Partly as a reaction to reading Dave Allen’s organization book  Getting Things Done, I’ve carved three days out of my schedule between this week and next to take care of innumerable little tasks; organize papers, projects, and records; make progress on a couple of small projects; and so on. Today was my first day, and much of it went into getting paper-based information organized. While I’ve had filing systems working in the past, in recent years my system has been “put it in a pile where I can dig through and find it if I really need to.” I had been envisioning filing papers as a Big Job that needed to be done all at once and then repeated regularly, and for me, organizing papers was wasn’t enough of a priority to put in that time at this stage.

Allen’s book has given me a newer and more pleasant perspective on the issue. He points out that papers that haven’t been dealt with, and in fact all things that haven’t been dealt with, tend to be an irritant until they’re taken care of. In other words, one of the immediate rewards of getting my files in order would be more peace of mind. He also outlines a system for keeping files always up to date, with no need to make a big filing push at any time. It was largely this system for paper files that I used to inform my recent post on keeping on top of e-mail all the time.

While it may sound bizarre, filing papers today was actually fun, because Allen’s system helped me get into flow with the filing: in other words, I was continuously involved and challenged in the task, I knew exactly what I needed to do, and I could see how well I was doing as I went.

I won’t and can’t reproduce all of Allen’s system here, although I highly recommend his book if you’re interested in getting more control over the many obligations, objects, papers, tasks, priorities, and other elements that pass through your life.

I had actually started filing using Allen’s system a week or two before I began going through large stacks of to-be-filed papers, just to handle some new papers that were coming in. In other words, I’m already treating filing like a habit instead of something to be done every once in a while in chunks. It’s important to handle these kinds of obligations that way to be able to keep up to date once things are off to a good start. Trying to do filing in a “big push” is likely to mean keeping a “to file” pile after that, which will require another “big push” in future. By contrast, Allen’s system depends on setting eyes on a piece of paper once and then trying to decide where it needs to finally go or what it needs to finally do.

I purchased (inexpensively, through eBay) a simple label maker to make the labels for my file folders. While a label maker may sound like it’s approximately as useful as a banana hammock, the difference in clarity and professional appearance of the printed labels on folders compared to the old hand-labeled folders is striking. I can much more easily find a file using these labels. I use a label maker instead of the computer to make the labels because Allen’s system depends on being able to make up a new file instantly with very little fuss, even if it’s just one folder for one piece of paper, and putting labels through a printer is usually too much of a hassle for repeated little jobs like that.

With a stack of fresh folders, the label maker, and a good system, I was able to sit and plow through piles of paper fairly efficiently, and most importantly to be able to decide then and there exactly what to do with each piece of paper–whether that meant capturing a task from it in my task management system, filing it in an existing folder, making a new folder and filing it there, recycling it, etc. Seeing chaos reduced to order step by step like this is powerfully motivating–and well worth trying if you can make the time to get started.

A good imagination may not be strictly necessary for procrastination, but it can help.

In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about the nature of procrastination: picturing something in the future and imagining how hard it will be or what can go wrong. He goes on to point out that the more easily a person can imagine problems, the more incentive they have to procrastinate “… because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project and all the negative consequences that might occur if it weren’t done perfectly.”

How do people successfully combat procrastination? They take control and move things forward–that is, they figure out what the next physical action is.

Allen is big on the next physical action, and close examination of the idea helps explain why: figuring out the next action changes the focus from broad dangers to easy, short-term wins. For example, if you’re daunted at the prospect of doing your taxes, you may find yourself distracted by thoughts of a big balance due, mistakes, or audits. Figuring out your next task (“Sort through receipts in receipt box” or “Call tax preparer to make an appointment” or “Download an update to the tax softare”), by contrast, puts things on a much more comfortable level. Almost anyone can sort receipts, make a telephone call, or click a button on a Web site, and doing so moves the tax process forward. Reducing large tasks to a series of next actions–only one of which needs to be figured out at any given time–can create enthusiasm or energy around getting things done instead of wrapping the task in anxiety.

Photo by tracer.ca

Have you ever broken a promise–even to yourself–without meaning to? Maybe you offered to do something and didn’t get around to it, or made a resolution and didn’t follow through, or it you wanted to be involved in something but forgot to show up because there were other things going on.

If you haven’t had this experience–if you never neglect to do anything significant you intend to do–then you don’t need this article. For the rest of us, I have four simple points that help ensure things get done.

1. Get it down in writing somewhere you’ll see it. Our brains can only hold a few priorities at once, and those priorities shift from hour to hour, or even moment to moment. If you have a task system that you already actively use, that’s an ideal place to put the task. Or you could put a temporary note somewhere in your way. For instance, whenever I have to remember to bring anything with me in the morning, I put a post-it note on the front door, where it will always present itself to me before I go out. Another option is to put a note in a calendar system you use, or to have it pop up as a reminder in your e-mail program, phone, or PDA (if you use something that offers a reminder feature). Whatever you do, it needs to be in writing so that you don’t have to depend on having the information in short-term memory, and it needs to be somewhere you’ll naturally see it again so that you don’t have to keep an item in short-term memory just to review it.

2. Figure out the next explicit action you need to take. An action is a specific behavior that you already know how to do. For instance, “clean the garage out” isn’t an action, because where do you start? And are you supposed to clean it all in one marathon session? etc. Instead, think about what you would do if you were going to start on the task right away, and how you would describe it if you were going to have someone else do it for you. If the thing you want to get done is cleaning the garage, your next action might be “sit down with calendar to find a four-hour block of time to start working on garage” or “Call dump to find out hours” or “E-mail Jerry to find out if he wants the old couch.” Explicit actions free you from worrying about the whole big project, whatever it is, and allow you to focus on doing one specific thing that you know how to do. If you don’t know what to do, or do but don’t know how to do it, then your next task is to get the information you need. It could be “Talk with Marcia to find out what she wants moved out of the garage” or “Find blog posts by people who have successfully cleaned out their garages” or “Sit down at computer and brainstorm things I’ll need to do to get the garage cleaned out.”

Once you’ve completed that action, figure out what the next action is and write that down (or do it immediately and follow up with the next action after that).

3. Be prepared to say yes. It won’t help to know that you need to do something and know what it is if you aren’t going to do it when the chance arises. At some point there has to be a decision that “OK, I’ll do that now.” Fortunately, this is much easier if you know that you have do do something and have a specific, doable action in mind.

4. Fix conflicts and obstacles. Some tasks won’t need this step. Depositing a check, reading an article on the Web, or making pancakes for the kids may not present any serious difficulties. However, if your next action is “Talk to mom about moving her to a senior care facility” or “Draft letter of resignation,” for instance, there may be barriers between you and getting that action completed. Here are some of those barriers and what to do about them.
A. Lack of knowledge. If you don’t know how to do what you need to do, then probably your real next action is to learn something–by reading, seeking out someone more knowledgeable, taking a course, finding a step-by-step guide, etc.
B. Anxiety, fear, guilt, anger, etc. If a negative emotion is getting in the way of you taking the action you have decided to take–for instance, if you’re too angry to talk constructively with your coworker who just caused your big project to fail, or if the very thought of talking to your mom about assisted living makes you want to go stick your head in the sand, then it may be necessary to work through that emotion as your next action rather than moving ahead with something more task-oriented. Working this through could be accomplished by journaling, talking with a friend, or talking with a therapist or other professional. You may simply need to apply idea repair.
C. Someone or something you’re waiting for. If someone else needs to do something before you can make progress, you have three choices: wait for them and do something else in the mean time; try to encourage them to move ahead; or find a way around them. Realistically, there may be times when you don’t have any other option than to wait, but these are the minority: usually, there will be something you can do to move almost any project forward, even if it’s just preparation for a later step while you wait for someone whose input is necessary for the current step.

Photo courtesy of the Washington State Department of Transportation.

I’ve aspired for years to keep my inbox empty and up-to-date, but it wasn’t until very recently that I figured out how to actually achieve it. Before, my idea was “Well, I’ll kind of reply to things in order of importance and just try to really keep on top of it.” This is another way of saying “I’ll just try harder,” and just trying harder doesn’t work . While I was aware of this on some level, I didn’t see a better solution available for the time being, which is fine–we can’t tackle every goal in our lives all at once. But then I learned how to actually get it done–and it turned out to be quick and even kind of fun.

Why keep an empty inbox?
Keeping an empty inbox means no worrying that there’s something I ought to have replied to, no forgetting to follow up on important matters, no burdened sigh on seeing a long list of maybe-I-need-to-do-something-about-some-of-these messages every time I open my e-mail. It improves my mood and keeps me focused on things I actually need to do.

I’ve only had an empty in-box for a short time, but all indications so far are that it will be much easier to keep an empty inbox now than it was to keep a full one before. What enabled me to really tackle this job was switching to a Web e-mail client that I could access from everywhere instead of using one e-mail client on my laptop and another at home on my desktop. Using two programs meant I had to process every single e-mail twice, which was tedious and didn’t seem worth my time. Using the Web client gets rid of this problem, though it doesn’t in and of itself provide any solution to inbox management.

The setup
So Web mail for me was what opened the door to keeping my inbox empty. But what am I doing differently to actually accomplish it? Well, let’s take a look at my e-mail folders (see the close-up, below). The key to this system is that group called _Utility. All the other folders are just where I keep old e-mail for reference.

“Information” contains e-mails that have something in them I might someday need to know: login information for a new hosting account, a discount code for a Web site I shop at sometimes, a schedule for a conference I might go to, that kind of thing. It’s there only to keep the most important reference information I receive through e-mail all in one place. Because of the small number of things I need to keep here (I only use it for information I have a high probability of needing), it’s always easy to find what I’m looking for. I’ve been using this strategy for years, and it’s worked really well for me.

“Pending” contains e-mails about things I’m expecting from other people. I review it regularly to see if there are any situations that have changed or gone on too long and require my attention. Because there are usually only a few e-mails I’m waiting to have someone else follow up on, it usually contains very few items. Right now it holds only one, a note from someone who owes me a refund on a defective computer part. This is a new category for me in e-mail, but a similar category has worked really well for me in my task list (I use ToDoist, which is free unless you want a few extra geegaws, has good features, and is very easy to use.)

“REPLY or act” is my folder for e-mails that need a substantial response or that require me to do something. This might seem like just another inbox at first glance, but it’s actually the key to the whole system. E-mails only go into “REPLY or act” if I have

1) already looked at them, and
2) need to take some action (writing back or doing something), and
3) have decided exactly what kind of action or response I need to provide, and
4) have decided I’ll definitely take that action or make that response (that is, there are no “maybe follow up on this” e-mails in this folder), and
4) can’t answer the message in two minutes or less.

Before I started this system, my inbox contained thousands of e-mails. As of this moment, my “REPLY or act” folder contains exactly eight, none more than a week old.

“Things to Read” is where I put things that I’m interested in reading but don’t need to specifically get back to anyone on or do something about–blogs of interest, a non-critical update about a group I’m involved in, etc. I only put things in here if they will take some time to read: anything that I can read within a few minutes gets read right away and never makes it to this folder.

How it all fits together
What this means is that going through my inbox ends up being a process of making quick decisions and taking quick actions. Here’s a letter from a friend: I’ll put that in “REPLY or act” and respond at length later on. Here’s a long description about new features on that Web site I use: I’ll put it into “Things to Read.” Here’s some spam and a couple of notices I’m not interested in: delete, delete, delete. Here’s a short e-mail about recent events at my son’s school: I’ll read it now and then file it. Here’s an e-mail asking if I’ll be at Taekwondo class Thursday: I’ll fire off an answer now. And so on.

The result is that I can mow through everything in my inbox in a very short period of time and bring it back to “empty.” Anything that takes a long time by definition gets shuffled into one of the utility folders.

Then whenever I go into e-mail and don’t have anything in my inbox, or else get through the inbox quickly and don’t find anything interesting, if I actually have some time, I dive into my “REPLY or act” folder, open the oldest e-mail in it, and reply to or act on it. I had tried using a “reply or act folder” with my old system, but since I hadn’t figured out yet how to keep my inbox clear, the huge mass of e-mails in the inbox always distracted me from looking at “reply or act.” With the new system, my empty inbox forces me to look into my utility folders if I want to do anything. What I’m finding is that instead of feeling paralyzed by the mass of mostly low-importance, undealt-with e-mails in my inbox, I’m energized by the short list of really meaningful e-mails in “REPLY or act.”

Principles for easy e-mail management
It’s important to point out that I process everything in my inbox only once. If some message really is going to take a prolonged decision process, it can go into “REPLY or act,” but usually the decisions take a very short period of time. In the past I would defer them in favor of digging around for a more interesting piece of e-mail. Now I have a rule that if the decision is short I make it immediately, and this allows me to respond very quickly to all kinds of e-mails that otherwise might have languished for weeks.

So, the three principles that need to be followed for this kind of system to work are:
1. Process everything in the inbox from beginning to end regularly
2. Don’t defer dealing with e-mails that just need a quick decision or read or a short response
3. Review actionable e-mails in utility folders on a regular basis.

One exception to the above: if you know you have time to answer a more lengthy e-mail, you can just process your other in-box items and then get back to the e-mail you want to answer right away. Anything you are going to act on immediately after processing your inbox never needs to go into the utility folders at all. Just whatever you do, don’t leave something in your inbox because you want to follow up on it soon but can’t immediately. Even one leftover e-mail can encourage us to avoid inbox processing, and all that needs to be done is to put that e-mail into the Reply folder, maybe with a star or a red flag if it’s of special interest.

How to get started
To set this kind of system up, what do you do with the half-a-billion e-mails already in your inbox (if you’re like me and had them piling up)? Well, you need to set aside some time if you’re going to do this, but it only took me a little more than an hour to set mine up and get organized. Once you have your block of time, here’s the process I’d suggest:

1. Make a set of utility folders that works for you.
2. Pick a time period, from 5-30 days. Anything this recent, you’ll consider “fresh” e-mail. (Don’t worry: older e-mails will be covered in a later step, so this doesn’t have to be a long period. I used 10 days.)
3. Move everything older than that to a new folder called “Old Inbox.”
4. Process your inbox in the way I’ve described, starting with the first item and going through all e-mails without skipping any. Only process! This means: delete e-mails you don’t need, put messages needing long responses in your reply folder, file away non-actionable e-mails you want to keep, and deal immediately with any e-mail that you can get through in two minutes or less. Don’t get bogged down in detailed responses for anything that isn’t absolutely urgent: only answer e-mails that will take 2 minutes or less for now. Even very important things, as long as they don’t need to be done right this second, shouldn’t merit responses: you’ll have a chance to get to those soon.
5. When you have processed all of your fresh e-mail, you will have an empty inbox. Everything has been deleted, queued in a reply/act folder, queued for reading, stored with pending (waiting for someone else) items, or filed away.
6. If you think there may be anything important in your Old Inbox folder, start going through it from the most recent item going back. Just skim the titles and check e-mails as necessary if you need to know what’s in them. Don’t worry about processing everything in here unless you have a lot of extra time: just look for actionable items and put them in reply/act, to read, or pending. Everything else is just reference and can be found within Old Inbox if you ever need it. (This step will be especially easy if you’ve been flagging important e-mails prior to now: start by processing all of your flagged e-mails.)
7. Keep your inbox empty by following the three principles above.

My categories are just guidelines: you may find a different way you prefer to sort your e-mail. However, you may find something very similar is the most efficient method for you if you’re interested in keeping a clean inbox. However you organize, make very clear distinctions between actionable e-mail folders and non-actionable ones, or you’ll start to get a huge mass of stuff accumulating without knowing off the top of your head what needs your attention and what doesn’t.

This post owes much to the ideas of Dave Allen and to his book Getting Things Done, although it also is informed by personal experience and organizational skills I’ve learned over the years. Here’s hoping you find it useful.

This morning I got out of bed with the realization that I often have to sort out the same set of e-mails twice: once on my desktop and once on my laptop. Realizing that this was getting in the way of me keeping on top of e-mail as it comes in, I found myself a good Web-based interface for my e-mail, where I started by working on just my last ten days of e-mail. I went through every single non-spam message I had received in that time, sorting them into appropriate folders, responding to or following up on the ones that could be done within a minute or two, and putting about half a dozen that will require more time into a special “REPLY/ACT” folder where I’ll be able to easily tackle them in order. Then I went over the past month and a half and any marked e-mails in my own inbox and added anything that stood out to the REPLY/ACT folder.

And now my inbox is empty. This doesn’t mean that I have no e-mails to respond to, but that I’ve cleared away everything except the e-mails that will need detailed responses and have those easily accessible in priority order. As new e-mails come in, I’ll deal with them in a similar way, since I have a system in place and am going to the same spot to handle e-mail whether at home or on the road. Instead of always opening my e-mail box to a long list of mostly-unimportant e-mails, I’ll open it to a few things that I’ll review, fire off quick replies where those are needed, and have a single place where the bigger tasks will go. Everything else will get filed away. This takes very little time, now that my system is set up. And since I had been gradually developing my ideas of how to sort e-mail in past attempts at this process, it all came together quickly, in just over an hour!

Update, March 30th: I’ve continued emptying my inbox this way virtually every day since I started the process, and it has continued to be much easier than my old process. My REPLY/ACT folder sometimes gets more full and sometimes less, but “full” in this case is at most 16 items. The system seems to be working, and I’m definitely much more responsive than I have been in the past, in large part because I get the short responses out of the way immediately regardless of how important they are and have the e-mails that need longer responses somewhere they’re easy to find and pick off.

What Stress Has to Do With Organization
We can mostly only do one thing at a time, so ideally we’d always know exactly what that one thing should be at any time. Let’s say you’re at home, no phones are ringing, and nothing’s on fire. What do you choose to do with your time? Relax and watch a movie? Wash the plate and glass on the counter? Go over your kid’s homework? Fix that squeaky door? Catch up on some reading for work? Call your old friend from college you’ve been wanting to get back in touch with? Organize papers for tax season? Every responsibility–like housekeeping, friendships, bills, work, concerns about world hunger–and every way we communicate–like mail, notes sent home from school with kids, email, voice mail, conversations with family members–provides another potential source of things that might need to be done. And it’s exactly the same in a work or school environment, often with a completely separate set of systems in each location.

The problem is that all of these inputs can be stress-producing, if not overwhelming. Without some serious organization, it’s next to impossible to keep track of all of them at once, which means that anything that isn’t getting taken care of can potentially be a distraction and a worry. You find yourself regularly pushed around by thoughts like “Do I really have everything set up for the trip next week?” or “I keep thinking I need to pick something up at the hardware store” or “I’ve got to remember to get back to that prospect with a quote.”

Fortunately it is possible to channel some of this chaos and cut back on stress. Here are a few quick tips to that end, inspired in part by my continued reading of Dave Allen’s excellent organizational book, Getting Things Done, along with other sources.

Recognize your inputs. Anything that’s not in the place where you want it to be, may need to be acted on, needs to be reviewed to decide whether you need to act on it, is in the way of you knowing or doing something you need to know or do, etc. is an input, a potential “to do.” That doesn’t mean that you need to waste attention to all of those things every time you notice them, only that they’ll tend to dilute your focus unless you’ve got some kind of reliable system in place to handle them.

Don’t let the noisy things distract you from the important things. An e-mail about a new version of some software you use may be interesting and may pop up right in front of your face while an important financial matter that doesn’t have a specific deadline could be lingering in the background. It can help to have places to put lower-priority things  as they come in, for instance an “Interesting/check out” folder in your e-mail program for that e-mail to go until after the financial matter is settled.

Minimize the number of task systems you use. Almost everyone needs more than one task list: for instance, you might have an e-mail program with messages that need to be read, responded to, or acted on; plus a traditional “to do” list, a place to stack incoming mail, etc. But it’s easy to let task systems proliferate–a few notes written on paper here, an occasionally-updated PDA task list there, a stack of unreviewed papers on your desk to go through, etc.–making it difficult or impossible to determine what the one thing you want to do at any given time is, because there are too many places to look to figure that out.

Ditch unimportant tasks. Still have last week’s newspaper because you didn’t get around to reading it but might still? Consider how often you’ve gotten around to ever reading a week-old newspaper before, and if it’s close to 0% of the time, the newspaper can go. I’ve found sometimes in the past that I’ve been hanging onto an unimportant tasks for years–something that really would be good to do, but has never been important enough to trump all the other things that are going on in my life on a daily basis. It can be freeing (and a good way to cut down on an unrealistically long task list) to be able to look at some items like this and say “I’m just going to decide to not do that one.”

Part of how you’ll be happiest dealing with all of these inputs will depend on whether you want to organize your life or just keep the noise level down a bit. You may find you want the productivity and peace of mind you can get from a real organizational system. Allen’s book is a good resource for tackling this if you decide to.

On the other hand, maybe your life isn’t all that hectic, but a little additional clarity and order will help–in which case the suggestions above might be enough to give you the lift you’re looking for.

If you’re not sure whether it’s worth committing to a big organizational effort, ask yourself: Am I sometimes not taking care of things I need to get done, with bad consequences? Do I feel overwhelmed or anxious about the things I need to do? If either of these is a yes, time spent organizing effectively can provide relief while making more efficient use of your time. A successful organizing effort pays for the time it takes to do it in short order, and doesn’t have to necessarily be done all at once to be effective.

Photo by andres.thor

One of my first posts when I started the Willpower Engine site was about the two uses of self-motivation: acquiring habits and getting projects done. What has become clear recently is that projects can and sometimes should be treated as habits to acquire. There are two main reasons to do this: first, the habit approach can relieve a lot of stress, and second, the habit approach can be very productive.

How to make a project into a habit
First, how can a project be turned into a habit? A habit is something you do regularly, usually with the idea of continuing forever, while a project is a set series of things to do with a clear end point. How does one translate into the other?

It’s true that not all projects can be made into habits: the ones that can are those that require a lot of the same kind of work over a long period of time–especially if that work is something that will need to be done again in the future. These kinds of projects include many kinds of organization, creative or constructive habits, lifestyle changes, etc.

For example, the project of writing a novel can be made into a habit of writing every day for a set period of time or a set number of words. The project of decluttering a house can be made into a habit of organizing the house a little bit at a time on a regular basis. The project of documenting all of the in-house software at a particular company can be made into a habit of noting details of any in-house software product that comes in sight plus a habit of fleshing those notes out into full-fledged documentation.

When changing a project into a habit like this, there’s less emphasis on the overall structure of the thing and more on the day-to-day work. If there’s too little emphasis on the overall structure, than part of the habit should be reviewing the overall progress of the work.

The kinds of projects that don’t make good habits are ones that involve very different kinds of work over time, like starting a business, and/or that have a clear stopping point after which you don’t intend to do much of that work again, as for instance if you were doing a one-time renovation of your house.

Relieving stress
Making a project into a habit can relieve stress in two ways: first, it narrows the scope of what needs to be done at any given time to something very small and manageable. Instead of filing all of the papers lying around your office, you just need to spend 15 minutes at a time filing papers. Instead of losing 50 pounds, you just need to track what you eat, exercise regularly, and make good food choices (still a tall order, but much more feasible than losing 50 pounds in a single go).

The second way making a project into a habit relieves stress is that when this transformation is made, the project no longer needs to ever get done. Instead, the intention is to keep working on it, writing another symphony after this one, maintaining weight after losing it, keeping the office organized once it gets organized in the first place.

The advantage of maintenance
Another advantage of changing a project into a habit is that many projects need maintenance even once they’re complete, like keeping a decluttered house from getting re-cluttered or keeping on top of new sales prospects once you’ve caught up with a backlog.

Handling multiple habits at once
I’ve mentioned a number of times that it’s generally a bad idea to try to take on more than one major goal at a time, because even one significant effort or life change generally requires enough attention and focus that introducing another goal tends to serve as a destraction that causes the first effort to fail. In other words, second and third and fourth goals will suck away focus from the first goal until it dies from neglect or crashes spectacularly because attention was elesewhere.

One way around this limitation, though, is to bind habits together. For instance, if you’re trying to simultaneously organize your home, your office, and your finances, your discipline can be devoting fifteen minutes (for instance) to each of those tasks every day, at set times. (“Every day” isn’t a strict requirement, but it is much easier to acquire a new habit if you practice the behavior pretty much every day.) When you’re thinking about your goals, then, you would be thinking about whether or not you’ll be able to accomplish those three things in their regular times, whether there’s extra time that can go to one of them, and what specific issues may be arising with any of them.

There is a drawback to this approach, which is that with it, there is less attention to give to specifics and problem-solving for any one goal, so it may still be best to stick with one intention at a time if this causes problems. However, if the main task is to stay on track and remind yourself to do something, this “binding” approach can work just fine. And even without binding, the approach of turning a project into a habit can be of great use.

Painting courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

One of the current books I’m reading is David Allen’s excellent guide to task management, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I’ll certainly have more to say about this book in future posts, but Allen makes one particular point that’s immediately useful: if you want to be relaxed and focused, it makes all the difference in the world if you capture the things you’re concerned about and get them out of your head–that is, if you type them out or write them down.

One use of this principle is in dealing with a thought that’s nagging at you or upsetting you. To use this idea, you write out everything that’s in your mind about the problem: your concerns, possible solutions, fears, and so on. Doing all of this stops these thoughts from swirling around in an incomplete state within your head, leaving a more peaceful, constructive and resolved state of mind.

Allen himself doesn’t really go into why this process works, at least not in what I’ve read so far, and he isn’t really concerned with how it can be applied in areas other than task management. It’s enough for him to say that to handle tasks, it’s important to have a system for collecting all tasks needing to be done as they arrive and getting them on paper or onto the computer so that you can prioritize and deal with them instead of fretting about them. But some of the reasons capturing your responsibilities in writing can work so well are clear from other things we know about motivation and mood. For instance, we know that the human brain is designed to focus on only one thing at a time, so having multiple responsibilities or concerns knocking around mentally is stressful and not very constructive.

Similarly, we know that mindfulness–conscious consideration of what’s going on in our own brains–helps nourish constructive behaviors and opens up the possibility of detecting and repairing broken ideas. Broken ideas can’t really be tackled unless they are laid out explicitly, and writing is often the easiest and most effective way to do this. As long as a broken idea is floating around inside a mind without being fully detected and named, it can cause damage while the person is having it may not even realize it’s there.

For task management, of course, there are more steps to go through after writing things down. But for some of the other useful applications of this idea, writing down can sometimes be all that’s needed. And even when there’s more work to be done after, writing down stray thoughts instead of letting them roam is the first step in many complete solutions.

Photo by tnarik