Productivity

Identify the decision you need to make.

Examine your past bold decisions.

Ask yourself what attributes or similarities are shared between the bold decision you are considering and your prior decisions.

Consider whether there are attributes of your past bold decisions that might impede your ability to get to a good outcome for your current decision.

Apply the lessons from your past data to your current decision.

Stop reinventing the wheel. I use the same 10-19 Project management structure for every project. I have it committed to memory. (This is how I can find my scope statement in ten seconds.)

The weekly review is supposed to help you do three things: get clear, get current, and get creative.

Get Clear. Take some time to clean up your workspace and empty your inbox. Then, review your projects. Which are most important? Which ones have milestones coming up in the following week? Organize them by priority and urgency so when you start next week, you'll know what to start without having to think about it.

Get Current. Look at your calendar. Perhaps next week you have a big meeting with your boss about a big software upgrade, but you forgot to call the vendor to get the details. Put that call on the calendar for next week, and give yourself enough time to research before your meeting with your boss. Finally, check your mail for anyone you may be waiting on input from. Make notes or appointments to check in with them next week.

Get Creative. Look at those projects you've always wanted to get to, like redesigning your personal web site, and think about what small parts of those projects you might be able to slip into your schedule. Think about how you can be more efficient—maybe you're a sysadmin and there's a new tool that will cut down on the time you spend each week pushing patches to your servers. Take some time to get out in front of your life, instead of sitting in the passenger seat

First Things First: Put It On The Calendar

Get ClearCollect loose papers and materialsGet Inbox to zeroEmpty your headGet CurrentReview Action ListsReview past calendar dataReview upcoming calendarReview Waiting For listReview Project (and larger outcome) listsReview any relevant checklistsGet CreativeReview Someday/MaybeBe creative and courageous

0-15 minutes: Clean up email/paper notes. Interview notes, new contacts, and emails I want to follow up on all get filed. If there's a message I can fire a response to in a minute or two, I'll respond, but nothing that requires research.15-45 minutes: Review ideas, projects, calendar appointments. This is where I spend the bulk of my time. I look through my idea bank (stored in Wunderlist, which I mentioned last week), trash anything stale, add new ideas, and assign dates where I can. I head over to my to-do app (ReQall, another tool I love), clear out old and completed tasks, and add new or follow-up items based on my calendar, assignments, and trigger list.45-60 minutes: Brainstorming. This is where I head back to my idea bank and start brainstorming topics I want to write or learn more about, items in the news that are worth investigating, and personal projects that need my attention.

Try a Trigger ListIf you're having a hard time building a checklist, you may consider using a "trigger list" to jog your memory each week. The trigger list is just a long list of items you should scan during your weekly review to make sure you didn't forget anything. It's designed to trigger your memory and help you remember something you may have forgotten. We mentioned how you can use a trigger list for school and personal projects, and productivity guru Merlin Mann published this one at 43Folders a long time ago for professional projects.

Make Sure You're Reviewing and Not DoingOne common trap that people fall into when trying a weekly review is that they spend too much time actually doing things instead of reviewing them. If you hear someone say the weekly review only works for a small number of tasks, or that their weekly review takes hours upon hours, the problem may be that instead of scheduling a time to call that software vendor back, you're actually taking time out of your review to call them. Don't fall into that trap—it's tempting to do it now and get it off your plate, but a rule of thumb is that if the to-do takes more than 2 minutes to accomplish, stop and schedule it or put it in your to-do manager.

The idea behind the mind-sweep is to identify and gather everything that is making claims on your attention or is likely to affect the larger areas of responsibility in your life -- everything that's quietly burning cycles, stealing focus, and whittling away at your attention -- so that you can then decide what (if anything) must be done about each of those things.

Are there items on this list I now realize might have been aggravating my recent GTD slack? Did anxiety or a feeling of being overwhelmed contribute to avoiding proper planning and execution of these items? Might there be holes in my system that have made it easy for some of these items to escape and resist subsequent capture? Has my work, home life, or general focus changed in subtle ways that might make me want to rethink best use of my planning time? Are there interesting clusters within these projects that suggest opportunities and imminent change? What sorts of tasks and projects are causing the biggest pain for me now? And how can I evolve a system that helps to compensate for that?

It is not a single, atomic activity - This is the biggest one for me, by far. Maybe 80% of the time, a small project is masquerading as a single TODO. Acknowledging the multiple steps and identifying the logical next action usually does the trick for me. Change: move to “Projects” and generate true next action

It is not a physical action - “Think about proposal for Bob” seems like a next action because it’s tied to a commitment I’ve made, but imagine how much easier this would go as “Draft five or six ideas for Bob’s proposal.” Now I’m writing instead of just staring at a wall thinking about the notion of proposals. Change: Reword it as a physical activity, preferably yielding a physical artifact or new next action.

It is not really the very next action I need to take - I can frequently find at least one action that needs to take place before the one I have on the list. Bear with me here, but even “Return library books” can linger for weeks and months if you first need to find the one missing book that mentally keeps you from proceeding. This is a thorny one, since a legitimate future action can seem like the next action, even when it really is not. Change: walk backwards through your steps until you can derive the true next physical action.

It is not something I’ve actually committed to - “Learn Regular Expressions” is something I’m really interested in, but, in addition to actually being a potential Project (not a next action), it’s not something about which I have a stake in the ground. Until I’m ready to make it part of my immediate actions, it’s just guilt-inducing cruft. Change: move to “Someday/Maybe/On-Hold” or “@Tech”

It is poorly defined or just badly worded - This is a catch-all for stragglers that may be addressed by many of the fixes above, but I draw it out separately here for a good reason: changing the way you define or word something also changes the way you think about it. Try always beginning your next actions with a physical verb. “Email,” “Call,” “Google,” “Recode,” “Visit,” and “Buy” all encompass physical actions, and often context. Change: try re-phrasing your next action as a specific contextual activity

It is nothing I can act on now - This is usually the result of lazy or infrequent reviews. If an item on your list is something that has a dependency with another person or just takes time until follow-up, get it out of there. Alternatively, rephrase it as your physical followup that you want to perform as soon as possible (“Call Jean to check progress on perl script”). Change: move to “Waiting On” or reshape it as a true next action for yourself

Next actions: Both physical _and_ visible

The thing is, I now see how items like these can’t really be “done” at all; each one of those things is actually a complex, multiple-item project with built-in dependencies and waiting time. To look at any of them as a single thing I need to do is to buy into the anxiety-inducing premise that my goals and behaviors should somehow mirror each other on a one-to-one basis. If you think about it, that’s plainly ridiculous.

A more reasonable approach using GTD would be to focus just on that next physical activity needed to undertake each project; even if it seems like a trivial activity. In order: Find old résumé in file cabinet Call gym to see when membership expires Start a running list of everyone I need to buy Christmas gifts for

write - Once you've gathered any amount of information -- and, seriously, don't go to committee forever on this stuff -- try writing a letter, email, one-page-report, or even a theoretical blog post about your topic. No one ever needs to see it, but if you were to explain everything you've learned about your new topic alongside how you feel about it, you might be surprised to discover you know, think, and feel more than you had realized before you started writing. My layman's theory here is that writing puts demands on the left side of your brain to turn mushy clouds of ideas into semi-coherent pyramids of information. (Sometimes those pyramids will end up looking more like they were created by a dog's behind than having arisen from the dream-visions of Pharaohs, but you'll never find out until you commit that "Shitty First Draft")

agenda - If you have a big pile of a little questions that can wait for now, just capture them all into your list for "agenda-boss," "agenda-team," "agenda-spouse" or what have you. You can then quickly blow through them all at one time.

all - Some of the information you need to make decisions is almost certainly available in the brain of someone close to you. When needed, make a short call to someone who you think can help guide your way. This could be anything from the person in the next cube to a customer service line to a library reference desk to that wisest of institutional historians, your Mom. Again, all the usual admonitions about respecting time still apply, but a phone call, used efficiently, can be the fastest path to an answer.

email - Once you've given yourself an independent education on a topic and feel that you've learned enough to ask good questions, consider writing a short email asking for advice and input from a colleague or people on your team. All the usual rules apply here, but a fast email along the lines of "Do you have a preference in foo over bar, and why?" can be a quick way to bring one honeycomb of the hive mind's experience quickly into play.

Project verbs Finalize Resolve Handle Look into Submit Maximize Organize Design Complete Ensure Roll out Update Install Implement Set-up

Next-action verbs Call Organize Review Buy Fill out Find Purge Look into (Web) Gather Print Take Waiting for Load Draft Email

This causes many of us to fashion more or less phoney-baloney "sub-contexts" that reflect some facet of the parent (e.g. "@computer" might contain "@email," "@web," "@code," "@print," and so on). While this makes terrific sense from a logical standpoint (and it can certainly have its uses), it doesn't reflect the true meaning of a context, at least in my own mind: "what tools, resources, opportunities, and limitations are unique to this situation?" or put slightly differently from the perspective of choosing tasks at a given time, "what are the things I can't work on now given where I am and the tools to which I have access?"

The magic of GTD is that it gets things out of my head and into a system so I can stay in the moment.

If you don’t already have a “waiting for” folder in your email, you need one. This is the folder I keep in my email where I drag sent messages that I’m waiting for a response on. I go through it basically daily, and it’s fascinating to see how often I haven’t heard back about something and need to follow up on it, and which I otherwise might have forgotten about until the lack of answer popped up as a problem. I do this not just for work emails, but personal ones too, like the person in my homeowners association who was supposed to get me an answer to a question about dues but didn’t, or any other question that I need the answer to but might otherwise forget that I’m waiting on until months later. Yes, this does make me the annoying person who will follow up with you when it’s been a week since I emailed you a question and I haven’t heard back. It also makes me the person who gets the answers I need and doesn’t discover weeks later that some crucial bit of info never arrived.

1. Projects are defined as outcomes that will require more than one action step to complete and that you can mark off as finished in the next 12 months. 2. Think of your Projects list as a current table of contents of the current outcomes on your plate. 3. Most people have 10-100 current projects, personally and professionally. 4. Current projects have at least one next action, waiting for, or calendar action, in order to be considered current. 5. Projects that have no current next action, waiting for, or calendar action are either no longer projects for you, or should be incubated to Someday/Maybe. 6. Future actions (i.e., actions that are dependent on something else happening first) do not go on the Next Actions lists until you can take action on them. They get stored with project plans. 7. The Projects list and project plans are typically reviewed in your GTD Weekly Review, ensuring each project has at least one current next action, waiting for, or calendar item. 8. It’s fine to have multiple next actions on any given project, as long as they are parallel and not sequential actions (e.g., “Buy stamps” and “Mail invitations” would not both be on Next Actions lists for the “Put on Party for David” project given that you need to buy the stamps before you can mail the invitations). 9. Projects are listed by the outcome you will achieve when you can mark it as done (what will be true?). 10. Effective project names motivate you toward the outcome you wish to achieve, and give you clear direction about what you are trying to accomplish.

Complete the task right away if it takes less than two minutes. If the project allows, look for task delegation opportunities. Put reference items like documents, files, contact information, etc., in the comment section of a specific task. If you need to complete a task in the future, assign a due date. Delete any elements that are irrelevant in a personal or professional context.

Calendar: You need to enter appointments in your calendar. You can start using calendar apps, as these are more efficient than paper-based calendars. Next Actions: The tasks that are not fit for any project should be in the Next Actions list. You can have different context-specific lists like chores, personal, work, phone calls, etc. Projects: You need to organize projects in a separate list based on the contexts. Assign specific deadlines for each task of a project and review the project list daily. Waiting For: If you delegate some project tasks to others, then you should maintain a reminder list for those tasks.

Context: You’ll have different tasks related to work, life, and hobbies. These are known as contexts. You need to create separate to-do lists for each of these contexts. Time Available: If you have about 15 minutes while driving to your destination, you can probably stop at a grocery store to purchase items you listed on your shopping list. Energy Available: Schedule complex tasks for the time when you’re more energetic. Leave the simple tasks for low energy level hours. Priority: You can also identify what to do next depending on the priority of the tasks in a to-do list.