Black Belt Productivity

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Now, how do you feel about your productivity? You have a huge stack of actions sitting on your desk, or worse yet, in your entire room! I know that it is a little daunting, but stick with us…we will lead you out.

David Allen includes a very nice diagram to overview the process. You can get it at David Allen’s site or you can click here to view it. (The last time I downloaded the diagram from the official site, it gave me the one in Spanish…not so productive for me!) There is an Advanced Workflow Diagram available, but I would not worry about that at this time.

- Michael

Chapter 6: Processing: Getting “In” to Empty

Our goal for our Processing step is to empty our Inbox(es), or InRooms, in some cases. We will again touch every action that we have accumulated in our Inbox and process it accordingly. Allen cautions against trying to do any of the actions that to are going to see. He stresses to keep all of the stages separate, so we will just move them into one of three spots in our system, which we will discuss momentarily.

There are some guidelines for your processing that you need to follow:

• Process the top item first
• Process one item at a time
• Never put anything back into your Inbox

These all seem self-explanatory. Every item in your stack should be treated equally. No one item is more important than any other item. This also lead to the point to process one item at a time. You need to focus on the item thats in your hand. Allen also recommends to leave your Inbox where it is, and physically taking each item off the top. That way, if you get interrupted, you don’t have all of the Inbox contents all over your workspace. And you will never get your Inbox to empty if you allow yourself to put things back, so process each item when you get it out to keep the stack on its way down to empty.

Now, you need to start making decisions about each item. For each item, your first decision will be if it is actionable or not. If it is NOT actionable, then the item should end up in the trash, because it has no more use; a Someday/Maybe list, for future consideration; or into your Reference File.

For the items are actionable, you will need to make one of three decisions:

• Do it (for actions less than two minutes)
• Delegate it (if you are not the most appropriate person to complete the action)
• Defer it into your organizational system (that will discuss more thoroughly next week)

You can adjust the time for your actions to do, but keep it consistent for each processing session. Don’t say that you will do a 5 minute action for one item, then do a 10 minute action for the next item. But, if you have more time at your next processing session, you could use 5 minutes for your ‘do’ actions.

When moving something for delegation, be sure to notate it in your system as well. We will discuss this more next week, but having a Waiting For list is ideal for your delegations. You can use this list for items that you delegate as well as items that your are waiting on to complete your next action.

For everything that you have left, they will move into your organizational system. That will be our topic on Tuesday. For now, you can place them in a Pending pile, and we will talk about them next week.

Lastly, in your processing stage, you need to start identifying Projects. After going through all of your items, you will see that some of them may lend themselves to being a Project. Remember that we define Projects as any outcome that requires more than one action step to complete. You can start a simple list of Project, and again, we will talk at length next week about how to incorporate Projects into your organizational system.

So we have culled our huge Inbox down to empty. We have completed all of the items that take less than 2 minutes to complete. We have delegated items to others for their actions. Now we just have a pile to integrate into our system. Come back Tuesday to see how that will take shape.