Black Belt Productivity

Here is the second part of Chapter 2. It will go into the Organizing and Doing stages of GTD^®. I hope that you enjoy it.

- Michael

Chapter 2: Getting Control of Your Life: Mastering the Five Stages of Workflow

Now that you have processed all of your items, you will need to organize them all into one of eight categories. If you remember you have 3 options for non-actionable items. The corresponding organizational bins are:

1. It is trash…………………………………………………….Goes in the trashcan
2. No action now, but someday……………………..Someday/Maybe List
3. A piece of info that I want to keep…………….Reference File

The Someday/Maybe list is a sort of holding bin for your items. It is for things that you cannot take any action on right now, but you do not want to forget about them. Some people will utilize a “tickler file” for this. A tickler file is a file that you create to send yourself reminders in the future. There are many users of the tickler file out there. I am not one of them. Jason will do a write up on a tickler file at a later date. A reference file is a good tool to keep near your workspace for general information filing. I have notes for games that I play, insurance claim slips, genealogy documents that I have amassed for my family and a lot more. There are many filing systems that you can use, but the most important thing is that you can get your hands on needed info FAST!

Now that you have all of those non-actionables out of the way, it is time to tackle the next task at hand. You can just put a project in a Projects list and review them regularly (see next step). Some of your projects may require support material also. It is good to file them, but keep them in view. I have a angled wire folder holder that I keep my current project material in so that I can grab it even quicker than something in my reference file.

When you create a NA, you must decide which organizational bin is right for its storage. If you need to delegate an item to another person, it is good to create a Waiting For list. This list will serve as a reminder that you are dependent on someone else to complete that action item. During your review (see next step), you can catch up with that person to find out the status of that item. If you decide to defer the action, then it will either go on to your Calendar or onto a Next Action list. The calendar should only be used for time-specific actions or information. Meetings, things that you need to do a certain day, but not a certain time that day, and other information about a certain day are the only things to go onto your calendar.

If the action is not time specific then it needs to go onto a Next Action List. These lists are broken down by contexts. These contexts are whatever you want them to be, but they need to be grouped so that every action that you do can fall onto one of these lists. There will be much more on contexts in a later segment of the GTD^® Primer.

Once you get your actions organized, you need to get to work on completing them. Every so often, you need to review the work that you have done and make adjustments as you see fit. DA recommends that you do a formalized review at least once a week. This is probably the hardest step in implementing GTD^®. It has been for me, and I know a number of others that this is true for also. Review is a step-by-step look at every item in all eight of your organizational bins. For each item, you determine if it is still in the appropriate bin, if it needs to be moved to another bin, or if it has been completed and taken out of the system.

Of course, the last stage of your system, is doing the work that you have set before you in your eight organizational buckets. There are some model for prioritizing your work flow that I am not going to get into here. Basically, you need to get out there and start knocking things off those lists.

These five stages are crucial to the successful implementation of GTD^®. Skipping one may not mess up your system much, but ignoring one or trying to get them all done at once can wreak havoc on your system and your life.