting it off due to a tacit uncertainty that there’s enough of a market for it. Before embarking on a project called “Start a speech consulting business,” the first project that needs to be completed is resolving the uncertainty: “Assess market for speech consulting services.”

Then determine the next action or subproject. An example would be “Set up Google Adwords campaign for multivariate test.” Since this is not something most people have the knowledge to do in one step, it would probably best go on the Project list. Then we need a solid next action to move the project forward — maybe “Read introductory pages on adwords.google.com”.

We’re basically processing an potential project to see if it’s worth doing. It’s a feasibility study. Processing a project is a project in itself — a “look into” or process project.

“R&D” is a common shorthand for process projects on a Project list, as in “R&D: Getting a financial advisor.” You might prefer others:

• Assess
• Look into
• Research
• Determine
• Evaluate
• Compare
• Test
• Draft
• Brainstorm

Notice that the latter two phrases involve getting information from yourself rather than outside resources. Sometimes you just need to know if you know enough to move a project forward. Think twice about reflexively consuming more information instead of thinking proactively. If you draw a blank, the information resources will still be there.

Process projects are not open-ended information buffets. The object is to determine either whether to proceed with the target project, or how to proceed with it. For action we need sufficient information, not complete information.

If the target project is affirmative, put it on the Project list along with any subprojects that might be involved (any multiaction task is referred to technically as a “project,” so subprojects also go on the Project list). If it’s determined that the project is not worth pursuing at this time, but possibly later, put in on the Someday/Maybe list. If it’s determined that it’s not worth doing now or later, dump it out of the system.

For any project that you’re not able or willing to commit to now, but possibly later, put it on a list called Someday/Maybe.

A few items on the list would be things like:

• Train for and complete a marathon
• Install hardwood floors
• Start a speech consulting business
• Vacation in Luang Prabang

Someday/Maybe completes an organizational framework of five major placeholders. Intray paperwork and inbox email will either get discarded or processed into one or more of the following categories:

• Next Actions (optionally organized by context)
• Projects
• Calendar
• Waiting For
• Someday/Maybe

Putting items on a Someday/Maybe list allows you to consciously decide whether or not to keep them as future options. Going to graduate school might be a worthwhile project, but not actionable until you’ve fulfilled certain short-term career goals. Putting a down payment on a car might not be a priority until you’ve established an adequate emergency fund. Changing cell phone carriers might be an option to take after the contract with your current provider has expired.

Some projects seem like remote possibilities, like starting a newspaper, but no matter how much you try to dismiss them, they keep haunting you. Keep them on your Someday/Maybe list, and out of your head. Each week you get a chance to review each item on the list and decide that it’s still a Someday/Maybe, that it’s time to make it an active project with a next action, or that it’s time to cross it off the list once and for all.

In a world of infinite options, there’s always the danger of the Someday/Maybe list getting out of hand. Most people who keep the list find that it becomes larger than their Project list. So how to we decide whether to put it on Someday/Maybe, or leave it off entirely? If there’s a strong possibility that you’ll think of the item again over time, it should probably go on Someday/Maybe.

There are other ways to manage options. If you have a tickler file, you might want to write a note to yourself, and file it for review at a date that’s arbitrary (e.g. in two weeks) or relevant (three days before an event); then it’s out of the regular review process. You can defer a decision by putting the item on your calendar, and review it on that date.

If you have many options that fall in a single category, like DVDs to buy or books to read, it’s more manageable to keep them in their own checklists. Someday/Maybe is ideal for items that you would potentially migrate to your Project list. For instance, I keep a backlog of article ideas on a checklist, articles currently being written on my Project list, and imminent writing projects on Someday/Maybe.

But how you manage future options is more of an art than a science. Experiment until you come up with a set of placeholders that makes intuitive and logical sense.

Whenever a project requires information or a delegated action from others, put it on a list called Waiting For.

An example of a short Waiting For list would be:

• Michael 7/21: Gantt for store remodel
• Laura 7/20: artwork for client presentation
• Amazon.com 7/20: Andrei Roublev Criterion DVD
• Frank’s Auto 7/19: status on transmission replacement

Each item contains the person or organization from which you need a deliverable, the date when the action was delegated or when the information was requested, and the action or information itself. Other information potentially helpful to include are due dates, phone numbers or email addresses of the parties involved. If you have an electronic organizer, you can paste sections of pertinent emails or information from relevant websites into the note field of the corresponding line item on your list.

The Waiting For list needs to be reviewed as regularly as other context lists — at least once a day in your daily review, but as often as you need to ensure that your projects aren’t being orphaned by the inaction of others. If you’re responsible for the project, you’re as responsible for the component actions of the project you delegate to others as your own actions.

Avoid keeping a mental account of what others need to bring to the project. A busy office culture frequently makes every attempt to stop and think seem frivolous, and it’s tempting to take the shortcut of assuming that others will do (or remember accurately, if at all) what you ask of them. If it’s important enough to be done, it’s important enough to write down and track.

Having a Waiting For list is essential for identifying dependencies that need to be resolved before you can take further action on a project. Finalizing the budget for a remodel requires Michael to present a plan that includes a timeline with estimates on labor and materials. The client presentation can’t be rehearsed until the PowerPoint file is finished, requiring artwork from Laura.

Once you get in the habit of having a current list for every incompletion, it becomes much easier to identify potential problems before they become actual.

Instead of making a commute for each new errand, write all errands on your @Errands context list (after deciding that it really require a physical trip instead of, say, a phone call), and aim to batch the completion of all errands in a single loop between home and work. Instead of making numerous non-emergency calls throughout the day, set specific times to place and return phone calls.

For knowledge workers, email will be the single most repetitive task that can benefit from batching. A common recommendation is for two email sessions per day: 11:00 am and 4:00 pm, for example. Another is for once every hour. Response requirements will naturally depend on your job — batching is a non-starter for financial traders — but few jobs actually require the persistent availability that’s usually assumed.

Fine tune your email batching by starting with once an hour, then gradually increase the length between sessions. Some people will find that even once a day is enough.

Escape the inbox. Focus primarily on output. Turn off email notifications and decide to let email collect in sufficient quantity to justify processing the entire inbox in one sitting. Checking email at arbitrary times leads to a habit of looking for emergencies, which you’ll inevitably find as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most of us our have at least some inefficient people in our lives who impose manufactured emergencies on us in order to make themselves feel important. A protocol of answering email at regular intervals helps put you in control of the information flow, thinking instead of reacting.