The first step is to get your commitments out of
your head and onto paper or a screen. I think
paper is best for most people as the freeform
nature really helps with free flowing ideas. Run
through every aspect of your life, from work to
running your home to the fun things you’d like
to do someday. Don’t worry about order or
sorting - just get it all out of your head.
Once that is done you can sort these
commitments by type or by the part of your life
they affect. The precise name or details of these
buckets is not important. They just have to
make sense to you. I have different buckets for
client work, administration, my house and car
and for family and friends. Yours probably
should be different.
The final step is to decide for each item in each
bucket if it something to be done now, done
later, something you are waiting for or
something you need to renegotiate with
yourself or someone else.
If it is something you’re waiting for someone
else to do then record it as such. I keep a
Waiting For list where all the things people have
promised me are listed. Everything from the
DVD a pal offered to lend me to the tasks
people took away from a meeting. I may not
chase all of them, but it helps me to check this
regularly and make sure I’m stalling something
I want to do because I’m waiting for someone
else.
Finally, looking at a task I may decide that it is
something I’m just not going to do. It might no
longer be useful, or better for someone else to
do. If that is the case then there may be action
to pass it off or to tell someone that;s what I
decided. The value here is making sure I have
decided to close something. If I don’t make that
decision but just never do anything about it
then it nags away at my brain, taking my
attention from other things. By renegotiating
commitments to myself and others I can stop
that from happening.
If a task will take around two minutes or less to
complete then do it now. The time spent
writing it down and categorising it will probably
take as long as just getting it done. I try to carry
this over to everything in my life. If it will take
two minutes to do then I just get it done. I do
like to add it to my list later and then cross it off
however - I love the satisfaction of ticking
something off a list.
If a task is to be done later then it is important
to consider if it is a single task or a project. For
this approach a project is anything that takes
more than one step to complete. If it’s
something that will take more than one step,
then work out what the next action is. If I can’t
write the report until Dave has sent me the
figures then there’s no point worrying about
doing the writing. My next action is to contact
Dave and get the figures from him.
David Allen & his Book
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BUSINESS GENTLEMAN