Next Actions

Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking

Merlin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:47:32 -0400

The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen's GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.

When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here's how I'd summarize each:

Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. Or as I like to put it, "How will I know when I'm done with this?"
The Next Action. Knowing that you don't need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project; you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion.
The Review. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you're doing gets looked at once a week without fail.

While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people's results change over time.

If you focus on trying to master these three things in the service of stuff you think is valuable, you're going to accomplish some grand work.

Slightly related, I wanted to share a modest, GTD-esque idea for a fast way to identify the actual Project and Next Action from within a big bunch of "stuff."

Think about the thing that's most on your mind right now. It's probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that's really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let's say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it's:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I've said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you're feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.

”Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Missing iPhone To-Do App: Not Missed

wood.tang — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:05:33 -0500

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I'll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven't felt the need for a to-do app at all. It's an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it's turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.

I work with serious time constraints. As a stay-at-home parent, I need to think hard about what I can actually accomplish with my son hanging on my pant leg, or during a few hours of nap time in the afternoon. Very rarely do I execute the classic GTD use case where I say, "Let's see, I'm at my desk right now with a phone and a computer: so let's look at my @calls, @online, and @printer lists to see what I can do." Instead, it's usually, "He's occupied with his Legos for next 10 minutes, so what's the most important thing I can knock out before he starts screaming for a popsicle."

In that sense, my contexts are "with the kid" and "without the kid." I'm very limited in what I can do con toddler, and I have to be prepared to do everything possible the second that status changes to sin toddler. So carrying around my entire task list, sliced and diced into neat contexts with due dates and dependencies to peruse at my leisure, doesn't do me a lot of good.

Years ago I was a dedicated Palm/Treo user, but during one of my patented switches I decided to scale back to carrying a standard cell phone plus some index cards or a notebook to keep track of stuff. Until last week, I'd been working this way for over a year, and I've developed some pretty useful ways for planning ahead, printing out a portable copy of my agenda or jotting down a subset of my larger list to do each day. Instead of carrying every possible contingency by default, I had a conservative, tactical plan.

Part of this grew out of necessity; I simply couldn't go running back to the computer every few minutes to look at iCal. But it also fit my new "work" environment. I needed something fast and easy on which to scribble reminders, something impervious to pureed foods and projectile fluids, something easy to shove into a pocket while I was juggling a squirmy kid, dog leash, diaper bag, and stroller handle. And because it wasn't an entire list of everything on my plate, it made me focus on just the few things I could reasonably tackle that day, instead of being paralyzed about what I couldn't.

So why bother with an iPhone at all? I don't really have to answer that, do I? It certainly upgrades the ways I can waste that interstitial time waiting on the boy to finish his lunch. And I'm not above peeking at my email to start thinking ahead about what I have to work on later. But I don't really miss that iPhone to-do app, because had it been there, I wouldn't have given up my notebook anyway.

”The Missing iPhone To-Do App: Not Missed” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dear Me: Get to work

Ethan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:32:09 -0400

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I'd scan through my context lists and I'd see things like:

Pack box up

Ask Bob about meeting

Review new design book

Send Cherry income information

Scanning down a list of actions in a context list should be like running your hand across a silk sheet. Scanning through these tasks felt less like silk and more like sand paper. Pack what into the box? What did I need to know about the meeting? Review the book for what, specifically?

With a moment's thought I could remember what I meant when I wrote most of these tasks, but they were difficult (if not impossible) to scan through, select rapidly and then act on. I was losing speed. Mind less like water, more like ketchup.

Insight

Looking back, it's not hard to see what the problem was: unclear writing. I simply wasn't being descriptive enough. Yet for the longest time I didn't see this. The actions were "understandable enough" with a bit of work. That "bit of work", of course, is the silent killer of GTD. Anytime you are putting in work to decipher your system, your energy and productivity are being slowly siphoned away.

Tasks must be immediately clear without needing interpretation. To use a geeky metaphor, they are precompiled instructions waiting for execution, not a script that's interpreted at run time.

After I realized this, I tried to address it, but I ended up with excessive detail (and thus wasted time in the planning stage) or fell back into old habits of too little information.

Then I started using a hack: I stopped deferring my tasks and started getting someone else to do them for me.

Solution: Write your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

Ok, back to reality: it would be nice if there was someone willing to actually do all my tasks, but that's not the case. None the less, I stopped writing my tasks down as if I was going to do them later, and I started to literally write as if I was delegating them to someone else.

To make this trick work, you need a delegatee firmly in mind:

Someone real. It doesn't help if, every time you are going to faux-delegate, you have to re-imagine some fictional character.
Ideally someone a bit outside your knowledge domain. This prevents a certain laziness in phrasing tasks.
Someone that you don't normally delegate a lot of tasks to. Again, avoiding the "common knowledge" problem.

Every time I draft a task, I am mentally writing it as if I will be handing my context list over to someone else (in this case, it's my wife Bee since she's at least twice as clever as I am but whose work has little overlap with mine). These are, of course, all my tasks, but I am quite literally delegating (not simply deferring) when I'm writing them down.

Example

Revisiting the poorly written task in my example above, I keep my delegatee firmly in mind and tell them to:

Pack winter clothes in corner of bedroom into airmail box

Ask Bob for the date of the next website revamp meeting

Review "Page Design" book for three examples of three column page layout

Send Cherry second quarter income statements (doc link in notes)

Why this works

The secret to all this is that, when you are writing down your deferred tasks "normally", in truth you're actually delegating but you just don't realize it. You are simply delegating to your future self. The problem is that, in our present-self state of mind when planning tasks, we are filling in the gaps in our writing with present-knowledge. This knowledge fades quickly and by the time our future-self picks up the work, the mortar of that transient information has dissolved, turning what seemed to be a solid, actionable task into an unclear jumble of words. By shifting our mindset from "I'll do this later" to "I need to assign this to so-and-so", we hack around this problem.

So tighten up the descriptiveness of your tasks today: defer as if you delegate. And when you finally have an army of minions that you really can delegate your every whim to, you'll be ready with tasks in hand.

”Dear Me: Get to work” was written by Ethan Schoonover for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

GTD: Project Verbs vs. Next-Action Verbs

Merlin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 07:29:40 -0500

In implementing Getting Things Done, you're wise to understand that words are powerful things. And the king of words in GTD, as in life, is the verb.

How you articulate an activity or how you choose to frame a project within the context of your larger life and work will say a lot about how successful you can be in turning all your "stuff" into atomic actions that will work in support of valuable outcomes. This starts with simple things like beginning next actions with a physical verb, but there's actually a lot more subtlety (and potential confusion) to it.

In fact, one of the hang-ups that many people encounter in planning their work in GTD is that, no matter how hard they try, they can never seem to get the distinction between single-action verbs and the larger "look-into" style projects that may require sub-actions. This comes up a lot, and it can lead to frustration and untold friction.

Well, if you've ever shared this affliction of not knowing your verbs from a hole in the ground, I have some rare and unexpected GTD gold.

Buried in the companion booklet for the Getting Things Done FAST! CD set (currently out of print) is one of the more useful bits of GTD instruction I've seen outside the book. It's a list of "Project Verbs" versus "Next-Action Verbs" and, man, is it ever useful.

These materials (which I'd never seen anywhere else before) provide a powerful codebook for translating your own language and thinking into planning that is do-able and valuable. Put simply, there are verbs that suggest a single physical next action, and there are verbs that suggest a desired outcome with more than one step. And these tables can help you see and understand that distinction immediately.

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

Get the distinction? Most all of those big verbs can and should be uncorked to reveal that they contain nothing but dozens of smaller verbs. And those little fellas are your physical next actions. That's your work.

I really wish I'd had these tables taped over my desk three years ago when I started doing GTD, because -- geeky as it sounds -- they're a kind of rosetta stone for ensuring that you correctly translate your stuff into either tasks or containers for tasks. So useful.

Getting that taxonomy and structure correct during the planning stage will do much to improve your life when it comes time for doing.

”GTD: Project Verbs vs. Next-Action Verbs” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 14, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)

Merlin — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:17:02 -0400

In one of the recent podcast interviews I did with David Allen, we talked about procrastination and how he tries to get people -- especially knowledge workers -- back to just "cranking widgets."

I love this term, because, in his humorous way, David captures how any thing we want to accomplish in this world eventually has to manifest itself in an intentional physical activity. Seemingly over-huge super-projects like "World Peace," "Cancer Cure," or "Find Mutually Satisfying Vehicle for Jim Belushi" all still come down to physical actions, such as picking up a phone or typing an email.

And David is wise, in that interview, also to highlight the importance of what he refers to as a "'look-into' project," which just means that even deciding if a project is interesting and useful to undertake can be a project in itself. It also means that, even with an outcome of "deciding," that meta-project still consists solely of physical actions. In this case, it's the physical actions that help you locate the additional information you'll need to make a timely and wise decision about whether to proceed at all. In sum, no matter what, it all still should come back to widgets and how they get cranked.

Like a lot of you, I've struggled with how you turn "thinky work" into physical action widgets, but here are a few of my favorite task-verbs to get you started in the right direction. They're presented here in a rough approximation of the order in which I use them in my own "look-into" projects:

web-research - Usually my first stop in learning the broadest possible information about anything. And, for me, that means I'm primarily visiting two sites: Wikipedia and Google. Go to either or both and just type in the keywords that get you started. Then just follow your nose for a few minutes. If you started every project with 20 minutes of Wikipedia and Google time, you'd already be so much further along than if you'd just sat around staring into space, waiting for kismet to bring you a slice of cake. At least now you have something to start with. Yes, you probably have your own go-to sites for this kind of work; just do remember to use them.
brainstorm - Try doodling, free writing, white-boarding, or mind-mapping to freely generate ideas, possibilities, and connections. Whatever works best for you in your own situation. You must give yourself permission to really cut loose and not evaluate here -- as they say, the goal is quantity not quality. You're just looking to stimulate new nouns and verbs that that can provide hooks into finding more information. Lightly structured brainstorming is the best way to shape unrelated and seemingly unconnected material into a useful map for further action.
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.
call - 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.
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. (And yes, Professor Grammarpants, this is technically a verb, since it's just a short way of writing "Ask n person next time I see them...")
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")

You'll notice I left off the verb you were really casting about for here, which is almost certainly "**decide**." This is not an oversight.

This one I can't help you with, because -- unless you own and utilize a jokey "Executive Decision Maker" purchased from the Sky Mall catalog -- deciding is most definitely not a physical action.

Deciding, as I hope you learned today, is actually a kind of project outcome. Trying to pretend it's an action, as your author has painfully discovered, is like trying to see our notional dog's yard pyramid as an "@dogbowl" action; that's simply not how it works and it completely confuses the process and order of thinking vs. deciding vs. doing.

Decisions can only be delivered after you've nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information. Once the fetal decision has consumed these sufficient data, a bouncy baby outcome cannot help but be born. You just need to be there to slap it on the ass and give it a good name. Just please don't call it a verb.

”6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II

Merlin — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:09:00 -0400

Conclusion of our two-part series on improving the quality of your to-do list. Yesterday's post covered some basics and whys, the concept of the “next action,” and the importance of physicality.

« Start with yesterday's “Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I”

Keep it Current

While you can and probably should track more than one next action at a time for each project (these are all the things that can be done now), it's vital to differentiate a true next action from any of the garden-variety items that just need to be done at some point later. In other words, be careful not to to turn your to-do list into an ad hoc project plan.

Now, now, now

Avoid the trap of littering your horizon with piles of crufty pseudo-tasks that can't actually be addressed (or, almost as often, can't be addressed yet). While you want to always stay aware of future obligations and the work that they are likely to generate, the to-do list is absolutely not the place to do it. Keep your to-do list a sacred tabernacle for current activity, and maintain longer-term task and support materials as well as appointments where they belong--in a project support folder and your calendar, respectively.

Remember: you should theoretically be able to choose any item from your list and, given the proper tools and context, start on the task immediately. Reveal hidden dependencies and move the later items someplace else; there’s no shame in tracking the small task that will keep things moving (and doing it is even better).

Trim, toss, and refactor

Make a habit of pruning your list of completed, dead, and obviated tasks. To be effective, your list should be alive-- a functional dashboard for understanding the immediate work at hand. And remember: your to-do list is not the place to park your ambitions or test the limits of your grasp. Constantly break tasks down and down to the most atomic work possible, and be ruthless about moving (or deleting) stuff that belongs someplace else.

Why Am I Doing This Task?

This is important. When compiling a list of all the stuff that's on your mind (and on your plate), it's crucial to unpack how each task you accept or assign to yourself will support your projects, your roles, and the goals you've set for yourself. Before adding a new item, reflect on the value that each chunk of work brings to your world.

Is this the best use of my time right now?
Am I the best person to do this task?
Is this something that must be done now? Why now?
What happens if I don't do this at all?

To illustrate the significance of these questions in the grand scheme of things , I'll borrow (and freely butcher) an image from developer Joel Spolsky. Try imagining your available time and resources as a wooden box--a fixed amount of space that can only contain so many cubic inches of “stuff.” You'll be filling that box with wooden blocks of varying sizes, each of which represents a separate task on your list. The bigger the block, the more time that task will take (and the more metaphorical space it will require in your box). Got it?

Let's say your notional box has 8 average-sized blocks in it right now, with a maximum occupancy of about 10 blocks. Now, let's imagine you're thinking of adding 5 big new blocks to the box. Well, you have some decisions to make now, don't you? Some of those blocks might fit easily into a team member's box (hello, delegation), while others might be reduced in size to fit the available space. But more often then not, you're going to have to do the painfully obvious and just free up some space--either by removing some old blocks or by forgoing the addition of new ones. Of course, it doesn't go without reiterating that the smaller the blocks (tasks) you choose to add, the more flexibility you have in adding and moving blocks; think about how (what becomes) that big IKEA bookcase arrives in that flat little carton.

Remember: for the sake of this visualization, making your task box any bigger is not an option, no more than you can add a few hours to your day or a couple weeks to your month. So the only variable in your control is what you decide to put in or take out--what tasks will you choose. The bottom line is that both those blocks and the box are ultimately your responsibility, so brace yourself for some hard decisions on where your priorities lie.

If it’s on your list, it’s a commitment

Try to keep this box image forefront in your mind whenever you're tempted (or compelled) to shovel more work into an already-teeming inbox. Look at each addition to your to-do list as a personal commitment to completing that action. Bear in mind that every minute you spend working on one task is necessarily a minute you cannot spend working on another. So ensure that your to-do list honors these reasonable limits and keeps you focused on the work that's most valuable to you.

This actually takes a surprising amount of discipline and requires making a kind of deal with yourself; no more treating your to-do list like the hope chest where you toss all the stuff you should be doing or might maybe be doing. The to-do list is a plan, and it’s a contract. If you’re not sure you want to do an item, take it off the list. If you can’t envision what doing the task will look like, off it goes. Jot and doodle someplace else.

Like so many of the things we talk about here, the to-do list is really a cipher, albeit an important one. As the artifact of your short-term planning, it becomes the developing Polaroid of your next few hours, days, or weeks. So, reframing your list as “the things I want to have done” helps set the proper state of mind; this is your life for the next little while, so don’t be skittish about taking it seriously enough that you can depend on it as the tactical plan for getting you where you want to be.

Solving common hang-ups

Getting good at this stuff is a process. Don’t expect to be an instant master of the to-do on your first try. To help you navigate some of the challenges that frequently await your to-do list, here’s some strategies for getting out in front.

Get a running start

Start off your day or your week by giving yourself several tiny tasks that can be accomplished in just a minute or two each. Aim low, and don't be embarrassed to make these really, really easy jobs. “Clean the keyboard,” “Empty the trash,” and “Add paper to the printer” might seem like pointless busy work, but ticking off several fast items in a row can often be the jolt you need to start tackling the bigger, scarier stuff.

Delegate actively

If you're tracking tasks that you've assigned to others or are waiting on work from someone else on your team, resist the urge to shift responsibility for ensuring their timely arrival. Give yourself tasks like “Call Alex for ETA on redesign sketch” or “Email Bob for latest revision of Chapter 3.” This active follow-up especially deserves a spot on your list when others are depending on your piece of that work to keep the project moving and on schedule. Even when the ball is in someone else's court for the moment, always give yourself timely reminders to ensure that it returns to your side of the net when it's expected and needed.

Cringe-bust your to-Do List

Ever notice how some items seem permanently stuck on your to-do list? Days, weeks, seasons may fly by and the same three or four hoary old tasks stare back at you, stroking their beards and cackling. Chances are you've stopped mentally processing these to-dos as tasks in the world and now just let your eyes fly past them so as to minimize the guilt, pain, and cringing that they cause you.

You can “cringe-bust” your to-do list by printing out a complete set of current tasks--preferably in alphabetical rather than priority or project order. Run through the list quickly, placing a check mark next to any item that causes you the slightest anxiety or concern. The idea is to root out the items that you dread doing.

On your second pass-through of the list, make a note on a separate piece of paper highlighting why you've been avoiding each task. Is it fear of failure? Boredom? Garden-variety anxiety about the outcome? Whatever your reason--and do be honest with yourself--generate a new to-do for each item that addresses the “cringe” rather than the actual to-do that's causing it.

For example, if you're dreading calling an introverted customer because there's always weird silences in the conversation, give yourself a to-do to generate a few topics that you can bring up when things start to slow down. It won't make the call fun, but it will get you past the anxiety that's holding you up. The trick, in any case, is to deflate the cringe-y task by replacing it with a more active, manageable, and unintimidating one that drains the situation of the power to control you.

When you've succeeded, cross out both tasks with a thick red marker, and give yourself a high five. You rule.

Related stuff

What's the secret to your to-do list? What tricks do you use to keep it together and make sure everything gets done?

Technorati Tags: gtd, planning, productivity, todolists, work

”Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 13, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I

Merlin — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:48:44 -0400

Since new folks visit 43F each day, I thought it might be valuable to return to one of our most popular evergreen topics to review some "best practices" for keeping a good to-do list. While a lot of this might be old hat to some of you, it's a good chance to review the habits and patterns behind one of the most powerful tools in the shed. Part 2 appears tomorrow (Update: now available). (N.B.: links to previous posts related to these topics are provided inline)

Why bother?

In my own experience wrangling life's entropic challenges, some of my best gains have come from maintaining a smart, actionable, and updated accounting of all the things I've committed myself to doing. While the quality of that list may vary from day to day, it's the best place to train my focus whenever things are starting to feel out of control. In fact, the health of my to-do list usually mirrors the health of my productivity (as well as the barometric pressure of my stress). On the good days, my to-do list has a living quality that helps guide my decisions and steers me through unexpected changes in priority or velocity. And on the crummy days, it becomes the likely suspect when I need to quickly reassess the state of the union and make changes.

While you can argue for the flavor and approach to task management that best suits your style (and your personal suck), it's hard to disparage the benefits that come from getting task commitments out of your brain and into a consistent location. One list scribbled on one busy day is not necessarily the answer (although it can be a lifesaver). Try thinking of your to-do list as an evolving plan for responsibly focusing your effort and attention in the near future.

Anatomy of a To-do

The primary idea of a to-do is that it's a task that can and should be done--a point that might seem obvious until you start uncovering how many of the items on your to-do list may not belong there (or, conversely, how many uncaptured items do). The best and most useful to-dos share common qualities:

it's a physical action
it can be accomplished at a sitting
it supports valuable progress toward a recognized goal
it's something for which you are the most appropriate person for the job

Glancing at your own to-do list, do you see any potential troublemakers? Notice any items that make you squeamish? Any mystery meat tasks that seem "un-doable" as is? Don't sweat it. We're going to have you shaped up in no time.

Break it Down to the “Next Action”

In Getting Things Done , David Allen introduced his notion of the “next action,” which he defines as “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.”

For example, a classic old-school to-do might be something like “Plan Tom's Surprise Going-Away Party,” “Clean out the Garage,” or “Get the Car Fixed.” But, as Allen cannily notes, these are each really small projects since they require more than one activity in order to be considered complete. Learning to honor that distinction between a task and its parent project may, in fact, be the most important step you can take toward improving the quality and “do-ability” of the work on your list.

So, in our example of beginning to organize for Tom's big party, we first want to learn when exactly he'll be leaving town. But to obtain that information, we'll first need to call his housemate, Sue, for details. But before we can call Sue, we'll have to remember where we jotted down her new work number last week. (Project managers call these kind of linked tasks “dependencies,” but you knew that.)

Suddenly our focus has narrowed from the ginormous and ultimately un-doable “Plan Party” to the entirely manageable “Find Sue's work number.” While this is far from the only task we'll have to complete for our party planning, it's clearly the next thing we'll need to do before proceeding. This is the bona fide “next action,” so it's earned a place on our to-do list.

By always breaking projects of any size into their true constituent next actions--and it's definitely okay to have several at once per project--we're making it fast and easy to always know what should be happening next.

Let's Get Physical

Articulating your to-dos in terms of physical activity--even when they require only modest amounts of actual exertion--has a variety of benefits.

Most importantly, it ensures that you've thought through your task to a point where you can envision how it will need to be undertaken and what it will actually feel like once you're doing it. This means you can easily visualize the activity, the kinds of tools you'll need, and perhaps even the setting where the work should take place; It's not just a bunch of words you've written on a page.

All in how you phrase it

Framing your work in the physical world is easiest when you imagine what's being done, and the best trick here is to simply phrase your task in a form like: “verb the noun with the object.” That means instead of reminding yourself with the mystery meat of “Year-end report,” you'd more accurately first “Download Q3 spreadsheet from work server.” And, instead of “Get with Anil,” you'd probably want to “Email Anil on Monday to schedule monthly disco funk party.” Get specific in whittling the task down to one activity that you can accomplish completely at a sitting. “A sitting” will vary for you, but I try to never plan a task that would take more than ten minutes (your level of busy-ness might command even smaller-sized tasks).

Consider, for example, how an oversized to-do like “Prepare the big presentation” might be improved upon by zeroing in on the physicality of a first step like “Draft four ideas for our presentation's theme.” Where the former task provides no purchase for a sensible ascent, the latter gives us a fat handle for getting started with something that already feels familiar: we know how to type, and we definitely know when we see four of something. So, this is a sensible chunk of work that can be done.

Get the verbs right

Notice how we're breaking these Big Nouns into little verbs? That's deliberate. With that original to-do for your presentation, you might theoretically just keep “preparing” your presentation until some arbitrary alarm bell goes off in your head, saying “Yeah, okay, that looks like a fully-prepared presentation, so you can stop.” But a better-defined chunk of activity suggests a task with clear edges; it has a beginning and an end. This enables you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ensuring that you always know what to do next, instead of half-assing your way through a badly-defined pile of fuzzy nouns.

This physicality and functional piece-work act in concert to make the planning and execution of your tasks as stress-free and unintimidating as possible. Knowing that every item on your to-do list is a familiar task that can be accomplished before lunch can be wildly empowering. It's just up to you to ensure that all your work is segmented, shaped, and stacked into units that can fit through the windows that are available to you.

Your work is what you make it

The trick is that these jobs can be made easier long before they're undertaken by framing and naming them properly and in the right-sized units. As early as the capture and planning phases of this cycle, you hold the power and responsibility for defining your work. Failing to do that well and thoughtfully is a primary cause of hang-ups further down the line. In other words, your work often isn't difficult because you're necessarily all that busy, but because you hadn't taken the time to list it all out in a way that makes it clear and “do-able”. This is so important as you begin actually working on your tasks, when the last thing you want is to wonder whether you're doing the right thing at the right time.

As we’ll see tomorrow, to have any use beyond a handy brain dump, your to-do list has to stay current and reflect your realistic commitments in the world. Otherwise you’re studying documentation for a product that may not exist any more.

Read on for “Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II” »

Technorati Tags: gtd, planning, productivity, todolists, work

”Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 12, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

To-Done: Scheduling tasks

Merlin — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 08:09:07 -0400

How I learned to stop worrying and love my schedule

This is an intriguing idea. Peter converts his to-dos into scheduled blocks of work.

I now schedule EVERYTHING. As a result, very little gets missed. I’m still using next-actions, but I’ve added the step of mapping them out on upcoming weeks. This way, I can relax, knowing that I’m going to get them done.

If you’re reading this and thinking “so freakin’ what?” you’re probably not alone, but some of the GTD acolytes in the house might be hollering “Blasphemer!” since David Allen often suggests using your calendar only for “hard landscape” items, such as appointments with others, while leaving to-dos as “when you can” items that get knocked off as time, energy, and context allows.

But, the idea is really quite sound for someone like me (and most of the people I know). If you handle all your own work and scheduling (a/k/a “don’t have a ‘real’ job”), it’s entirely up to you to choose and do all the tasks on your theoretically unlimited lists. Giving yourself timed assignments like these seems like a potentially smart way to ensure that your stuff is getting done when you think it should.

Since you put the tasks in there, you’re certainly entitled to remove them as well, right? You’re just making some modest paper walls to give a shape to something that’s often frustratingly formless. Neat idea.

I continue to admire and enjoy how people are adapting the patterns of GTD without hewing slavishly to every syllable of the book.

This is a terrific example of how one pattern (“get it all down”) might seemingly contradict another (“calendar is hard landscape only”). Of course, they’re not really contradictory at all unless you choose to treat Allen’s suggestions as an operator’s manual or fundamentalist Productivity Bible. While that approach is useful for getting started with a system like GTD, it does seem valuable to let the ideas evolve and adapt into something that better comports with your own needs.

Edit 2005-08-18 09:35:25 - The referenced To-Done post was by Peter Flaschner not Keith Robinson. Sorry for the error (and thanks, Jay).

Technorati Tags: calendars, GTD, productivity, todos

”To-Done: Scheduling tasks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 18, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Cringe-Busting your TODO list

Merlin — Mon, 23 May 2005 08:58:01 -0400

As I’ve said before, items can sometimes linger on your TODO list a lot longer than you’d like, and it can be tricky to understand exactly why that is in each case. I’m convinced cringing is often a factor.

Being that it’s Monday, and a lot of us are planning this week’s activities, why not join me in a modest exercise.

Print out your TODO list (alphabetically, if possible)
Read it over—beginning to end
Go back and circle each item that makes you cringe, or that causes you some kind of existential angst
Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)
Now, again, per cringe item, add a new TODO that will a) make the loathsome task less cringe-worthy, or b) just get the damned thing done
Cross the original cringe items off your list
Work immediately on the new, cringe-busting TODO

If you could do this for just one item on your TODO list today, wouldn’t you be a little better off? Is there a quick call you could make, a draft you could edit, an email you could return, or some other piddling 2-minute task that would plane some cringe off of your hated tasks?

Imagine if you did this today for five items on your list. Now imagine you began each Monday with a Cringe Bust. Might be a handy way to pick off old items and let some unnecessary anxiety out of your working week.

(For extra credit, find the item on your list that’s been making you cringe for the longest. Anybody else turning up items that have been inducing cringes for over a month? Ouch. I suck.)

”Cringe-Busting your TODO list” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 23, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Choosing a daily GTD action plan

Merlin — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 21:26:55 -0400

high octane moron: Revolving workflow strategies

I employ an informal Getting Things Done action strategy that’s similar to the one Chris lays out in his post. I often have a theme for a given day, where I choose an approach that’s suited to my mood, my energy level, and the kind and amount of work on my TODO list. (I’m especially a fan of days where I knock down “mosquito tasks” as Chris calls them.)

While they could be rotated throughout a single day, I am finding I like to commit to a single approach early in the day and generally stick to it for the day (possibly choosing a second approach at night). I don’t plan in advance what tomorrow’s strategy will be, because a lot of it is based on external factors like the number of new client requests I might receive in the morning. These are certainly nothing beyond common sense, and many of them are even laid out in the book and elsewhere, but it has helped me to list them out and think about which I am using at any given time.

Chris’s approaches include:

alternate projects
big chunks of time on certain projects
complete as many small items as possible
oldest first
newest first
squeaky wheel
goal driven

How do you plan and choose your actions for the day?

”Choosing a daily GTD action plan” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 25, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"