Getting Things Done

Reference material now shows up in many forms (topics and media), with numerous ways to organize it. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the most common.

Your reference and filing system should be a simple library of data, easily retrievable—not your reminder for actions, projects, priorities, or prospects.

General-Reference Filing As I’ve emphasized in previous chapters, a good filing system is critical for processing and organizing your stuff. It’s also a must for dealing with the paper-based material and ad hoc digital information that are valuable to you for one reason or another, and you’ll need a way to store both. Ideally you already set up a general-reference filing system as you were processing “in.” You need to feel comfortable storing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later, or an article you read online, and your general-reference system must be informal and accessible enough that it’s a snap to file something away, right at hand where you do your work and personal administration and review. If you’re not set up that way yet, look back at chapter 4 for help on this topic.

Most people wind up needing from one to four physical file drawers, many dozens of e-mail reference folders, and other digital storage locations and categories that can range from a few to hundreds.* The Web itself is nothing more than a huge digital filing cabinet, which both relieves the need to create your own digital reference library and produces a huge amount of the type of information that you will likely want to collect and organize within your own system. The ever-increasing plethora of information and ways to access and organize it only forces the necessity to distinguish nonactionable from actionable inputs, and to create and maintain an easily usable system of reference data storage.

Large-Category Filing Any topic that requires more than fifty folders and/or major documents should probably be given its own section, drawer, or digital database, with its own alpha-sorted or other easily searchable system. For instance, if you’re managing a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paperwork, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to hold all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at least a whole file drawer for each of those designated hobbies.

Bear in mind that if your area of focus has support material that could blend into other areas of focus, you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files. When you read a great article about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your Garden cabinet or in the general system with other information about home-related projects? As a rule, it’s best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

Contact Managers Much of the information that you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You need to track contact information of all sorts—mobile, home, and office phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you may want to maintain information about their birthdays, names of family members, hobbies, interests, etc. In a more rigorous professional vein, you may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates, goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff development and legal purposes.

The “contacts” section of most of the digital and paper organizers (along with the calendar) has probably been the most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track of phone numbers and e-mail addresses. It’s instructive to note that this is purely and simply reference material. No action is required—this is just information that you might need to access in the future. As digital as the world seems to have become, many people still have stacks of collected business cards that are subtly yelling at them, “Decide something about me! Do something with me!”

But once you have filtered actionable items out of those inputs, there’s no big mystery about how to organize contact information, aside from the logistics for your individual needs. Again, the only problem comes up when people try to make their contact manager serve as a tool for reminding them about things they need to do. That doesn’t work (unless it’s part of a well-functioning CRM system that includes both customer information and action triggers appropriately assigned and incorporated). As long as all the actions relative to people you know have been identified and tracked in your action reminder lists, there’s no role for a contact manager to fill other than being a data store.

The only issue (or opportunity) then becomes how much information you need to keep and where and in what equipment you need to keep it in order to have it accessible when you want it. Nothing’s perfect in that regard, but as the mobile digital Internet-connected tools increase in power, along with their connection to various data stores, both the ease of access and the confusion of options will increase in this regard.

If material is purely for reference, the only issue is whether it’s worth the time and space to keep it.

Information that might be useful lives at many levels. You could probably find out pretty much anything if you were willing to dig deep enough. The question of how much to keep, how close, and in what form will be a changing reality, given the variables of your needs, your particular comfort levels with data, and the technology that turbocharges your relationship to global information. Relative to your personal organization and productivity, this is not a core issue, so long as all of your projects and actions are in a control system that you work with regularly. Reference material in all its forms then becomes nothing more or less than material to capture and create access to according to your particular proclivities, requirements, and capabilities.

Some degree of consistency will always make things easier. What kinds of things do you need with you all the time? Those must go into your ubiquitously available mobile device or notebook. What do you need for meetings or off-site events? That should be put into your briefcase, pack, satchel, or purse. What might you need when you’re working in your office? That should be put into your personal filing system or your networked computer. What about rare situations relative to your job? Material needed for those could be archived in departmental files, off-site storage, or deep in the digital cloud. What could you find on the Web anytime you might need it? You don’t need to do anything with that information, unless you require it when you’re away from a good Internet connection, in which case you should print the data out when you’re online and store it in a file you can take with you.

Do you see how that personal organization of reference material is simply a logistical and purpose-based one? Distinguishing actionable from nonactionable things is the first key success factor in this arena. Second is determining what your potential use of the information is, and therefore where and how it should be stored. Once these are addressed, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want. There is no “perfect” reference system. Its structures and content demand a highly individual decision that ought to be based on the ratio of the value received to the time and effort required for capturing and maintaining it. You are better off starting with real information you want to keep, deciding the best place to put it so it’s retrievable, and crafting that from the ground up than trying to choose or design a system theoretically. You will definitely hone your reference libraries into a larger, more sensible framework as time goes on, but that will best be built from upgrading how you’re managing your day-to-day realities. Tolerate some ambiguity here, in terms of figuring out the best way to do it all. The key will be some regular overviewing and reassessment of your system, and dynamically course-correcting as needed.

Someday/Maybes are not throwaway items. They may be some of the most interesting and creative things you’ll ever get involved with.

The second thing to deal with in organizing nonactionable items is how to track things that you want to reassess in the future. These could range from a special trip you might want to take one day, to books you might want to read, to projects you might want to tackle in the next fiscal year, to skills and talents you might want to develop. For a full implementation of this model you’ll need some sort of “back burner” or “on hold” component.

There are several ways to stage things for later review, all of which will work to get them off your current radar and your mind. You can put the items on various versions of Someday/Maybe lists or trigger them on your calendar or in a digital or paper-based tickler system.

It’s highly likely that if you did a complete mind sweep when you were collecting things from your mental space, you came up with some things you’re not sure you want to commit to. “Learn Spanish,” “Get Marcie a horse,” “Climb Mt. Washington,” “Write a mystery novel,” and “Get a vacation cottage” are typical projects that fall into this category.

If you haven’t already done it, I recommend that you create a Someday/Maybe list in whatever organizing system you’ve chosen. Then give yourself permission to populate that list with all the items of that type that have occurred to you so far. You’ll probably discover that simply having the list and starting to fill it out will cause you to come up with all kinds of creative ideas.

Activating and maintaining your Someday/Maybe category unleashes the flow of your creative thinking—you have permission to imagine cool things to do without having to commit to doing anything about them yet.

You may also be surprised to find that some of the things you write on the list will actually come to pass, almost without your making any conscious effort to make them happen. If you acknowledge the power of the imagination to foster changes in perception and performance, it’s easy to see how having a Someday/Maybe list out in front of your conscious mind could potentially add many wonderful adventures to your life and work. We’re likely to seize opportunities when they arise if we’ve already identified and captured them as a possibility. That has certainly been my own experience: learning to play the flute and how to sail in the open ocean started in this category for me. In addition to your in-tray, there are two rich sources to tap for your Someday/Maybe list: your creative imagination and your list of current projects.

Make an Inventory of Your Creative Imaginings What are the things you really might want to do someday if you have the time, money, and inclination? Write them on your Someday/Maybe list. Typical categories include:

Reassess Your Current Projects Now’s a good time to review your Projects list from a more elevated perspective (that is, the standpoint of your job, goals, and personal commitments) and consider whether you might transfer some of your current commitments to Someday/Maybe. If on reflection you realize that an optional project doesn’t have a chance of getting your attention for the next few months or more, move it to this list.

People have at times found it useful even to subcategorize their Someday/Maybe projects. There might be a significant difference for you to think about projects you really want to do around your home as soon as you have the resources versus your “bucket list” kind of fantasies, such as climbing a mountain in Nepal or creating a foundation for disadvantaged kids. In a company this might be a distinction between “parking lot” ideas (“Let’s save that to discuss at our next quarterly meeting”) and keeping track of the projects you might energize when and if significant capital shows up. The key here is to pay attention, as you experiment with these options, to whether your lists and subcategories are unnerving or energizing you.

More than likely you have some special interests that involve lots of possible things to do. It can be fun to collect these on lists. For instance:

These kinds of lists can be a cross between reference and Someday/Maybe—reference because you can just collect and add to lists of good wines or restaurants or books, to consult as you like; Someday/Maybe because you might want to review the listed items on a regular basis to remind yourself to try one or more of them at some point.

In any case, this is another great reason to have an organizing system that makes it easy to capture things that may add value and variety and interest to your life—without clogging your mind and work space with undecided, unfinished business.

What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.

Many people have created some sort of “Hold and Review” pile or file (or whole drawer or e-mail folder) that vaguely fits within the category of Someday/Maybe. They tell themselves, “When I have time, I may like to get to this,” and a “Hold and Review” file seems a convenient place to put it. I personally don’t recommend this particular kind of subsystem, because in virtually every case I have come across, the person held but didn’t review, and there was numbness and resistance about the stack and contents. The value of someday/maybe disappears if you don’t put your conscious awareness back onto it with some consistency.

Also, there’s a big difference between something that’s managed well, as a Someday/Maybe list, and something that’s just a catchall bucket for stuff. Usually much of that stuff needs to be tossed, some of it needs to go into Read/Review, some needs to be filed as reference, some belongs on the calendar or in a tickler file (see page 182) for review in a month or perhaps at the beginning of the next quarter, and some items actually have next actions on them. Many times, after appropriately processing someone’s “Hold and Review” drawer or file, I’ve discovered there was nothing left in it!

Your calendar can be a very handy place to park reminders of things you might want to consider doing in the future. Most of the people I’ve coached were not nearly as comfortable with their calendars as they could have been; otherwise they probably would have found many more things to put in there.

One of the three uses of a calendar is for day-specific information. This category can include a number of things, but one of the most creative ways to utilize the calendar function is to enter things that you want to take off your mind and reassess at some later date. Here are a few of the myriad things you should consider inserting:

Triggers for Activating Projects If you have a project that you don’t really need to think about now but that deserves a flag at some point in the future, you can pick an appropriate date and put a reminder about the project in your calendar for that day. It should go in some day-specific (versus time-specific) calendar slot for the things you want to be reminded of on that day; then when the day arrives, you see the reminder and insert the item as an active project on your Projects list. Typical candidates for this treatment are:

Events You Might Want to Participate In You probably get notices constantly about seminars, conferences, speeches, and social and cultural events that you may want to decide about attending as the time gets closer. So figure out when that closer time is and put a trigger in your calendar on the appropriate date—for example:

If you can think of any jogs like these that you’d like to put into your system, do it now.

It’s OK to decide not to decide—as long as you have a decide-not-to-decide system.

Decision Catalysts Once in a while there may be a significant decision that you need to make but can’t (or don’t want to) right away. That’s fine, in terms of your own self-management process, as long as you’ve concluded that the additional information you need has to come from an internal rather than an external source (e.g., you need to sleep on it), or there is a good reason to delay your decision until a last responsible moment (allowing all factors to be as current as possible before you choose how to move on it). But in order to move to a level of OK-ness about not deciding, you’d better put out a safety net that you can trust to get you to focus on the issue appropriately in the future. A calendar reminder can serve that purpose.*

This is a big topic to devote so little space to, I know, but go ahead and ask yourself, “Is there any major decision for which I should create a future trigger, so I can feel comfortable just ‘hanging out’ with it for now?” If there is, put some reminder in your calendar to revisit the issue.

One elegant way to manage nonactionable items that may need an action in the future is the tickler file.* A three-dimensional version of a calendar, the original version of this allows you to hold physical reminders of things that you want to see or remember—not now, but in the future. It can be an extremely functional tool, allowing you to in effect set up your own postal service and “mail” things to yourself for receipt on a designated future date. I have used a tickler file for years. Even though technology has made reminders of this sort more easily digitized in software and mobile access devices, it’s possible that numerous things for you are more easily managed in this low-tech manner. The promise of digital management of such things is marching forward incessantly, but there remain many things in my personal system that are more efficiently managed by physical particles as reminders.

Essentially the tickler file is a simple file-folder system that allows you to distribute paper and other physical reminders in such a way that whatever you want to see on a particular date in the future “automatically” shows up that day in your in-tray.

If you have a secretary or assistant, you can entrust at least a part of this task to him or her, assuming that he or she has some working version of this or a similar system. Typical examples would be:

Even if you are in a high-level professional role, while you can (and probably should) utilize staff to handle as much of this as is appropriate, I recommend that, if you can integrate it into your lifestyle, you maintain your own tickler file functionality. There are many useful things you can do, at least some of which you may want to avail yourself of outside the pale of your assistant’s responsibilities. I use my tickler file to manage travel documents I need at hand on a certain day, reminders of birthdays and special events upcoming (that would take up too much visual room on my digital calendar), printouts of interesting things to explore when I might have more time in a couple of months, etc.

Bottom line: the tickler file demands only a one-second-per-day new behavior to make it work, and it has a payoff value exponentially greater than the personal investment. It represents a unique executive function: deciding not to decide until a certain point.

Setting Up a Tickler File If you are doing this in a physical system, you need forty-three folders—thirty-one labeled “1” through “31,” and twelve more labeled with the names of the months of the year. The daily files are kept in front, beginning with the file for tomorrow’s date (if today is October 5, then the first file would be “6”). The succeeding daily files represent the days of the rest of the month (“6” through “31”). Behind the “31” file is the monthly file for the next month (“November”), and behind that are the daily files “1” through “5.” Following that are the rest of the monthly files (“December” through “October”). The next daily file is emptied into your in-tray every day, and then the folder is refiled at the back of the dailies (at which point, instead of October 6, it represents November 6). In the same way, when the next monthly file reaches the front (on October 31 after you empty the daily file, the “November” file will be the next one, with the daily files “1” through “31” behind it), it’s emptied into the in-tray and refiled at the back of the monthlies to represent November a year from now. This is a perpetual file, meaning that at any given time it contains files for the next thirty-one days and the next twelve months.

The big advantage of using file folders for your tickler system is that they allow you to store actual documents (the form that needs to be filled out on a certain day, the meeting agenda that needs to be reviewed then, the invoice that you’re holding payment on until that day, etc.).