Black Belt Productivity

Jump to Comments

OK. Now you are down to one pile of stuff to mess with…see how easy this is! After today, you will have all of your stuff put ‘away’ into your trusted system and all of the pile will be gone. It will be a good day, I promise.

- Michael

Chapter 7: Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets

Today is the day that we really cement our system in our head and in practice. We will be setting up and filling all of the buckets that will be our trusted system. This is the part of the program that can be the most confusing while, at the same time, the most straightforward. We will be working on the outer part of the Workflow Diagram.

David Allen states that there are seven types of items you will want to keep track of in your system:

• Projects
• Project support material
• Calendar (dated items and information)
• Next Actions
• Waiting For (deferred actions)
• Reference Material
• Someday/Maybe (no actions or time required)

He also stresses that it is “critical that all of these categories be kept pristinely distinct from one another.” (page 140) If they start meshing with each other, the individual value of each category will be lost.

The next most personal thing that you create for your system is your context list. These are your next action buckets. This is where all of your actionalble items will live until completed. There are NO wrong contexts!! These are going to be the lifeblood of your system. You can add, remove, generalize, drill down your contexts anytime that you want to. The most important thing is to make sure that they accurately represent some facet of your life. Right now, I have 14 contexts in my system. I routinely go through my context list and see if I need any or need to remove any. On the flip side, Jason only has 5 contexts in his system. Now I am sure that we have some of the same contexts, but we may use them in vastly different ways.

Allen does sugget some starter contexts that you might want to use:

• Calls
• At Computer
• Errands
• Office Actions
• At Home
• Agendas
• Read/Review

You will probably find that you will outgrow these categories quickly. At least, I did. Most are self-explanatory as they details that you can do when you are at a specific location (computer, office, home, out and about (errands)). ‘Calls’ are calls that you need to make to advance the action. ‘Read/Review’ is any article, magazine, book, or website that you want to look at at a later time. ‘Agendas’ maybe the oddball here. Allen suggests that the ‘Agendas’ category be used to keep track of things that you want to discuss with other people, in meetings, etc. Each person that you need to discuss something with should have its own ‘Agendas’ item. For instance, you could have a ‘Agendas-Boss’ item for the things that you need your boss to do, or a ‘Agendas-Wife’, ‘Agendas-Kids’ items for things to discuss with those family members. It is a handy way to keep track of things that you need to discuss with other folks in your world.

Organizing your Projects list is a fairly simple list to maintain. This list is not to layout every item that any particular project has and how it needs to be worked out, etc. It is a simple listing of the projects in your life.You can see on the picture of my system (using bsag’s wonderful Tracks application) that I have 10 projects going on now. Now one project (Novell > Windows Migration) is my main focus right now at work. It encompasses 2 other projects on the list which are projects themselves (or subprojects, if you will). It does not matter if you only list the Main project in your list, or list the main and subprojects separately in your list (as I have). You just need to make sure that if you do the first method, you review the subprojects as part of your review step.

Your Project Support Materials also needs to be addressed. This is any and all stuff that helps in the advance of your project, and any reference material for the project. I would recommend keeping your Project Support Material separate from your general Reference Material while the project is ongoing. Once it has been completed, it can be placed into the general Reference File for a time of your choosing.

Your general Reference Files can be organized however you see fit. The main goal of the Reference File is to hold the information that your might need access to quickly. So the organizing needs to be simple enough that you can remember where a particular item is going to be housed. It also needs to be fun enough that you are going to use it regularly to house your material.

Your Someday/Maybe needs only to be a list of things that you might want to look into for the future, and have no actions for it, nor any timeframes. I have not fully dumped my mind of my Someday/Maybes, but that is ok for me, for the moment. I am working to revamp a lot of my system as I am re-reading the book for this Primer, and fleshing out my Someday/Maybes is one of the areas that I am going to work on in my future system.

This chapter is where Allen lays out the setup for the Tickler file. Now Jason has written an excellent post on ‘Who is Tickling Whom?’ I will defer discussion of tickler files to him because I do not use a tickler file. I have never been disiplined enough to put things away (physically) and check for them everyday. I guess that I use a Calendar Tickler more. I will put a reminder on my calendar for things like ‘buy tickets’, make reservations’, ‘Superman Returns opens’. But having a physical tickler files is one aspect that I know that will not work for me.

The way that you set up your system is as different as you are to me. Jason and I have vastly different systems, even though we use some of the same tools in our system. There is a number of people that are documenting their systems for all to read. Emory Lundberg has written a whitepaper (GTD LoFi/HiFi) outlining his system. Patrick Rhone has outlined his Org-Fu on his blog. Searching the 43Folders boards will bring a lot of these to light. I recommend you reading them to see how different people take different approaches to their system. You can alway gleem one little nugget that will make your own system better for you. Get involved, ask questions, learn how others do things, and it will make your system better.
- Michael