Author: David Allen

ISBN:978-0143126560

Organization is the cornerstone of any individual or organisation that wants to become and stay effective. Improve (organization of) input and increase output. Very practical tips on why to write every information down, how to organize it and act on it! A true gem!

EXCERPTS

Most stress they experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept. [Sivers: Hell yes or no!]

You’ve probably made many more agreements with yourself than you realize, and every single one of them—big or little—is being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you. [Write everything down and clear your mind!] [Improve (organization of) input and increase output.]

In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and capture all those things that are “ringing your bell” in some way, clarify what, exactly, they mean to you, and then make a decision about how to move on them.

The real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required.

As the workflow diagram makes clear, the next-action decision is central. That action needs to be the next physical, visible behavior, without exception, on every open loop.

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are:

1. clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and
2. reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. [My recommendation; have as little tools as possible. I use Microsoft Outlook and OneNote to organize all my tasks and reminders!]

[Information doesn't have any worth if you cannot access it when you need it. In other words: Stored information should be properly ordered.]

You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

In my experience, when people do more planning, informally and naturally, they relieve a great deal of stress and obtain better results.

To know and to be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for appropriate focus, creative development, and cooperation.

And if you’re not totally clear about the purpose of what you’re doing, you have no chance of winning. Purpose defines success. It’s the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy, from deciding to run for elective office to designing a form.

Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to the purpose of what you’re doing.

If you’re not sure why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.

Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold. Although people seldom think about these consciously, they are always there. And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: “I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they . . .” As long as they what? What policies, stated or unstated, will apply to your group’s activities? “As long as they stayed within budget”? “satisfied the client”? “ensured a healthy team”? “promoted a positive image”? It can be a major source of stress when others engage in or allow behavior that’s outside your standards.

“You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

You often need to make it up in your mind before you can make it happen in your life. [QBism]

We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we’re trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks complete as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basic principles, however, can be summed up as follows: Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize. Go for quantity, not quality. Put analysis and organization in the background.

Making a list can be a creative thing to do; it’s a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

The Basics of Organizing:

1. Identify the significant pieces.
2. Sort by (one or more): components sequences priorities.
3. Detail to the required degree.
4. The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving.

When the Next Action Is Someone Else’s . . . If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the Waiting For action list). In a group-planning situation, it isn’t necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of the project. Often all that’s required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces.

How much of this planning model do you really need to flesh out, and to what degree of detail? The simple answer is, as much as you need to get the project off your mind.

In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.

A functional workspace is critical. If you don’t already have a dedicated workspace and in-tray, get them now. That goes for students, homemakers, and retirees, too. Everyone must have a physical locus of control from which to deal with everything else.

You must have a dedicated, individual, self-contained workspace—at home, at work, and even in transit.

Don’t skimp on workspace at home. As you’ll discover through this process, it’s critical that you have at least a satellite home system identical to the one in your office.

It is imperative that you have your own workspace—or at least your own in-tray and a place in which to process paper and physical material. Too many couples I’ve worked with have tried to work out of a single desk at home, and it always makes light-years of difference when they expand to two workstations.

Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch. You''l need:

• a desktop workspace,
• Paper-holding trays (at least three)
• A stack of plain letter-size paper
• A pen/pencil
• Post-its (3×3"s)
• Paper clips
• A stapler and staples
• Scotch tape
• Rubber bands
• An automatic labeler
• File folders
• A calendar
• Wastebasket/recycling bins
• Current tools being used for data capture, organizing, and to-do lists, including mobile devices, personal computers, and paper-based planners and notebooks (if any)

Until you’ve captured everything that has your attention, some part of you will still not totally trust that you’re working with the whole picture of your world.

If throwing something away is uncomfortable for you, you should keep it. Otherwise you would have attention on the fact that you now don’t have something you might want or need. [Hmm?]

Processing Guidelines The best way to learn this model is by doing. But there are a few basic rules to follow: Process the top item first. Process one item at a time. Never put anything back into “in.”

The cognitive scientists have now proven the reality of “decision fatigue”—that every decision you make, little or big, diminishes a limited amount of your brain power. Deciding to “not decide” about an e-mail or anything else is another one of those decisions, which drains your psychological fuel tank.

Too much information creates the same result as too little: you don’t have what you need, when and in the way you need it.

Because digital storage, without much forethought, has become almost automatic, it is very possible to create an environment of constant input but no utilization. You are creating a library so big and overwhelming, you have limited your capacity to make it functional for the work that’s important for you to do. The key here is the regular reviewing and purging of outdated information, as well as more conscious filtering on the front end, as you’re processing your input: “Is this really necessary or useful for me to keep, or can I trust that I can access it from the Internet or other sources if I need it?”

There will probably be things in your in-tray about which you will say to yourself, “There’s nothing to do on this now, but there might be later.” There are two options that could work: Write them on a Someday/Maybe list. Put a reminder of them on your calendar or in a tickler file. Determine what physical activity needs to happen to get you to decide.

You have three options once you decide what the next action really is: Do it (if the action takes less than two minutes). Delegate it (if you’re not the most appropriate person to do the action). Defer it into your organization system as an option for work to do later.

If you have a long open window of time in which to process your in-tray, you can extend the cutoff for each item to five or ten minutes.

If the next action is going to take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, “Am I the best person to be doing it?” If not, hand it off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format.

Delegation is not always downstream. You may decide, “This has got to get over to Customer Service,” or “My boss needs to put her eyes on this next,” or “I need my partner’s point of view on this.”

Tracking the Handoff: If you do delegate an action to someone else, and if you care at all whether something happens as a result, you’ll need to track it. It’s important that you record the date on everything that you hand off to others.

Again, I define a project as any outcome you’re committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete.

If the action step you’ve identified will not complete the commitment, then you’ll need some stake in the ground to keep reminding you of actions you have pending until you have closure. You need to make a list of projects.

As I’ve said, you shouldn’t bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you’ll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change. Attempting to impose such scaffolding has been a big source of frustration in many people’s organizing. You’ll be prioritizing more intuitively as you see the whole list against quite a number of shifting variables. The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review.

You’ll want to sort all of this into groupings that make sense to you so you can review them as options for work to do when you have time. You’ll also want to divide them in the most appropriate way physically to organize those groups, whether as items in folders or on lists, either paper based or digital.

What many want to do, however, based on perhaps old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that actually might not, and that might then have to be moved to following days. Resist this impulse.

Over many years I have discovered that the best way to be reminded of an “as soon as I can” action is by the particular context required for that action—that is, either the tool or the location or the situation needed to complete it. For instance, if the action requires a computer, it should go on an At Computer list. If your action demands that you be out and moving around in the world (such as stopping by the bank or going to the hardware store), the Errands list would be the appropriate place to track it. If the next step is to talk about something face-to-face with your partner, Emily, putting it into an “Emily” folder or list makes the most sense.

If, however, you have fifty or a hundred next actions pending, keeping all of those on one big list would make it too difficult to see what you need to see; each time you got any window of time to do something, you’d have to do unproductive re-sorting.

Another productivity factor that this kind of organization supports is leveraging your energy when you’re in a certain mode. When you’re in “phone mode,” it helps to make a lot of phone calls—just crank down your Calls list. When your computer is up and running and you’re cruising along digitally, it’s useful to get as much done online as you can without having to shift into another kind of activity. It takes more energy than most people realize to unhook out of one set of behaviors and get into another kind of rhythm and tool set. [Batch!]

You’ll probably find that at least a few of the following common list headings for next actions will make sense for you: Calls, At Computer, Errands, At Office, (miscellaneous), At Home, Anywhere, Agendas (for people and meetings), Read/Review

Manage the commitments of others before their avoidance creates a crisis.

Waiting For list; the primary reason for organizing is to reduce cognitive load—i.e. to eliminate the need to constantly be thinking, “what do i need to do about this?”

* If you happen to have a lifestyle that seldom has more than one screenful of un-dealt with e-mails at any one time, simply keeping them there as a reminder of your work at hand would probably suffice. As soon as the volume expands to something you can’t see at a glance, then organizing them outside your “in” area makes much more sense.

What seems to work best for many is to copy (“cc” or “bcc”) themselves when they delegate via e-mail, and then to put that copy into their “@WAITING FOR” folder.

Again, getting “in” empty doesn’t mean you’ve handled everything. It means that you’ve deleted what you could, filed what you wanted to keep but don’t need to act on, done the less-than-two-minute responses, and moved into your reminder folders all the things you’re waiting for and all your actionable e-mails. Now you can open the @ACTION file and review the e-mails that you’ve determined you need to spend time on.

In order to hang out with friends or take a long, aimless walk and truly have nothing on your mind, you’ve got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. And you need to be able to do that in a few seconds, not days.

Remember, you can’t do a project; you can only do the action steps it requires. Being aware of the horizon represented by your projects, however, is critical for extending your comfort with your control and focus into longer reaches of time. The real value of the Projects list lies in the complete review it can provide (at least once a week), ensuring that you have action steps defined for all of your projects and that nothing is slipping through the cracks.

When you assess something as a problem instead of as something to simply be accepted as the way things are, you are assuming there is a potential resolution. Whether there is or not might still need to be determined. But at the very least you have some research to do to find out.

Putting your big projects on the Projects list and holding the subpieces in your project support material, making sure to include them in your Weekly Review. That often makes it easier to see the larger field of what’s going on in your life from a higher perspective, at a glance.

The bad news about the good news of the huge assortment of options for digital project support is the ease with which we are seduced into spreading potentially meaningful information into such a multiplicity of locations and mechanisms that it can take us almost back to square one: we don’t know where it all is, can’t see it all integrated for appropriate over-viewing from the right perspective at the right time,

You’ll also want to clear out many of your notes once they become inactive, unreal, or redundant, to keep the whole system from catching the “stale” virus.

Bear in mind that if your area of focus has support material that could blend into other areas of focus, you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files.

As a rule, it’s best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

Reassess Your Current Projects: Now’s a good time to review your Projects list from a more elevated perspective (that is, the standpoint of your job, goals, and personal commitments) and consider whether you might transfer some of your current commitments to Someday/Maybe. If on reflection you realize that an optional project doesn’t have a chance of getting your attention for the next few months or more, move it to this list.

One of the most creative ways to utilize the calendar function is to enter things that you want to take off your mind and reassess at some later date. Here are a few of the myriad things you should consider inserting: Triggers for activating projects, Events you might want to participate in, Decision catalysts. When the day arrives, you see the reminder and insert the item as an active project on your Projects list. Typical candidates for this treatment are: Special events with a certain lead time for handling (product launches, fund-raisers, etc.), Regular events that you need to prepare for, such as budget reviews, annual conferences, planning events, or meetings (e.g., when should you add next year’s “Annual sales conference” or “Get kids set up for next school year” to your Projects list?), Key dates for significant people that you might want to do something about (birthdays, anniversaries, holiday gift giving, etc.).

Once in a while there may be a significant decision that you need to make but can’t (or don’t want to) right away. That’s fine, in terms of your own self-management process, as long as you’ve concluded that the additional information you need has to come from an internal rather than an external source (e.g., you need to sleep on it), or there is a good reason to delay your decision until a last responsible moment (allowing all factors to be as current as possible before you choose how to move on it). Some typical decision areas in this category include: Hire/fire, Merge/acquire/sell/divest, Change job/career, Potential strategy redirection.

Checklists can be highly useful to let you know what you don’t need to be concerned about.

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues.

Your best thoughts about work won’t happen while you’re at work.

An additional aspect of this future-thinking dynamic is the value of staying immensely flexible and informal about goal setting. A significant change in this area has been pioneered in the software world, as “agile programming” has become the norm for successful start-ups. Have a vision, do your best to imagine what it might look like, get cranking on producing something as a viably marketable first iteration, and then “dynamically steer,” maturing both your vision as well as how to implement it, based on real feedback from your real world.

If you have a bunch of things to do on one to-do list, but you actually can’t do many of them in the same context, you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.

If choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice based on your best call, that’s playing the game the most effective way you can.

Most people, however, have major improvements to make in how they clarify, manage, and renegotiate their total inventory of projects and actions. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgency of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you’re not dealing with, the result is frustration and anxiety.

If you’re not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.

When you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s really important to you, you’ll never know when enough is enough.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. [I do not agree: you always choose battles you think you can win. There is no objective criteria what you can and cannot do. At best it is a matter of credences. However, the latter never show that something is impossible. QBism.]

I’ve discovered that the biggest improvement opportunity in planning does not consist of techniques for the highly elaborate and complex kinds of project organizing that professional project managers sometimes use (like Gantt charts). Most of the people who need those already have them, or at least have access to the training and software required to learn about them. The real need is to capture and utilize more of the creative, proactive thinking we do—or could do. [Invaluable for me: Notes app on iPhone and Just.Press.Record on Apple Watch. I can always put down what pops into my head, even when backcountry skiing.]

The major reason for the lack of this kind of effective value-added thinking is the dearth of easily structured and usable systems for managing the potentially infinite amount of detail that could show up as a result. That is why my approach tends to be bottom-up. If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you’ll resist focused planning; an unconscious pushback occurs.

If you have room for them, whiteboards and/or easel pads are very functional thinking tools to use from time to time. Whiteboards are great to have on a wall in your office and in meeting rooms, and the bigger the better. Some companies have designed whole internal walls as erasable writing surfaces, fostering brainstorming and ad hoc visual communications. If you have children, I recommend that you install one in their bedrooms (I wish I had grown up with the encouragement to have as many ideas as I could!). Be sure to keep plenty of fresh markers on hand—nothing stifles creative thinking faster than dry and useless writing tools. [Make sure the ink is removable!]

I suggest, however, that the value of smartphones and the like is for the execution of the results of thinking—not for generating creative thought.

Let our advance worrying become our advance thinking and planning.

Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there’s always too much to do. If you felt bad simply because there was more to do than you could do, you’d never get rid of that feeling. Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling. It comes from a different place. How have you felt when someone broke an agreement with you, told you they would meet you Thursday at four p.m. and never showed or called? How did that feel? Frustrating, I imagine. The price people pay when they break an agreement in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship—an automatic negative consequence. But what are all those things in your in-tray? Agreements you’ve made or at least implicitly accepted with yourself—things you somehow have told yourself you should deal with in some way. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration. Resolve to spend more time with your kids and then don’t—voila! anxious and overwhelmed.

The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.

How Do You Prevent Broken Agreements with Yourself? If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences: Don’t make the agreement. Complete the agreement. Renegotiate the agreement.

It has been a popular concept in the self-help world that focusing on your values will simplify your life. I contend the opposite: the overwhelming amount of things that people have to do comes from their values.

One of your better weekends may be spent just finishing up a lot of little errands and tasks that have accumulated around your house and in your personal life.

There’s another issue here, however. How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days (if not three minutes!), guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one, with more potentially daunting things to do on it! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.

Having to bail water in a leaky boat undermines your ability to direct it and move it forward.

People often grimace when I tell them that my wife and I put things in each other’s in-trays, even when we’re sitting within a few feet of each other; to them it seems cold and mechanical. Aside from being an act of politeness intended to avoid interrupting the other’s work in progress, the practice actually fosters more warmth and freedom between us, because mechanical things are being handled in the system instead of tying up our attention on the relationship.

When a culture adopts “what’s the next action?” as a standard operating query, there’s an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.

Who doesn’t procrastinate? Often it’s the insensitive oafs who just take something and start plodding forward, unaware of all the things that could go wrong. [Or, you could very well be aware of things that could go wrong. But you do it anyway. You'd feel worse if you didn't try than if you failed!]

The problem is that most people wait to do it until the next action is “Call the Auto Club for tow truck!” So when do you think most people really make a lot of their next-action decisions about their stuff—when it shows up, or when it blows up?

Which do you think is the more efficient way to move through life—deciding next actions on your projects as soon as they appear on your radar screen and then efficiently grouping them into categories of actions that you get done in certain uniform contexts, or avoiding thinking about what, exactly, needs to be done until it has to be done, then sputtering through your actions as you try to catch up and put out the fires?

Avoiding action decisions until the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress. [This is a very common reason for a bad atmosphere within companies.]

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

Long-term does not mean “someday/ maybe.” Those projects with distant goal lines are still to be done as soon as possible; long-term simply means “more action steps until it’s done,” not “no need to decide next actions because the day of reckoning is so far away.”

Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, “So what’s the next action?” People will complain only about something that they assume could be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. If it can be changed, there’s some action that will change it. If it can’t, it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated in strategy and tactics.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them. —George Bernard

You can’t really define the right action until you know the outcome you’re after. [Ultimate question: What is the purpose of life? You can only know if you live well/ how to live, if you know the answer to the ultimate question!]

An idealist believes that the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.