The stress of heavy workloads doesn’t come from having too many things to do. We can all think of infinitely more worthy things to do that we’re not doing than think of the few things we are doing. If that was really the source of anxiety, every person on the planet would be in a permanent existential crisis. On the contrary. At any given moment, we have one of two choices: we can feel bad about all of the tasks we aren’t doing, or we can feel good about having made the right choice of the one task we are doing.

Workload induced stress comes from two sources: blurred priorities and overtaxed memory. The first is obvious. If you’re unclear that what you’re doing at the moment is the best use of your time and energy, you’ll feel anxious about that misuse. But attributing stress to overtaxed memory rather than too much work seems like a bit of a stretch.

The Limits of Mental RAM

Let’s first look at the notion that having too much to do creates stress. Do you get stressed about solving world hunger? Probably not. It’s clear that feeding the world is beyond your means, so you’ve taken that project off the table as a legitimate option. If you really have to much work, you’ll make an executive decision to delete, delegate or defer the excess — but you don’t stress out about it.

Stress comes from either explicitly accepting a commitment that you implicitly know is unrealistic, or implicitly accepting a commitment you haven’t made explicit. Thinking, “I should set up that Roth IRA” is an implicit commitment that will eddy in the psyche indefinitely until the loop is closed with a specific next action that can be viewed objectively and retrieved conveniently. If you’re near a phone and you have a list of calls you have to make, and one of them is “Bank Customer Service: request Roth IRA,” it’s far easier to manifest that intention.

The first step to relieving stress is to capture everything that has your attention. That goes beyond just making a short list of the loudest or most recent claims on your attention; it means everything — big or small, important or unimportant. Most people resist going that far, then in stopping short of everything, they end up with a large but incomplete list that makes them more stressed than an absolutely total inventory of everything that’s on their mind would.

Having everything out in front of you, and knowing that it’s everything creates a sense of relief, even if you haven’t yet made a decision about what to do with anything on the list. A long list that’s finite is much less troubling than an incomplete list for the same reason that knowing you have $15,000 in debt is less troubling than wondering how much you owe.

Working memory can only hold about seven bits of information, give or take a few depending on your source. It’s clear that the mind wasn’t designed to manage a large inventory of commitments. But with tools, we can extend our storage capacity, which is where a system of externalized task management like Getting Things Done (GTD) comes in.

Outboard Memory

Think of GTD as a set of shelves for storing your stuff, rather than trying to carry it all in your arms. If you had to do something with any one thing you were carrying yourself, you would risk dropping the rest of the load. So you spend all of your energy keeping things close to the vest, hesitating to take action.

Without that shelf space available, you’ll resist capturing new items, sometimes making premature judgements about whether or not those items are important enough to capture in the first place. When you give yourself the freedom to capture everything that has your attention, and have a full array of placeholders to shelve it, you give yourself the discretion to evaluate it at a more appropriate time, when you can give it the full, objective attention it requires.

Total capture isn’t enough to keep things off your mind. You still need to process, organize and review what you collect regularly enough to trust that your outboard memory. But total capture is the necessary entry point. Without a good capture protocol, having any systematic approach to task management will seem take more work than it saves, because you’re working to systems in parallel: one of written notes, and another of mental notes. The more you try to remember, the less inclined you’ll be to write things down, and the more you’ll overtax your working memory.

Barriers to Fluid Capturing

If writing things down when they first occur to us is so important, why do so many of us resist the process? A few reasons:

1. Lack of trusted system downstream. If your processing skills are weak, your brain already knows that whatever you capture will just pile up for nought. Being efficiently lazy, the brain will preempt the extra work by gradually short circuiting your motivation to write things down. Likewise, if your habit of regularly looking at your calendar, project and action lists at least weekly loses momentum, the brain will again disengage from the preliminary work of capturing — after all, why create content that won’t be reviewed?

If the problem lies downstream, so does the solution: become diligent about processing, organizing and reviewing what you’ve captured. Many people allocate too little time to processing their in-basket on the grounds that it doesn’t seem to qualify as “real” work. This is one of the areas where GTD contrasts sharply from traditional time management systems: it explicitly acknowledges defining work as an essential phase of work, over and above doing predefined work.

2. Lack of preestablished capture tools. The time you need to capture something is not the time to decide what you’re going to capture it with, or how. In a moment where two decisions have to be made simultaneously — what to collect and how to collect it — the tendency will be to forgo the need to collect, and hope that whatever’s important enough will be remembered.

Capture tools needs to be thought through ahead of time, so that they’re available at a moment’s notice. Think through all situations throughout the day where you need to take notes:

• When you’re at you’re desk
• When you’re in a meeting
• When you wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea
• When you’re on your cell phone

Determine your preferred method and medium for dealing with each of these situations. Would you rather type your notes or jot them down by hand? Do you type notes with a specific application or a generic text editor? Do you handwrite notes better on large or small pads of paper? Where is the most strategic place to put them? Do you carry a ubiquitous capture tool like index cards in the back of your pocket, a Moleskine or a Notetaker Wallet. Five minutes spent on making decisions about how and where you’ll capture notes will save you from those future split seconds of indecision that make the difference between writing things down and hoping you’ll remember them.

3. The seduction of busyness. The act of capturing something demands hitting a pause button on whatever you were doing. In effect, it’s like a moment of instant meditation. For Type-A workers driven by latest-and-loudest, taking a moment to note something that could possibly be more important than whatever they’re doing (though perhaps less urgent), is something to be resolutely resisted. You’re smarter than that. You’d rather be productive than busy. The three seconds it takes to write something down is far more efficient than the 30 seconds it would take to remember what you didn’t capture, assuming it’s remembered at all. As always, the way things get done is one at a time.

4. Excessively formal notetaking. “Notetaking” is probably a misnomer here. Capturing needs to be agile: a few words or a few bullet points necessary to jog your memory when you process them. For instance, when I was driving I came up with the idea for this post; so I grabbed my voice recorder and said “getting things dumped” — and nothing else. I didn’t need to elaborate on the idea, because I knew that I would put the voice recorder in my in-basket later, and figure out the project and next action when I processed the voice note. Almost all of my voice notes last three to five seconds.

There are times when a lengthier capture process is preferable. A few minutes spent creating a mind map or an outline might be necessary to get a project off of your mind to an extent that a few words wouldn’t. But for general purpose capturing, shorter notes encourage more prolific collection.

5. Thinking through projects and next actions rather than capturing stuff. GTD users who get good at processing — looking at a note, deciding whether it’s actionable, and determining the specific project and action — are often tempted to process any new input right on the spot, essentially replacing capturing with collecting and organizing. That’s often more efficient, but it’s better to develop the skill of jotting raw notes rapidly so that you have the choice of whether to process now or later, depending on what’s appropriate give the time and attention you have available. I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t capturing until I got a notetaker wallet. Before that, I spent too much time trying to enter projects and next actions into my organizer instead of just capturing a short representative reminder.

You might, for instance, use a paper planner to manager your tasks. Assuming you don’t carry it with you at all times, it might make more sense to write a note like, “Meeting with Earl 7/12 at 3:00pm” on an index card when Earl first proposes it. Later, when you’re processing the note from the card into your planner, you have the leisure to determine if there’s a larger outcome involved that would go on your project list, any task to prepare for the meeting that would go on your next actions list, or any other considerations that might form a checklist.

It’s generally a good idea to keep capturing and processing as a two-step process, but skip capturing when the project and next action are obvious.

(Photo credit: World Economic Forum)

The reduced effort behind a clarified next action comes from eliminating the need to define the action while trying to do it. If the action is defined beforehand, the overhead of thinking about the action is offloaded. That doesn’t necessarily mean that no thinking is involved in an action. Programmers think while writing code, but not about what the particular block of code they’re writing is designed to accomplish. As I write this paragraph, I don’t know the exact wording of the next sentence, but I know thought this paragraph is intended to express. The words are just detail.

Efficiency is doing things once, not doing things fast

When a next action is clearly defined, it’s possible to do a mediocre job of executing it and still be more efficient than the ready-fire-aim approach characterized by Type-A workers. Risk scenarios aside, making fast mistakes never saves time. A few extra seconds of asking and answering “What’s the next action?” can save minutes or even hours of correcting fast mistakes made by prioritizing doing before thinking. But what makes a good next action? When in doubt, there are a few questions that can be asked about a next action it ensure that it’s well-formed.

Can I check it off? It might seem obvious that a next action is something that can be successfully crossed off a list when completed, but sometimes the specific threshold for doing so is unclear. “Look for a job” is an example of a task that lacks a defined end point, beyond actually getting hired. Those looking for a job today need a way of knowing that they’ve “looked for a job,” otherwise it remains an open loop that persists after stopping the search.

What condition needs to be satisfied in order for “Look for a job” to be checked off? The time management approach would be to block a specific amount of time on the calendar. At the end of that time, the task has been completed. Another approach would be to clarify what looking for a job accomplishes — it enables someone to send out resumes or, if possible, make calls. Once it’s possible to send out resumes, the first cycle of looking up job listing is complete.

Can I visualize it being done? Next actions are physical, visible actions. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to take action in the real world on tasks that lack a physical component. “Look for a job” is too vague to qualify as a next action. The ways of looking for a job can be visualized — calling colleagues for leads, reviewing a specific job-related website, reviewing classified ads in the newspaper — and those are next actions; but “Look for a job” is an intention for which there are next actions. When it’s time to work from our action list, we don’t want to spend additional time deciding which action is best suited to the intention. We want to already have decided it and already have it on the list so that no further thinking needs to be done.

Is it a Next Action or a To Do? A good Next Action list only contains physical, visible actions with no dependencies. “Call Sally” only appears on the list if Sally’s phone number is immediately available. Otherwise the action that would enable call to Sally would be the next action, which would either be written down — “Call Michael: get Sally’s phone number” — or done immediately if it can be done in under a couple of minutes.

To Do lists, making no distinction between actions and projects, typically have items like “Look for a job.” The problem with generalized action descriptions is that they create a cognitive dissonance when it’s time to act from them. The brain sees “Look for a job” as the very next thing to do, but still has to choose the very next thing to do (“Review admin jobs on Craigslist”) in order to act on it. Since the disparity is implicit rather than explicit, the internal conflict goes unidentified, and the next thing to do seems harder than it actually is. It becomes easier to put off thinking about it than to revise what’s been written, sowing the seeds of procrastination.

Where does the action take place? One of the advantages of organizing next actions by context is that it compels the user to make them physical and visible. “Draft ‘Anatomy of a Next Action’” doesn’t specify where or how the action will be taken. I have several options for how it gets done. I can type it out on my laptop, write it on a legal pad, or even jot it out on my Notetaker Wallet. When the time comes to write, I want to spend my time writing, not deciding how to write. I put “Draft ‘Anatomy of a Next Action’” on my @Computer list, so that when I’m at a computer, I have a physical trigger for the actions I need to do there.

Clarifying the context for next actions does not require using context lists to organize those actions. Context lists simply batch tasks to resources for added efficiency (e.g. making all phone calls in one sitting). Defining the context for a next action simply binds it to the physical and visible, ensuring that it’s actionable. Be on the looking for “unbounded” words like “contact,” “find,” “ask,” “decide” or “plan.” Those words are pointers to more concrete actions like “email,” “google,” “call,” “review” or “outline” that are tied to specific tools or locations.

(Photo credit: Enoch!)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Once you’re used to capturing anything that has your attention immediately, not having anything to capture with is panic-inducing. Many writers and thinkers are diligent enough to carry a notebook in hand wherever they go, but for most of the population that’s unrealistic.

Phones with QWERTY keyboards can obviate the need for carrying additional writing gear, especially if you’re already using one anyway. When I started GTD I used the Palm Treo 600, but that got messy. First, I had a tendency to simultaneously capture and process, so I had to navigate to the specific list or application before making the entry. The overhead of having to think before jotting something down made me unconsciously resist maintaining the process, so I would only enter “important” things. But things that don’t seem important in the moment can turn out to be very important. Capturing everything now allows for more contemplative triage later.

Then I heard about the Notetaker Wallet, a normal-size wallet with a notepad, a retractable pen, and a silo for the pen. It didn’t sound innovative, but it did sound useful. At $99.95, it also sounded expensive, so I looked for alternatives and found one: the Wenger Mini Folio Pad and Pen Set (update: no longer in production), which was $29.95 at the time. I was instantly hooked. I didn’t realize how much I was resisting taking notes on the Treo until I notice how much more notetaking I did when I got the Wenger.

The difference between writing on a notepad and typing on a PDA, for me at least, is substantial. Handwritten notetaking is a more natural reflex motion, and the unformatted nature of paper eliminates the need to select a list or application prior to writing.

That’s not to say that capturing on paper is more efficient if the notes are going to be processed into an electronic organizer eventually. You do have to reenter what you’ve written, but processing and organizing are less stressful when done at your discretion rather than having to be done on the fly. Collecting on paper exclusively makes it easy to identify what still needs processing. I’ll either process these notes during windows of idle time into my Centro or throw them into my in-basket for processing with the rest of its contents.

After a couple of years, the stitching on the Wenger started to give, and I had trouble finding a replacement (they seem to be out of production), so I bit the bullet and sprung for the Davidco model. The price may be steep, but the construction quality is noticeably higher, so I didn’t regret it in the least. On the contrary, the minute the trifold version became available, I upgraded from the bifold version without hesitation. In addition to bifold and trifold models, a women’s version is also available.

In daily use

Like many other users, one of the first things I did was replace the included Rotring retractable pen with a better one — in this case a Fisher Bullet Space Pen. With the Rotrings I’ve tried in both Notetaker Wallets, the ink flow is uneven. I would frequently have to scribble on the pad before the ink would register, which breaks the spontanaeity of jotting things down. The Space Pen, which fits snugly in to the wallet’s silo, has a pressurized cartridge, making ink flow consistency a non-issue.

Having a pen and notepad in the same space isn’t much different that carrying a pen in your front pocket and a notepad in your back pocket, but there’s something about having them together that encourages more frequent use: there’s less drag to the process of taking them out.

In addition to the usual notes-to-self, I find that tearing off notes for other people is a great way to remind them to take action on something. Instead of asking someone to email you the information about XYZ, you can jot down your email address along with the action reminder: “Email me about XYZ at frank@yadayada.com.”

Here’s the trick: If you include your contact information, even if you know they already have it, they won’t react negatively to being given a written reminder. It looks like the point of the note is the contact information, when in fact it’s the action reminder that you’ve slipped in. Strictly verbal requests are almost always forgotten.

I’ve grown fond of outlining posts and articles using the Notetaker Wallet. The small size of the notepad is less intimidating that a legal pad or an electronic document, and it forces me to put down the essential points without veering off into rabbit holes. If I get the occasional urge to free associate, my handwriting is small enough to make thumbnail mind maps on the notepad, at three or four levels of hierarchy.

Whenever I get confused about a project, one of my first reactions is to pull out the wallet and make a checklist to dump all the major considerations out in front of me. The informal nature of such a small tool makes it more spontaneous than firing up MindManager, which I use for more deliberate brainstorming sessions.

Right now I’m looking at a few alternative capture tools to play with, from inking software for my smartphone (Pennovate Notes) to the low-tech PicoPad wallet insert. When it comes to raw collection, the simpler the tool, the better. I care less about features than utility: the best tool is the one you use the most.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Cloud-based apps aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re convenient for anyone juggling work between multiple computers. If you have a task, but aren’t sure if you’re going to get it done at home, at work, or on the go, web-based task lists are ideal. They’re inherently cross-platform, making them idea for those who have to use an operating system at work that’s different from their personal machines. Gtdagenda aspires to be the personal organizing equivalent of Gmail.

Despite the name, Gtdagenda is flexible enough to support different productivity canons. The site has instructions for configuring the app for Steven Covey’s 7 Habits (more accurately, First Things First), David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done. Other instructions illustrate how to configure for the gym, for school, or for software development.

Organization of Gtdagenda

Like Outlook, Gtdagenda provides an integrated view of your lists and calendar entries, with Next Actions by default taking up the most space. The default view can be modified to make Calendar or some other entry type the prominent pane.

The framework of Gtdagenda is made up two sections. One section clusters Goals, Projects, Tasks, and Next Actions. The other section clusters Checklists, Schedules and Calendar. Larger outcomes of individual projects get entered in the Goals section. Tasks and Next Actions can be assigned to Projects from a dropdown menu. I’d like to see an “Add New Project” option within this menu — currently, a Project has to exist before it can be assigned to a task.

Being a GTD-ready tool, Gtdagenda organizes action items (tasks and next actions) by context, unless you delete them. Action items can be marked for deletion, completion, archiving, or moving to Someday/Maybe. By default, they’re grouped by priority assignment (1-5), but can also be grouped by project.

Some users might find the distinction between Tasks and Next Actions arbitrary. A Task gets turned a Next Action by checking the star icon; otherwise they’re the same. But having the two labels has two advantages: (1) the Tasks category provides an optional bucket for subprojects, and (2) users who don’t follow GTD or follow it less literally might prefer ignoring Next Actions and just use Tasks.

The Checklists feature very cool. In Gtdagenda, checklists aren’t  general purpose lists of considerations, as it would be understood in GTD parlance. Gtdadenga’s checklists are Seinfeld Chains. Each “list” consist of only a label and checkboxes for ticking off daily for a weekly checklist, weekly for a monthly checkist, or monthly for a yearly checklist. Like Joe’s Goals or Sciral Consistency, the purpose of these checklists are to confirm repetitive or cyclical actions — you do your workout for the day, and tick that day’s box. Each checklists displays a line graph that stays flat when all boxes are check, or dips where the corresponding box is unchecked (i.e. where you’ve broken the chain).

Calendar and Schedules are largely two views of the same information. The Calendar tool displays a thumbnail calendar that brings up day-specific tasks when you click on a specific date. Entries can be assigned projects and contexts. When you click on Contexts, the lists will show their corresponding calendar entries separately. Schedules displays the days tasks in block view, adding time information. You can assign projects to these entries but not contexts.

Email updates and mobile access

Each Gtdagenda account has a two mail addresses for adding action items: one for Tasks and one for Next Actions. For some reason, there aren’t any email addresses for Projects, Goals or Calendar. Users with a web-enabled cell phone can access Gtdagenda at gtdagenda.mobi, so if you aren’t at a computer and not in the subway, you always have a way to get to your lists.

Signing up

Like many commercial web apps, Gtdagenda is based on the “freemium” service model, with Free, Basic ($4.45/mo) and Premium (9.95/mo) tiers. The feature grid is a little too complex to generalize here, but you can see the plan differences on this page.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, Technology, Get It Done, Done Online

What you would like to accomplish today is a broader concept that what you would like to do now. We need to be able to shift our focus between the forest and the trees at will by referencing them differently. This is why having a project list that’s separate from a next actions list makes it easier to jump start your way toward an outcome.

What do I want to accomplish?

This is always a good grounding question to ask whenever you need to clear away any confusion. It allows to begin and continue with the end in mind without getting lost in minutiae. Recently I wrote about processing an inbox to zero base, and a commenter suggested that spending too much time processing email would lead to distraction.

It’s a valid concern, and a good reason for having an outcome focus from the outset. This is why I’m so pedantic about making the distinction between checking email and processing it. They’re two fundamentally different focuses that lead to two very different results. Checking email is looking through an inbox for potentially important messages, which can be done indefinitely. Since that process is necessarily selective, there’s no way to weigh the importance of each email against every other email, since you would have to see them all to make a relative assessment — so there’s always a sense that something else might be more important than what your attention is currently focused on. Processing email means systematically scanning each message to either act on, delete, delegate or defer any actions implicit in it, spending a maximum to two minutes per email.

What you’re trying to accomplish when you’re processing email is acheiving an empty inbox. With that outcome focus in mind, it’s no longer a treadmill activity, but a series of next actions leading to a very specific endpoint.

Asking the “What am I trying to accomplish?” question is a good wake-up call when you’re in the middle of an action that seems to lack momentum, even when you know intellectually that it needs to be done. I’m in the middle of writing a long post (not this one) that seems to be taking forever to write, since the information in it is pretty dense. Several times I’ve had to visualize the finished post to recover the motivation to finish it.

What’s the next action?

I also have to remind myself (by looking at the reminder on my action list, not doing it mentally) that my current task isn’t to “Write post X,” but to “Summarize Chapter 8,” making the next action as granular as possible. The next action on every project, no matter how large or abstract, needs to be reduced to a physical task that you can visualize yourself doing, otherwise it never gets translated from an idea into the physical universe.

These two questions, “What am I trying to accomplish?” and “What’s the next action?”, should making a mantra, allowing you to reduce the complex to the simple.

(Photo credit: Enoch!)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, To Do List

An aspect of GTD that some find disappointing is the lack of a hard, fast rule for prioritizing tasks. There’s no “most important task,” no “ABC” code, no 2 x 2 matrix; only the advice to “trust your heart” or “follow your intuition.” It seems ironic, given GTD’s thoroughly systematic approach to collecting, tracking and reviewing actions and projects.

There may not be a rule, but there is a set of criteria you can apply to filter out inefficient options from the decision making process — think of them as “elimination rounds.” The four criteria are context, time, energy and priority.

Context

When thinking about what to do next, the first question to ask is: What can you actually do? Thinking about doing web design when you’re not near a computer isn’t an activity worth spending much time on. Thinking of doing something while lacking the tools to do it is simply idling. What you can do define the very next action at the computer that would make the overly general activity of “web design” actionable: sketch layout, resize photos, or some other concrete task.

Let’s suppose that not being at a computer, in this case, means sitting in a train station. There don’t appear to be many options, but since you’re in the habit of reviewing your @Calls and @Anywhere lists in situations like these, you see that you still need to call Sandy to get the details about the sofa she’s selling on Craigslist. Five minutes later, you’ve talked to her and have arranged to stop by her place to see the sofa in person.

Notice that the context was the trigger, not your mood or memory. You simply let the external situation determine what options were available rather than waiting to be in the mood to get around to the call or hoping that you would remember to make it. That’s being productively lazy (a good thing).

Time

You’re reviewing a list of things you can do in your current context, say @Office, so it’s a given that you can do them. What’s the best thing you can do given the time you have available? If you know you have to go to a meeting in eight minutes, choosing to read a long contact that would really need considerably more time to focus on is not a good use of the next eight minutes. Watering the plants, something that’s never “important” until the plants die, might be a better option.

But suppose the meeting is in 90 minutes, and you have no other external commitments between now and then. Instead of finishing a bunch of minutiae on your list, this might be the time to plow through that contract. It’s generally more strategic to use longer blocks of time for high-focus tasks, and shorter blocks for rote tasks.

Energy

You’re in the right context and you have a good idea which tasks are suited to the time available. Now the question is: Which task among these to I have the energy to execute effectively? This might seem like a question for slackers, but it’s really a productivity assessment.

Just because you have the time to read a contract doesn’t mean you’ll do it effectively when you’ve just been through the ringer with your boss. Your eyes might be on the document, but your mind is elsewhere. 45 minutes spent staring at the contract when distracted might be equivalent to 15 minutes of undistracted reading. That’s 30 minutes of activity that will have to be repeated later. Logging time in order to feel productive is busyness, not productivity. When attention is in short supply, switch to more mechanical tasks.

Priority

Once you’ve determined that you’re in the right place, have the right time and the right energy to accomplish any one of several tasks, the next question to ask is: Which one of these things would have the most impact? You’ve already narrowed down your options with the previous questions, so it’s likely that the priority choice at this point is a no-brainer. The choice may not be easy, but it’s probably simple.

Rules versus principles

It is absolutely not required that you follow this framework when choosing what to do next. Context, time, energy and priority only comprise a hierarchy of efficiency. There’s no rule that states you need to restrict yourself to doing computer-related tasks when you’re at a computer, but there is a general principle that there’s less effort involved when working within your resources. You can always choose to get to a computer if the task is a priority, but having context and other criteria in mind forces you to make that judgment call consciously.

(Photo credit: Redvers)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Shopping lists seem intuitive enough. It’s not common for people to include the items they need to pick up at the grocery store in their To Do list. Keeping a separate shopping list prevents having to sort through related procurement tasks — “Get lettuce” (or just “Lettuce”) — and unrelated tasks like “Replace washer in faucet.” The logic of keeping these lists separate seems self-evident, but extending the principle to multiple batched lists, called context lists, can be problematic.

In the comments of an earlier post this week, Charles Gilkey of the terrific Productive Flourishing blog, remarked:

I’m still pretty averse to context thinking, to be honest. I used to be all over it, but I noticed how much time I spent in metaproductivity when having more simple lists with well-specified action phrases helped me along just as well if not better.

Context lists are popular within GTD, but some users are like Charlie: having multiple lists like @Computer, @Home, @Errands, @Calls and @Office seems to create more work than it saves.

I’ve always found that position curious, since context lists were one of the first things I latched onto when reading Getting Things Done. It made logical and intuitive sense that looking at a list of 13 next actions is easier than looking at a list of 130.

Where is the complexity?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’d like to know from those who resist context lists what makes the more time or labor intensive than a single-threaded action list. If I’m at work, and I suddenly think of something I need to do at home, it takes just as long to write it down on my @Home list as it would to put it on a congealed To Do list.

But when I get home, instead of looking through an entire To Do list to figure out which ones I can do and which ones I can’t, the @Home context list has done the work for me. My decision load is reduced to thinking about the best thing to do without first having to work out which ones I can do.

Here are some possible reasons people might opt for non-contexual lists:

• They’re writing To Do lists rather than Next Action lists
• They work in a situation, like a home office, where contexts overlap
• They continually reorganized their contexts before abandoning them altogether
• They felt the need to review all contexts instead of the current one

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

To Do lists rather than Next Actions. As a rule, Next Action lists only contain physical, visible actions with no dependencies. “Email Anne” is a next action because you can actually visualize being at the computer typing the email. “Contact Anne” would not be a next action, since it requires the further thinking step of determining how to contact Anne. The next action of “Email Anne” has been “intelligently dumbed down” to a mechanical activity, whereas “Contact Anne” is a cognitive activity.

When it’s time to do, you don’t have to think about when to do next because you’ve already thought about it. Assigning each task to a physical context provides a reality check against writing down unspecific tasks that require another iteration of thinking when they’re reviewed.

If an outcome requires more than one action step, the next action is entered on the appropriate context list and the outcome (project) is listed on a separate Project list. Listing projects separately allows you to delete the next action when completed but still have an identifier that a new next action needs to be defined. If a To Do list item actually represents more than one individual action step, it’s possible to delete a partially completed multiaction task without realizing that further action is required to close the loop.

Overlapping contexts. Most offices have a phone and computer, so why have separate @Calls, @Computer and @Office lists? To identify the dependent variable. Calls on the @Calls lists are for ones that can be made from any phone, like making hotel reservations. If a call has to be made from the office because you need access to files that are only there, then the call would go on the @Office list, not the @Calls list. If a call requires being at home to answer a repairman’s questions, the call is an @Home next action. But the vast majority of calls aren’t location-dependent, so it’s more efficient to batch them for handling as a group than hunt for them individually a monolithic To Do list.

Perpetual reorganization. This usually starts by trying to adapt someone else’s contexts without determining if they really apply. For instance, I don’t use Agendas, since I work at home and don’t answer to any one individual regularly enough to require batching topics. Sometimes it happens from a change in working situations. I no longer have an @Office context, so most “@Work” tasks are now @Computer items.

I don’t think constant system tweaking comes from re-deciding categories, but from never having concretely decided them in the first place. Assuming that’s true, the best practice is to sit down for a few minutes and write out a concrete checklist of all of your work sites (“work” meaning all tasks, personal and professional), then ask, “Where do I need to do this?” of each next action as it comes up.

Reviewing more than one list at a time

There’s a difference between having all your context lists available and reviewing them. The point of having them all available is so that you can add to them as needed. We often think of things in places where we can’t act on them. Instead of orphaning those thoughts and hoping they’ll resurface when you’re in the right context, it’s easier to simply write them down in an appropriately categorized list.

Except for the weekly review, there’s no need to review any list other than the one that matches the context you’re currently in. It’s actually a waste of time and mental effort to do so, unless you’re just about to change contexts (reviewing your @Errands list right before leaving work). Keep the other drawers in the wardrobe closed, and stay focused on the present moment by only pulling out what’s needed.

(Photo credit: cesarastudillo)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Zero base is a GTD term for having fully processed collection buckets with no items remaining. An effective norm for getting back to zero base is every 24 to 48 hours.

One of the first problems I encountered after quitting my last day job to work at home was letting my in-basket and email inbox accumulate for up to four days without processing it. Part of that slowdown had to do with my own laziness, but as a freelance writer, there’s far less input to deal with than typical office work. At the day job, I didn’t have the option of allowing my email and intray to build up for several days, since there would have been negative consequences.

As soon as I made it a rule to never go to sleep without getting to zero base, I found that the rest of my workflow sped up dramatically. Why the difference?

What zero base is and isn’t

Zero base doesn’t mean that every incoming item is done; only that it’s processed. Once your inbox is empty (I’ll use “inbox” to represent all collection buckets, physical and digital), you know that you’ve:

• Completed any two-minute items
• Filed any general reference material
• Delegated some items to the appropriate party
• Deferred some items on your calendar or tickler file
• Deleted anything not worth keeping
• Queued any longer-than-two-minute reading

Longer-than-two-minute reading would include any items in your @Action email folder/label, items in a general Read/Review or Action Support physical folder, or content in a project-labeled support folder (e.g. Office Renovation). As you’re processing each item, once you’ve determined that something will take more than two minutes to read, you deliberately file it electronically or physically to avoid getting lured into one task that might divert you from completing the processing your collection buckets down to zero. This is the inverse of the Two Minute Rule.

Eliminating guesswork

Once you’re at zero base, you’ve figured out precisely what to do next on everything that you could possibly be doing. There’s no more guesswork involved. You still have to read your longer emails, but you’ve at least scanned them during processing to have an idea of which ones are a priority. By contrast, when you have a pile of unprocessed paperwork and email, there’s no way to know if you might be missing anything important or urgent. It’s always better to know what you’re not doing than wonder what you’re not doing.

Eliminating a primary bottleneck

If the GTD five-phase workflow of collect-process-organize-review-do is seen in a “theory of constraints” fashion, any deficiency in one phase reduces the entire throughput of the system. You can’t process something you haven’t collected yet, you can’t review something you haven’t processed into your task management system, and so on.

Most of the phases are fairly mechanical, but processing — determining what to do next with what you’ve collect — requires serious cognitive effort. Maintaining empty inbox is the first reality check for ensuring regular throughput. As David Allen once told Merlin Mann, “If you’ve got anything in a ‘huh’ stack, you’re procrastinating.” In other words piles are a good indicator that a person’s workflow is backed up unnecessarily.

Eliminating distractions

When I mentioned resolving never going to sleep being getting to zero base, that doesn’t mean I checked my email before going to sleep. It means that the last time my email was downloaded, I processed it to zero before shutting down my email client. For this to be effective, manual downloading is a must. Real-time notifications and scheduled downloads are a treadmill to nowhere.

Once you see an empty inbox and keep it empty until you’re ready to process again at your discretion, you no longer scramble your brains re-sorting which items need special attention and which ones don’t. You no longer have to split your attention between answering your current email and emergency scanning, because you’ve already looked at everything you’ve processed at least once.

A note on emergency scanning

Processing an inbox is done sequentially, one item at a time, typically taking between 30 and 90 minutes in the morning, and less time throughout the day once the morning bulk has been processed. If things have accumulated to the point where a potentially urgent item might be sitting in the pile, it’s best to do an emergency scan of the whole pile prior to formally processing it. You’re not doing two minute items, extracting next actions, or anything other than sifting through your paperwork and email headers to see if anything mission critical needs immediate attention. If you need to do an emergency scan, go ahead and get it out of the way so that you don’t interrupt yourself in the middle of processing.

(Photo credit: Jose C Silva)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

• The handling of low-priority tasks is self-evident
• Anything classified as a “C” is not a low-priority task, but a non-priority task that shouldn’t be done at all

I found both explanations problematic. The system that only advocates doing high-impact tasks, aside from being unrealistic, leaves no room for anything else. More importantly, if something isn’t worth doing at all, it shouldn’t be classified or tracked, period.

An alternative triage

I would divide things up, instead, like this:

• Commitments: Things you track on your calendar, project and action lists
• Options: Considerations for the future reviewed less regularly (e.g. weekly instead of daily) on your Someday/Maybe list, calendar or tickler file
• Non-commitments: Things that don’t require any further thinking or tracking

Something is either worth doing, or it’s not. If you decide it’s worth doing, then it’s either a next action or a project. If you’re undecided, then it’s a someday/maybe. If you’ve decided that it’s not worth doing, don’t waste time tracking it.

Notice that having an explicit Someday/Maybe category requires that you make the decision to classify something as “undecided,” which is very different than simply not deciding. Having all of those indecisions in one place to review weekly is more efficient that occasionally thinking about each of 60 consideration as they spring to mind randomly.

A more strategic approach

There’s a Catch-22 to designating tasks a “C,” or by implication, unimportant. If something needs to be done, but is considered unimportant, there’s no incentive to ever do it. Without a positive motivation to do a task, the mind has find a negative motivation sufficiently strong enough to act on. I’ll get fired, my spouse will complain, my utilities will be shut off, I won’t be able to drive on an empty gas task, and so on.

Since the motivation has to be sufficiently strong enough to take action, the tendency is to procrastinate until the crisis point, when a C suddenly turns into an A. That’s not a strategic way to live, and it breeds apathy and anxiety.

The urgent, the important and the necessary

The first order of business is to acknowledge the necessary, not just the urgent or important. Here are some ways to get to small-but-necessary things early before they turn into big things.

Batch your next actions by context. If you’re a GTD user, you’re probably already using context lists to organize your tasks. If all of your phone calls are on your @Calls list, it’s more efficient to complete as many calls on that list in one sitting as possible rather than alternate between phone calls and actions in other contexts. It’s easier to know that you’ve completed all your calls than to wonder which call you should make next. If you must use a prioritized list, make sure it’s congruent with the context you’re in — no errands or home tasks on a list you need to review at work.

Use the Two Minute Rule. If an action would take longer to write down now and reconsider doing later, do it now if it’s worth doing at all. For convenience sake, we settle on the Two Minute Rule as the Do It Now breakpoint, but lengthen or shorten as your workload allows. Don’t clutter your mind or your organizer with “minutiae,” in the literal sense.

Use the Two Action Rule. It’s ideal to work through an action list starting with the highest-priority item, but sometimes your energy level requires an approach with more finesse. The Two Action Rule states:

To regain momentum on a stuck action list, commit to completing a minimum of two actions on it, however small, in quick succession, with a bias toward the oldest items.

The rationale behind the rule being:

Just as two points make a line, completing two tasks, however small, creates a sense of direction and perceived progress. The more quickly you can complete two next actions in a row, the greater the sense of momentum you’ll have that will feed itself into how you carry out the rest of the list.

As always, high-priority tasks are better than low-priority ones, but moving from inaction to action is the highest priority, as long as it’s not indiscriminate action.

Use weekends and “holidays.” If no time ever seems to be a good time to do low-priorty tasks, batch them for the weekend, ideally before doing your weekly review to lighten your lists. If the prospect of doing anything non-recreational on the weekend is an anathema, schedule a specific block of time to handle low-priority tasks.

Use the “rocks and sand” approach. If high-priority tasks are the few “big rocks” that fill the bulk of your day, handle the “sand” of lower-priority tasks in between them. Assuming the big rocks take more energy than sand, cycling between them is a great way to pace yourself. You don’t burn yourself lifting rocks all day, and you don’t lament wasting the day doing nothing more than sweeping sand.

“Reward” yourself with easy or desirable tasks. A common piece of advice is to reward yourself for doing something arduous or onerous by promising yourself a reward at the end, like watching a movie (no joke: I once saw a father bribe his six-year-old daughter into brushing her teeth by promising her ice cream).

You can take the same approach by following up something undesirable to do with something more desirable. If you want to get started exercising, try scheduling it immediately after doing some “real” work, like making a batch of sales calls. That’s similar to the rocks-and-sand approach, but here it’s not a routine; it’s done occasionally, on an as-needed basis.

Immediately after a weekly review. During a weekly review, make note of which next actions are getting a little too familiar. If you’ve seen them on two or more weekly reviews in a row, do them immediately if possible, or at least “debug” them by figuring out if they have unidentified dependencies — actions that have to be taken before the written ones can actually be done.

While you’re doing something else. Do your laundry while listening to a podcast, rehearse questions for a job interview while gardening, build your knowledge of classical music while reading a novel. Create a multitasking checklist of low-concentration actions that can be done competently while attending to another one.

(Photo credit: dickuhne)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

One way to cope with the brain’s lack of discipline is to keep your life compartmentalized. If a personal issue occurs to you at work, just ignore it, and if it’s important, you’ll think about it when it’s relevant. That’s a big risk to take (forgetting the odd anniversary) in the name of simplifying your life. And it’s totally unnecessary.

All you really need is a good collection and transfer protocol. If you’ve been reading Tools for Thought for a while, you probably know the drill by now: write it down, throw it in your in-basket and process it into your calendar or lists.

By what if the source material from work needs to go home, or vice versa? What about the articles you printed out for your Read/Review stack that you could chip away at in between errands? What if you’re a road warrior whose primary office is a laptop?

Using plastic travel folders

The simple solution is to create a set of semipermanent folders for collecting things on the run, schlepping things between work and home, or keeping things on you for supporting certain tasks. You can buy them preprinted from the David Allen Company, but they’re much cheaper to make if you have the labeler that no serious GTD user would be caught dead without.

Since these folders will get a lot more handling the general reference files you keep in your file cabinet, it’s better to use plastic folders rather than generic manila ones. The standard set consists of the following labels:

• In: This folder acts as your portable in-basket when you’re not deskbound, keeping any new documents, notes and receipts you collect from randomly spreading throughout your go bag. If you make your own set, it’s a good idea to make this one a different color than the rest (traditionally, red), since it will probably be the most frequently accessed
• To Home: If you’d rather not process personal items at work, or if they simply need to be stored at home, this is their temporary holding area
• To Office: Same concept, opposite direction
• Action Support: It’s usually more practical to have a single folder for any paperwork that you need to reference on all your errands than carrying separate project support folders, unless you have a lot of them
• Waiting For Support: Not one I’ve ever used personally. I just use Action Support for any actions I’m taking myself or expecting from others
• Read/Review: Technically not a travel folder, but you’ll probably make at least as much use of it in transit as you would in the office. Standing in lines is a great time to get through some of your reading material

Naturally, you can customize folders to your preference. You might want a separate “Receipts” folder instead of throwing your receipts in your In folder.

Storing and labeling

Before I started working at home, I used a three-tray setup at work: one for In, one for read/review material, and one for action support. The Read/Review folder would go, of course, in the read/review tray; the Action Support and To Home travel folders would go in my action support tray; the other folders would stay in my bag.

It’s a good idea to not only label each folder at the tab, but also toward the bottom edge in the center. Insert the folders so that the bottom edge face towards you. That allows you to see the labels clearly without getting obscured by the papers inside — you don’t have to lift the papers to see the labels. Apply some clear tape over each label to keep them from peeling away from the surface. If you really want to make the folders more aesthetic, use clear label tape with white lettering, but for me that’s overkill.

If you have any travel folder categories that you’ve found to come in handy, please mention them in the comments.

(Photo credit: The David Allen Company)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity