Getting Things Done

If you’ve emptied your in-tray, you’ll undoubtedly have created a stack of Pending reminders for yourself, representing longer-than-two-minute actions that cannot be delegated to someone else. You’ll probably have anywhere from twenty to sixty or seventy or more such items. You’ll also have accumulated reminders of things that you’ve handed off to other people, and perhaps some things that need to be placed on your calendar or in a Someday/Maybe holder.

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.

For the purposes of organization, as I’ve said, there are two basic kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get to them, around your other calendar items (some perhaps with a final due date). Calendared action items can be either time specific (e.g., “10:00–11:00 meet with Jim”) or day specific (“Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she got the proposal”).

The calendar should show only the “hard landscape” around which you do the rest of your actions.

As you were processing your in-tray, you probably came across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed up. You may have realized that the next action on getting a medical checkup, for example, was to call and make the appointment, and so (since the action required two minutes or less) you actually did it when it occurred to you. Writing the appointment on your calendar as you made it would then have been common sense.

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. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run. That’ll be much easier if the only things in there are those that you absolutely have to get done, or know about, on that day. When the calendar is relegated to its proper role in organizing, the majority of the actions that you need to do are left in the category of “as soon as possible, against all the other things I have to do.”

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.

How discrete these categories will need to be will depend on (1) how many actions you actually have to track; and (2) how often you change the contexts within which to do them.

If you are that rare person who has only twenty-five next actions, a single Next Actions list might suffice. It could include items as diverse as “Buy nails,” “Talk to boss about staff changes,” and “Draft ideas about committee meeting.” 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. If you happened to be on a short break at a conference, during which you might be able to make some calls, you’d have to identify the calls among a big batch of unrelated items. When you went out to do odds and ends, you’d probably want to pick out your errands and make another list.

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. And obviously, when a key person is sitting in front of you in your office, you’d be wise to have all the things you need to talk about with him or her immediately at hand.

You’ll probably find that at least a few of the following common list headings for next actions will make sense for you:

Calls This is the list of all the phone calls you need to make; you can work off it as long as you have a phone available. The more mobile you are, the more useful you’ll find it to have one single list of all your calls: those strange little windows of time that you wind up with when you’re off-site, out and about, traveling, on a break, or waiting for a plane or for your kid to come out from school offer a perfect opportunity to make use of that list. Having a discrete Calls category makes it much easier to focus and intuitively pick the best one to make in the moment.

I suggest that you take the time to record the phone number alongside each item. There are many situations in which you would probably make the call if the number was already there in front of you but not if you had to look it up, and if you’re using a mobile device then only a tap is required to engage.

At Computer If you work with a computer—particularly if you move around with a laptop/tablet or have a computer at work and another at home—it can be helpful to group all those actions that you need to do when it’s on and running. This will allow you to see all your options for computer work to do, reminding you of the e-mails you need to send, the documents you need to draft or edit, and so on.

Think carefully about where and when and under what circumstances you can do which actions, and organize your lists accordingly.

Because I fly a lot, I maintain an Online action list, separate from my At Computer one. When I’m on a plane without a Wi-Fi service I can’t connect to the Web or my servers, as many actions require. So instead of having to rethink what I can and can’t do whenever I look at my At Computer list, I can trust that none of my At Computer actions require that I be connected, which frees my mind to make choices based on other criteria.

If you only do at-computer work at your office, or at your home, you could incorporate those actions on those location-specific lists, though you might still find it functional to see reminders of computer work grouped together when you’re sitting in that context. On the other hand, if your work and activities are primarily mobile-centric, and you could be taking actions equally on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, then parking those reminders on a single Digital context list or folding them into the Anywhere category might work best.

Errands It makes a lot of sense to group together in one place reminders of all the things you need to do when you’re out and about. When you know you need to go somewhere, it’s great to be able to look at that list to allow for the option of handling numerous things along the way, in one trip. Actions like “Get stock certificates from bank deposit box,” “Pick up suit at the tailor,” and “Buy flowers for Robyn at the florist” would all go here.

We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.

This list could, of course, be nothing more elaborate than a Post-it that you keep in your planner or on your refrigerator door, or in an Errands category in some digital task manager.

It’s often helpful to track sublists within individual Errands items. For instance, as soon as you realize you need something from the hardware store, you might want to make “hardware store” the list item and then append a sublist of all the things you want to pick up there, as you think of them. On the low-tech end, you could create a “hardware store” Post-it; on the high-tech side, if you were using a digital list, you could attach a “note” to “hardware store” on your list and input the details there.*

Simplifying your focus on actions will ensure that more of them get done.

At Office If you work in an office, there will be certain things that you can do only there, and a list of those things will be useful to have in front of you then—though obviously, if you have a phone and a computer in your office, and you have “Calls” and “At Computer” as separate lists, they’ll be in play as well. I’d use an “Office Actions” or “At Office” list for anything that required me being physically present there to take the action, such as purging an office filing cabinet or printing and reviewing a large document with a staff person.

A major trend now is for organizations to become more open, flexible, and virtual. “Hotel-ing” (i.e. not having a permanent office, but rather “plugging in” in any available location) is on the rise. Consequently, At Office could mean simply an action that requires being at any of several company locations. Or, for some people, it’s useful to have both an At Office “A” and an At Office “B” list, for those things that are still discretely tied to one physical location or another.

At Home Many actions can be done only at home, and it makes sense to keep a list specific to that context. I’m sure you’ve got numerous personal and around-the-house projects, and often the next thing to do on them is just to do them. “Hang new watercolor print,” “Organize travel accessories,” and “Switch closets to winter clothes” would be typical items for this grouping.

If you have an office at home, as I do, anything that can be done only there goes on the At Home list. (If you work only at home and don’t go to another office, you won’t need an At Office list at all—the At Home list could suffice.)

Similar to people who work at various locations, many people have multiple personal work environments, such as vacation homes, boats, and even the local gourmet coffee shop or café. “At Starbucks” can be a fine categorization for an action list!

Agendas* Invariably you’ll find that many of your next actions need to either occur in a real-time interaction with someone or be brought up in a committee, team, or staff meeting. You have to talk to your partner about an idea for next year; you want to check with your life partner about his schedule for the spring; you need to delegate a task to your assistant that’s too complicated to explain in an e-mail. And you must make an announcement at the Monday staff meeting about the change in expense-report policies.

Standing meetings and people you deal with on an ongoing basis often need their own Agenda list.

These next actions should be put on separate Agenda lists for each of those people and for that meeting (assuming you attend it regularly). Professionals who keep a file folder to hold all the things they need to go over with their boss already use a version of this method. If you’re conscientious about determining all your next actions, though, you may find that you’ll need somewhere between three and fifteen of these kinds of lists. I recommend that separate lists be kept for bosses, partners, assistants, and children. You should also keep the same kind of list for your attorney, financial adviser, accountant, and/or computer consultant, as well as for anyone else with whom you might have more than one thing to go over the next time you talk on the phone or in person.

The broader your responsibilities, and the more senior your organizational roles, the more you will get things done through your communications and transactions with other people.

If you participate in standing meetings—staff meetings, project meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, parent/teacher meetings, whatever—they, too, deserve their own lists, in which you collect things that will need to be addressed on those occasions.

Often you’ll want to keep a running list of things to go over with someone you’ll be interacting with only for a limited period of time. For instance, if you have a contractor doing a significant piece of work on your house or property, you can create a list for him for the duration of the project. As you’re walking around the site after he’s left for the day, you may notice several things you need to talk with him about, and you’ll want that list to be easy to capture and to access as needed.

Given the usefulness of this type of list, your system should allow you to add Agendas ad hoc, as needed quickly and simply. For example, inserting a page or a list for a person or a meeting within an Agenda section of a loose-leaf notebook planner takes only seconds, as does adding a dedicated “note” within an Agenda category in your digital tools.

Read/Review You will no doubt have discovered in your in-tray a number of things for which your next action is to read. I hope you have held to the two-minute rule and dispatched many of those quick-skim items already—tossing, filing, or routing them forward as appropriate.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

To-read printed items that you know will demand more than two minutes of your time are usually best managed in a separate physical stack tray labeled “Read/Review.” This is still a “list” by my definition, but one that’s more efficiently dealt with by grouping the documents and magazines themselves in a tray and/or portable folder.

For many people, the Read/Review stack can get quite large. That’s why it’s critical that the pile be reserved only for those longer-than-two-minute things that you actually want to read when you have time. That can be daunting enough in itself, but things get seriously out of control and psychologically numbing when the edges of this category are not clearly defined. A pristine delineation will at least make you conscious of the inventory, and if you’re like most people, having some type of self-regulating mechanism will help you become more aware of what you want to keep and what you should just get rid of.

Some professionals (e.g., attorneys) still work with significant printed materials, and although most of their documents may be generated and maintained in digital form, working with the document in physical form still remains the optimal way to deal with it. In those cases it often makes sense, in addition to a Read/Review box or tray, to have a Review/Respond category for the more rigorous reading that requires a different kind of focus.

It’s practical to have organized reading material at hand when you’re on your way to a meeting that may be starting late, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting, or, of course, if you’re going to have some time on a train or plane. Those are all great opportunities to browse and work through that kind of reading. People who don’t have their Read/Review material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be used.

Given the amount of digital input we’re getting that includes data to read and view, much of which is not really critical to our work or life but is potentially interesting or fun, it can be useful to create an organizational bucket within that world for such things. A Review/Watch file in your e-mail folder system or a Surf Web action list could be a good place to hold e-mails with links to recommended videos, blogs, or online articles.

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

Like reminders of the actions you need to do, reminders of all the things that you’re waiting to get back from or get done by others have to be sorted and grouped. You won’t necessarily be tracking discrete action steps here, but more often final deliverables or projects that others are responsible for, such as the tickets you’ve ordered from the theater, the scanner that’s coming for the office, the OK on the proposal from your client, and so on. When the next action on something is up to someone else, you don’t need an action reminder, just a trigger about what you’re waiting for and from whom. Your role is to review that list as often as you need to and assess whether you ought to be taking an action, such as checking the status or lighting a fire in some way under the project.

For many people, especially those in managerial or supervisory positions, getting this inventory of unfulfilled commitments that we care about from others captured, current, complete, and reviewed creates tremendous relief and improved focus going forward.

You’ll probably find that it works best to keep this Waiting For list close at hand, in the same system as your Next Actions reminder lists. The responsibility for the next step may bounce back and forth many times before a project is finished. For example, you may need to make a call to a vendor to request a proposal (which then goes to your Waiting For list). When the proposal comes in, you have to review it (it lands in your Read/Review tray or on your At Computer list). Once you’ve gone over it, you send it to your boss for her approval (now it’s back on your Waiting For list). And so on.*

It’s also very useful to have your Waiting For list available when you are meeting with or talking to anyone who might be responsible for any of those deliverables. It is much more elegant to broach a conversation early on, such as “Oh yeah, how’s it going with the Gonzalez proposal?” than to wait until it’s overdue and the situation is in a stress mode.

It’s important for this category in particular to include the date that each item is requested for each entry, as well as any agreed-upon due date. Follow-up is much more meaningful when you can say, “But I placed the order March twentieth” or “You’ve had the proposal now for three weeks.” In my experience, just this one tactical detail is worth its weight in gold.

You’ll get a great feeling when you know that your Waiting For list is the complete inventory of everything you care about that other people are supposed to be doing.

Keep actionable e-mails and paper separated from all the rest.

The most efficient way to track your action reminders is to add them to lists or folders as they occur to you. The originating trigger won’t be needed after you have processed it. You might take notes in the meeting with your boss, but you can toss those after you’ve pulled out any projects and actions associated with them. While some people try to archive texts or voice mails that they still need to do something about, that’s not the most effective way to manage the reminders embedded in them.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. Certain kinds of input will most efficiently serve as their own reminders of required actions, rather than your having to write something about them on a list. This is particularly true for some paper-based materials and some e-mail.

Some things are their own best reminders of work to be done. The category of Read/Review articles, publications, and documents is a good example. It would obviously be overkill to write “Review Vogue magazine” on some action list when you could just as easily toss the magazine itself into your Read/Review tray to act as the trigger.

Another example: if you are still doing paper-based bill paying, you’ll probably find it easier to deal with the bills by paying them all at one time, so you keep them in a folder or stack tray labeled “Bills to Pay” (or, more generically, “Financial to Process”). Similarly, receipts for expense reporting should be either dealt with at the time they’re generated or kept in their own Receipts to Process envelope or folder.*

The specific nature of your work, your input, and your workstation may make it more efficient to organize other categories using only the original document itself. A customer-service professional, for instance, may deal with numerous requests that show up in some standard form, and in that case maintaining a tray or file (paper or digital) containing only those actionable items is the best way to manage them. An attorney or accountant may deal with documents they need to spend time reviewing to determine actions, which could be stacked in a tray on the desk with items of that specific nature.

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?”

Whether it makes more sense to write reminders on a list or to use the originating documents in a tray or folder or digital directory will depend to a great extent on logistics. Could you use those reminders somewhere other than at your desk? If so, the portability of the material should be considered. If you couldn’t possibly do that work anywhere but at your desk, then managing reminders of it solely at your workstation is the better choice.

Whichever option you select, the reminders should be in visibly discrete categories based upon the next action required. If the next action on a service order is to make a call, it should be in a Calls group; if the action step is to review information and input it into the computer, it should be labeled “At Computer.” Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all the documents of one type (e.g. service requests) are kept in a single tray or file, even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone call, another needs data reviewed, and still another is waiting for someone to get back with some information—but they’re all sorted together. This arrangement can cause a person’s mind to go numb to the stack because of all the decisions that are still pending about the next-action level of doing.

My personal system is highly portable, with almost everything kept on lists, but I still maintain a Read/Review stack tray in my office and the traveling version as a plastic folder with the same title. Though I store and read some magazines digitally, it’s still both logistically functional and aesthetically pleasing to me to have the physical version at hand.

Like some paper-based materials, e-mails that need action are sometimes best as their own reminders—in this case within the e-mail system itself. This is especially true if you get a lot of e-mail and spend a lot of your work time with your e-mail software active at hand. E-mails that you need to act on may then be stored within the system instead of having their embedded actions written out or distributed on another list.

Many people have found it helpful to set up two or three unique folders on their e-mail navigator bars. True, most folders in e-mail should be used for reference or archived materials, but it’s also possible to set up a workable system that will keep your actionable messages discretely organized outside the “in” area itself (which is where most people tend to keep them).*

If you choose this route, I recommend that you create one folder for any longer-than-two-minute e-mails that you need to act on (again, you should be able to dispatch many messages right off the bat by following the two-minute rule). The folder name should begin with a prefix letter or symbol so that (1) it looks different from your reference folders and (2) it sits at the top of your folders in the navigator bar. Use something like the @ sign or the hyphen, whichever will sort into your system at the top. Your resulting @ACTION folder will hold those e-mails that you need to do something about.

Next you can create a folder titled “@WAITING FOR,” which will show up in the same place as the @ACTION folder. Then, as you receive e-mails that indicate that someone is going to do something you care about tracking, you can drag them over into the @WAITING FOR file. It can also hold reminders for anything that you delegate via e-mail: when you forward something, or use e-mail to make a request or delegate an action, just save a cc: or bcc: copy into your @WAITING FOR file.*

It takes much less energy to maintain e-mail backlog at zero than at a thousand.

Some applications allow you to file a copy of an e-mail into one of your folders as you send it (with a “Send and File” button). Others will simultaneously save only into your universal “Sent Mail” folder. In the latter case, 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.

Getting E-mail “In” to Empty The method detailed above will enable you to actually get everything out of your e-mail in-tray, which will be a huge boon to your clarity about, and control of, your day-to-day work. You’ll reclaim “in” as “in,” so anything residing there will be like a new message in your voice mail or an unread text on your mobile device—clues that you need to process something. Most people use their e-mail “in” for staging still-undecided actionable things, reference, and even trash, a practice that rapidly numbs the mind: they know they’ve got to reassess everything every time they glance at the screen.

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. Isn’t that process easier to relate to than fumbling through multiple screens, fearing all the while that you may miss something that’ll blow up on you?

Paper-based data is sometimes easier to trust for utility than digital versions.

There’s an obvious danger in putting reminders of things you need to do somewhere out of sight. The function of an organization system is primarily to supply the reminders you need to see when you need to see them, so you can trust your choices about what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing). Before you leave your office for the day, or before you decide to spend a big part of your day doing something previously unplanned, those actionable e-mails that you still have pending must be reviewed individually, just like your Calls and At Computer lists. In essence, @ACTION is an extension of your At Computer list and should be handled in exactly the same fashion. Your paper-based Pending workflow must likewise be assessed like a list if the paper materials are being used as your only reminders.

Distributing action triggers in a folder, on lists, and/or in an e-mail system is perfectly OK, as long as you review all of the categories to which you’ve entrusted your triggers equally, as required. You don’t want things lurking in the recesses of your systems and not being used for their intended purpose: reminding you. The digital world can be dangerous in this regard, because as soon as data is offscreen, it can tend to disappear as a viable prompt. This has caused many computer-savvy people to revert to a paper planner—its physicality and visual obviousness can create much more trust that their reminders will actually remind them!

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.

Creating and maintaining one list of all your projects (that is, again, every commitment or desired outcome that may require more than one action step to complete) can be a profound experience! You probably have more of them than you think. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend that initially you make a Projects list in a very simple format, similar to the ones you’ve used for your lists of actions; it can be a category in a digital organizer, a page in a loose-leaf planner, or even a single file folder labeled “Projects,” with either a master list or separate sheets of paper for each one.

A complete and current Projects list is the major operational tool for moving from tree-hugging to forest management.

The Projects list is not meant to hold plans or details about your projects themselves, nor should you try to keep it arranged by priority or size or urgency—it’s just a comprehensive index of your open loops. You actually won’t be working off of the Projects list during your moment-to-moment activities; for the most part, your calendar, action lists, and any unexpected tasks that come up will constitute your tactical and immediate focus. 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. A quick glance at this list from time to time will enhance your underlying sense of control. You’ll also know that you have an inventory available to you (and to others) whenever it seems advisable to evaluate workload(s).

The very broad and simple definition of a project that I have given (more than one action needed to achieve a desired result) provides an important net to capture the more subtle things that pull or push on your consciousness. If you work in an industry that is formally project focused (manufacturing, software, consulting, etc.), it may be challenging to realize that “look into getting a dog for our kids” and “find a good tailor” are projects! But whether you call them “projects” or something else, they still demand a certain kind of attention to relieve their pressure on your internal space.

Getting the inventory of all of those things complete, current, and clear for yourself, and acquiring the habit of maintaining it that way, could be one of the most valuable things you do to enable stress-free productivity for yourself from now on. Here are some of the reasons why:

Critical for Control and Focus It is impossible to be truly relaxed and in your productive state when things you’ve told yourself you need to handle continue to pull at your mind—whether they be little or big. It seems that “I’ve got to get my driver’s license renewed” can take up as much space in your head as “I need to formulate the agenda for next year’s conference” when an external list of such things is not complete and reviewed regularly.

Projects seldom show up in nice, neat packages. Small things often slip unexpectedly into bigger things.

Alleviates Subtle Tensions The smaller or more subtle things we tell ourselves we need to deal with create some of the more challenging stresses to handle, simply because they are not so much “in your face.” Projects often don’t show up in nice, neat packages. They start as what seems a simple situation, communication, or activity, but they slowly morph into something bigger than you expected. You thought you handled getting your daughter into preschool, but now there’s a problem with the registration forms or a change in the logistical details. You thought the invoice you sent was complete and accurate, but now the client says he didn’t agree to something you billed him for. Getting these kinds of situations identified and into your system with desired outcomes for appropriate engagement creates a wealth of fresh energy with unexpected positive results.

Core of the Weekly Review As I have indicated in other places, the Weekly Review is the critical success factor for marrying your larger commitments to your day-to-day activities. And a complete Projects list remains the linchpin for that orientation. Ensuring weekly that you’re OK about what you’re doing (or not doing) with a dog for your kids, along with what you’re doing (or not doing) about next year’s conference, is an essential practice. But that Projects list must already be there, in at least a somewhat recent form, before you have the capability to think about things from that perspective.

Facilitates Relationship Management Whether you are in conversation with your boss, your staff, your partner, or your family, having a sense of control and overview of all of your commitments that may have relevance in your relationships with them is extremely valuable. Invariably there are challenges with allocating limited resources—your time, your money, your attention. And when others are involved with you in ways that pull on those resources, being able to negotiate (and frequently renegotiate) those explicit and implicit agreements is the only way to effectively relieve those inherent pressures. Once executives and spouses and staff people get the picture of the commitments of their work and life, it triggers extremely important and constructive conversations with those involved. But it doesn’t happen without that complete list.

There are three primary areas in which you are likely to have “hidden” projects:

Current Activities Often there are projects that need to be captured from a simple inventory of your calendar, your action lists, and your workspaces.

What meetings are on your schedule—past or upcoming—because of some outcome you’re committed to achieving that the meeting itself does not complete or resolve? You may notice that a conference call you’ve been scheduled for is about a client request for a new custom program he or she might want. Voila! A project—“Look into possible custom program for Client XYZ.” You may have an evening orientation event calendared for parents at your son’s school that reminds you that you have an issue to resolve about his schedule of classes. Personal or business trips coming up, conferences on your calendar, etc.—all should be assessed for projects that deserve acknowledging.

There are also very likely still unrecognized projects connected to the next actions on your lists. Many times people we work with have “Call Mario re: the fund-raising event” on their Calls list, but have not yet identified “Finalize the fund-raiser” as something that should be on their Projects list.

And—though it should be obvious but at times isn’t—there are proposals or contracts to review in your briefcase, forms to fill out for the bank on your desk at home, or a broken watch in your purse that are actually project artifacts. Double-check that you have them all associated with the further and final outcomes instead of remaining workflow orphans.

Higher-Horizon Interests and Commitments There is a good chance that you might still have subtle attention on some of your commitments and interests from a longer and higher view of your responsibilities, goals, visions, and core values.

A review of the accountabilities you’re invested in professionally—the things you need to be doing well in your roles at work—and the areas of your life you need to keep up to certain standards will likely trigger some reminders of things that may have been taking some of your attention, for which defining a project about them will be valuable.

If you have professional goals, company objectives, and strategic plans, have you identified all the projects that they should engender for you, so that you can move on them appropriately? I have seldom had an executive pull out and review any long-range planning document without her realizing there is at least one project she needs to clarify for herself in regard to it. Are there things coming toward you further out in the future of your personal life that have started to pull on your attention to do something about them—kids or parents growing older, your retirement, life partner’s aspirations, fun and creative things you’d love to start exploring? This kind of reflection often produces at least some “look into” kinds of projects that, once identified, will produce a greater sense of being on top of your bigger world.

Current Problems, Issues, and Opportunities A very rich place from which to gather items for your inventory is the broad area of often-amorphous things that can disturb your focus if not recognized and dealt with by shaping them into real projects with action steps. These fall into three categories:

When is a problem a project? Always. 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. “Look into improving Frederick’s relationship with his school,” “Resolve situation with landlord and building maintenance,” and “Get closure on compensation dispute with business partner” are the kinds of very real projects that you might resist defining as such. When you actually do put words to it, put it on your list and create a next action for it; you will surprise yourself with a new level of elegance in the stress-free productivity game.

Invariably there are also projects lurking amid your administrative, maintenance, and workflow processes—in both the professional and personal arenas. What do you find yourself complaining about regarding your systems or simply how things are getting done (or not)? Is there anything frustrating about your procedures for filing, storage, communication, hiring, tracking, or record keeping? Does anything need improving in terms of your personal or business expense reporting, banking or investing processes, or how you keep in touch with friends and family? These are also the kinds of projects that usually become projects slyly—it’s tricky to notice when they cross the line between mildly irritating and a real bother (or inspiration) that deserves to get done.

Finally, there might very well be things you’ve been telling yourself you’d like to learn or experience to expand your own development or creative expression. Would you like to learn Italian cooking or how to draw? Have you been telling yourself it would be great to take an online course in digital photography or social media marketing? It’s very possible that many of these kinds of “might like to” projects would live just fine on your Someday/Maybe list. But as you gain greater familiarity with the effectiveness of GTD, you will want to take advantage of the methodology to more readily incorporate new, interesting, and useful experiences into your life by defining desired outcomes about them on the Projects list.

Most people find that one list is the best way to go because it serves as a master inventory rather than as a daily prioritizing guideline. The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your open loops and options so your mind can more easily make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter how many different lists of projects you have, so long as you look at the contents of all of them as often as you need to. For the most part you’ll do that in one fell swoop during your Weekly Review.

There are some situations in which it makes good sense (and eases some anxieties!) to subsort a Projects list. Let’s look at some usual options.

Personal/Professional Many people feel more comfortable seeing their lists divided up between personal and professional projects. If you’re among them, be advised that your Personal list will need to be reviewed as judiciously as your Professional one, and not just saved for weekends. Many actions on personal things will need to be handled on weekdays, exactly like everything else. And often some of the greatest pressures on professionals stem from the personal aspects of their lives that they are letting slip.

Delegated Projects If you’re a senior manager or executive, you probably have several projects that you are directly responsible for but have handed off to people who report to you. While you could, of course, put them on your Waiting For list, it might make better sense to create a “Projects—Delegated” list to track them. Your task will be simply to review the list regularly enough to ensure that everything on it is moving along appropriately.

The right amount of complexity is whatever creates optimal simplicity.

Some people have as part of their work and lifestyle several different projects of the same type, which in some instances it may be valuable to group together as a sublist of Projects. For example, a corporate trainer or a keynote speaker might maintain a separate category of “Projects—Presentations,” with a chronological listing of all the upcoming events of that nature. These would be “projects” like the rest, in that they need to be reviewed for actions until they are completed; but it might be helpful to see them all organized on one list, in the order they are coming up on the calendar, apart from the other projects.

If you are a real estate agent, sell consulting services, or develop proposals for a relatively small number of prospective clients in any profession, you will likely find it useful to see all of your outstanding “sales relationships in progress” in one view. This could be a separate list in a planner or digital application, but to be optimally functional it would need to be complete and each item regularly reviewed for current actions.

Some people like to sort their projects by major areas of focus—parents tracking those about their children, an entrepreneur dividing projects by the various roles he’s fulfilling (Finance, Sales, Operations), and the like.

Again, how you decide to group your projects is not nearly as critical as ensuring that your inventory is complete, current, and assessed sufficiently to get it off your mind. No matter how you organize it now, you will very likely change your structure as you get more experience using your system and as the nature of your focus shifts in work and life.

Some of your projects will likely have major subprojects, each of which could in theory be seen as a whole project. If you’re moving into a new residence, for instance, and are upgrading or changing much of what’s there, you may have a list of actionable items like “Finalize the patio,” “Upgrade the kitchen,” “Set up home office space,” and so on, all of which could in themselves be considered separate projects. Do you make all of this one entry on your Projects list—say, “Finish new home upgrades”—or do you write up each of the subprojects as an individual line item?

Actually, it won’t matter, as long as you review all the components of the project as frequently as you need to in order to stay productive. No external tool or organizing format is going to be perfect for sorting both horizontally across and vertically down through all your projects; you’ll still have to be aware of the whole in some cohesive way (such as via your Weekly Review). If you make the large project your one listing on your Projects list, you’ll want to keep a list of the subprojects and/or the project plan itself as “project support material” to be reviewed when you come to that major item. I would recommend doing it this way if big pieces of the project are dependent on other pieces getting done first. In that scenario you might have subprojects with no next actions attached to them because they are in a sense waiting for other things to happen before they can move forward. For instance, you might not be able to start on “Upgrade the kitchen” until you have finished “Assess and upgrade home electrical system.” Or, you can only afford one of your major home projects at a time, so keeping them lined up in order of your priorities would make sense. However, you might be able to proceed on “Finalize the patio” independent of the other subprojects. You would therefore want a next action to be continually current on any portion of this larger project that you could make progress on independently.

Don’t be too concerned about which way is best. If you’re not sure, I’d vote for putting your big projects on the Projects list and holding the sub-pieces 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. But if that arrangement doesn’t feel quite right, try including the active and independent subprojects as separate entries on your master list.

How you list projects and subprojects is up to you; just be sure you know where to find all the moving parts and review them as frequently as needed to keep them off your mind.

There’s no perfect system for tracking all your projects and subprojects the same way. You just need to know you have projects and, if they have associated components, where to find the appropriate reminders for them.*