ASSUMING THAT YOU have collected everything that has your attention, your job now is to actually get to the bottom of “in.” Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve captured. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.
To get an overview of this process, you may find it useful here to refer to the Workflow Diagram on page 123. The center column illustrates all the steps involved in processing and deciding your next actions.
This chapter focuses on the components in the diagram’s center column, the steps from “in” to next action. You’ll immediately see the natural organization that results from following this process for each of your open loops. For instance, if you pick up something from “in” and realize, “I’ve got to call Andrea about that, but I’ve got to do it on Monday, when she’s in her office,” then you’ll defer that action immediately and enter it on your calendar for Monday.
I recommend that you read through this chapter and the next one, on organizing your actions, before you actually start processing what you’ve captured in “in.” It may save you some steps. When I coach people through this process, it invariably becomes a dance back and forth between the simple decision-making stage of processing the open loops and the trickier task of figuring out the best way to enter these decisions in their particular organization systems.