Getting Things Done (20 page)

If you have a computer only at work, you may not need a separate “At Computer” list; “Office Actions” may cover those actions because the office is the only place you can do them anyway. (Similarly, if you have a computer only at home, and it’s not a laptop, you may be able to put computer-specific actions on your “At Home” list.)

 

“Errands”
It makes a lot of sense to group together in one place reminders of all the things you need to do when you’re “out and about.” When you know you need to get in your car and go somewhere, it’s great to be able to look at the list while you’re on the road. Actions like “Get stock certificates from safety-deposit box,” “Pick up pictures at framers,” and “Buy petunias at nursery” would all go here.

This list could, of course, be nothing more elaborate than a Post-it that you keep in your planner somewhere, or a screen in an “Errands” category of the “To Do” section on your Palm organizer.

It’s often helpful to track sublists within individual “Errands” items. For instance, as soon as you realize you need something from the hardware store, you might want to make “Hardware Store” the list item and then append a sublist of all the things you want to pick up there, as you think of them. On the low-tech end, you could create a “Hardware Store” Post-it; on the high-tech side, if you were using a digital list, you could attach a “note” to “Hardware Store” on your list and input the details there.

Because I travel in major metropolitan areas so much, I keep
two
“Errands” lists—“Errands—Ojai” (where I live) and “Errands—Anywhere,” for all those other things I can pick up even when I’m on the road. “T-connectors for irrigation” would go on “Errands—Ojai,” but “Get dress socks” would go on “Errands—Anywhere.”

 

“Office Actions”/“At Office”
If you work in an office, there will be certain things that you can do only there, and a list of those will be a useful thing to have in front of you then—though obviously, if you have a phone and a computer in your office, and you have “Calls” and “At Computer” as separate lists,
they’ll
be in play as well. I’d use an “Office Actions” or “At Office” list for anything that required an Internet connection available only, or even most conveniently, in the office—for example, a reminder to download a large software program from the Web would go on this list for me.

 

“At Home”
Many actions can be done only at home, and it makes sense to keep a list specific to that context. I’m sure you’ve got numerous personal and around-the-house projects, and often the next thing to do
on
them is just to
do
them. “Hang new print,” “Organize CDs,” and “Switch closets to winter clothes” would be typical items for this grouping.

If you have an office at home, as I do, anything that can be done only there goes on the “At Home” list. (If you work
only
at home and don’t go to another office, you won’t need an “Office Actions” list at all—the “At Home” list will suffice.)

 

“Agendas”
Invariably you’ll find that many of your next actions need to either occur in a real-time interaction with someone or be brought up in a committee, team, or staff meeting. You have to talk to your partner about an idea for next year; you want to check with your spouse about his schedule for the spring; you need to delegate a task to your secretary that’s too complicated to explain in an e-mail. And you must make an announcement at the Monday staff meeting about the change in expense-report policies.

These next actions should be put on separate “Agenda” lists for each of those people and for that meeting (assuming that you attend it regularly). Professionals who keep a file folder to hold all the things they need to go over with their boss already use a version of this method. If you’re conscientious about determining all your next actions, though, you may find that you’ll need somewhere between three and fifteen of these kinds of lists. I recommend that separate files or lists be kept for bosses, partners, assistants, spouses, and children. You should also keep the same kind of list for your attorney, financial adviser, accountant, and/or computer consultant, as well as for anyone else with whom you might have more than one thing to go over the next time you talk on the phone.

If you participate in standing meetings—staff meetings, project meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, whatever—they, too, deserve their own files, in which you can collect things that will need to be addressed on those occasions.

Often you’ll want to keep a running list of things to go over with someone you’ll be interacting with only for a limited period of time. For instance, if you have a contractor doing a significant piece of work on your house or property, you can create a list for him for the duration of the project. As you’re walking around the site after he’s left for the day, you may notice several things you need to talk with him about, and you’ll want that list to be easy to capture and to access as needed.

Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add “Agendas” ad hoc, as needed, quickly and simply. For example, inserting a page for a person or a meeting within an “Agenda” section in a loose-leaf notebook planner takes only seconds, as does adding a dedicated “Memo” in a PDA’s “Agenda” category.

 

“Read/Review”
You will no doubt have discovered in your in-basket a number of things for which your next action is to
read
. I hope you will have held to the two-minute rule and dispatched a number of those quick-skim items already—tossing, filing, or routing them forward as appropriate.

To-read items that you know will demand more than two minutes of your time are usually best managed in a separate physical stack-basket labeled “Read/Review.” This is still a “list” by my definition, but one that’s more efficiently dealt with by grouping the documents and magazines themselves in a tray and/or portable folder.

For many people, the “Read/Review” stack can get quite large. That’s why it’s critical that the pile be reserved only for those longer-than-two-minute things that you actually
want to read when you have time
. That can be daunting enough in itself, but things get
seriously
out of control and psychologically numbing when the edges of this category are not clearly defined. A pristine delineation will at least make you conscious of the inventory, and if you’re like most people, having some type of self-regulating mechanism will help you become more aware of what you want to keep and what you should just get rid of.

It’s practical to have that stack of reading material at hand and easy to grab on the run when you’re on your way to a meeting that may be late starting, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, or a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting to get your teeth cleaned. Those are all great opportunities to crank through that kind of reading. People who don’t have their “Read/Review” material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be processed.

Like reminders of the actions
you
need to do, reminders of all the things that you’re waiting to get back from or get done by others have to be sorted and grouped. You won’t necessarily be tracking discrete action steps here, but more often final deliverables or projects that others are responsible for, such as the tickets you’ve ordered from the theater, the scanner that’s coming for the office, the OK on the proposal from your client, and so on. When the next action on something is up to someone else, you don’t need an
action
reminder, just a trigger about what you’re waiting for from whom. Your role is to review that list as often as you need to and assess whether you ought to be
taking
an action such as checking the status or lighting a fire under the project.

You’ll probably find it works best to keep this “Waiting For” list close at hand, in the same system as your own “Next Actions” reminder lists. The responsibility for the next step may bounce back and forth many times before a project is finished. For example, you may need to make a call to a vendor to request a proposal for a piece of work (on your “Calls” list.) Having made the call, you then wait for the vendor to get back to you with the proposal (the proposal goes to your “Waiting For” list). When the proposal comes in, you have to review it (it lands in your “Read/Review” stack-basket). Once you’ve gone over it, you send it to your boss for her approval (now it’s back on your “Waiting For” list). And so on.
⁷

You’ll get a great feeling when you know that your “Waiting For” list is the complete inventory of everything you care about that other people are supposed to be doing.

The most efficient way to track your action reminders is to add them to lists or folders as they occur to you. The originating trig ger won’t be needed after you have processed it. You might take notes in the meeting with your boss, but you can toss those after you’ve pulled out any projects and actions associated with them. While some people try to archive voice-mails that they still need to “do something about,” that’s not the most effective way to manage the reminders embedded in them.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. Certain kinds of input will most efficiently serve as their own reminders of required actions, rather than your having to write something about them on a list. This is particularly true for some paper-based materials and some e-mails.

Some things are their own best reminders of work to be done. The category of “Read/Review” articles, publications, and documents is the most common example. It would obviously be overkill to write “Review
Fortune
magazine” on some action list when you could just as easily toss the magazine itself into your “Read/ Review” basket to act as the trigger.

Another example: people who find it easier to deal with bills by paying them all at one time and in one location will want to keep their bills in a folder or stack-basket labeled “Bills to Pay” (or, more generically, “Financial to Process”). Similarly, receipts for expense reporting should be either dealt with at the time they’re generated or kept in their own “Receipts to Process” envelope or folder.
⁸

The specific nature of your work, your input, and your workstation may make it more efficient to organize other categories using only the original paper itself. A customer-service professional, for instance, may deal with numerous requests that show up in a standard written form, and in that case maintaining a basket or file containing only those actionable items is the best way to manage them.

Whether it makes more sense to write reminders on a list or to use the originating documents in a basket or folder will depend to a great extent on logistics. Could you use those reminders somewhere other than at your desk? If so, the portability of the material should be considered. If you couldn’t possibly
do
that work anywhere but at your desk, then managing reminders of it solely at your workstation is the better choice.

Whichever option you select, the reminders should be in visibly discrete categories based upon the next action required. If the next action on a service order is to make a call, it should be in a “Calls” group; if the action step is to review information and input it into the computer, it should be labeled “At Computer.” Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all the documents of one type (e.g., service requests) are kept in a single tray, even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone call, another needs data reviewed, and still another is waiting for someone to get back with some information—but they’re all sorted together. This arrangement can cause a person’s mind to go numb to the stack because of all the decisions that are still pending about the next-action level of doing.

My personal system is highly portable, with almost everything kept on lists, but I still maintain two categories of paper-based reminders. I travel with a “Read/Review” plastic file folder and another one labeled “Data Entry.” In the latter I put anything for which the next action is simply to input data into my computer (business cards that need to get into my telephone/address list, quotes for my “Quotes” database, articles about restaurants I want to put on my “Travel—Cities” sublists, etc.).

Like some paper-based materials, e-mails that need action are sometimes best as their own reminders—in this case within the tracked e-mail system itself. This is especially likely to be true if you get a lot of e-mail and spend a lot of your work time with your e-mail software booted up. E-mails that you need to act on may then be stored within the system instead of having their embedded actions written out on a list.

Many of my clients have found it helpful to set up two or three unique folders on their e-mail navigator bars. True, most folders in e-mail should be used for reference or archived materials, but it’s also possible to set up a workable system that will keep your actionable messages discretely organized, outside of the “in” area itself (which is where most people keep them).