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Four weeks ago, I asked you to make a note in your calendar:

“What happened in the past four weeks that I was unprepared for?”

Now it is time to stop and think about the answer. Did something happen to you that was unforeseen? Which of these describes your response:

• Did the unexpected cause a crisis?
• Were you thrown out of your comfort zone?
• Did the unknown strike you as an opportunity?
• Were you on top of things, so the surprise yielded a benefit?

My own unexpected event came last Tuesday, in the form of a call from someone looking to hire me for a pretty cool job. We did a face-to-face interview on Thursday, and a second telephone interview that evening. I am looking forward to this opportunity, it will be an important new chapter in my personal and professional development. It is a little bit outside of my experience, but it is definitely a “growth position” that I am prepared to exploit. It will give me the opportunity to bring disparate parts of my work experience together in a new way. I will have more information for you shortly.

What unexpected event happened to you? Leave your answer in the Comments.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/657c2a. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Now that we have all completed our New Year’s Resolutions and goal-planning for 2008, it is time to start thinking about getting ready to look back. We have discussed being ready for change, now I’d like to talk about being ready for review.

The world is moving faster and faster, so it is a safe bet that something will happen to you, to me, to any of us, in the next few weeks that will have a big impact. When these things happen, they seem to come out of nowhere, an unforeseen or unpredictable “bolt-from-the-blue”.

Are you prepared for the unknown?

David Allen, in Ready for Anything, recommends that you grab your organizer and make a note for four weeks from today:

“What happened in the past four weeks that I was unprepared for?”

Now you can be mindful about your everyday business, keeping up-to-date with your activities. When the day of your note comes up, stop and think about the answer.

• Did the unexpected cause a crisis?
• Were you thrown out of your comfort zone?
• Did the unknown strike you as an opportunity?
• Were you on top of things, so the surprise yielded a benefit?

We will come back to this question in four weeks, I am looking forward to finding out what happened.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5zl64k. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

The real challenge is to make good communication a handy and well-used tool. Then you are likely to pick it up and use it without thinking.

~ Max Depree

Being productive in any environment is the result of identifying and fixing the weaknesses in your systems and processes. Communication, interaction, and production are inter-related in a way that many people do not realize. Bottlenecks occur when part of a system or process is out-of-sync with the rest. For example: “If someone on a team doesn’t respond to e-mails for two weeks, the entire group’s sensitivity and efficiency have been dulled.” [David Allen]

If you have been practicing GTD for any time at all, you know all about your Capture Device and your Tickler File, but have you analyzed the rest of your system to find any bottlenecks that may be impeding your progress toward completion? Like the staffer who does not respond to e-mail, is there a part of your own workflow that is not getting back to you?

Communicatie with Yourself

The underlying theme of the Getting Things Done practice is to get “stuff” out of your head where it is just swirling around and into a system for processing and doing. Take a look at the workflow diagram again, and get out a piece of paper (a big piece of flip-chart paper if you can get it!).
This is what mine looks like:

Draw out your own personal workflow diagram. Start at the beginning, and be sure to include all of your input devices/collection tools. As you can see, I discovered a recursive loop (Is it Actionable? > No > Hold > Back to Mailbox) that was causing a problem with ever getting some of my tasks completed. The In-box is not for storage!

Avoid Duplication of Effort

I also discovered that I was duplicating some of my tasks, in that I was tracking Delegated tasks and Deferred tasks in both the Hard Landscape of my calendar and in the @Waiting For context. Delegated tasks now get a note in the calendar only, on the day before the due date (or whatever time period I decide is needed to check on the status) and Deferred items go either to the Tickler File or the Next Action list. This gives them a target date for execution, and an appropriate Context.

This change in the process also allows me to use the @Waiting For context list for e-mail replies, answers to questions, submissions, etc.

Tagging Your Information

I like tagging, most of the posts on this site have two or more tags and can be sorted into a multitude of variations, depending on what topic you are interested in. I also use colored Post-it flags for tagging the papers and pages in my analog system. As you can see in the above picture, two of the listed Contexts are in green (the rest are blue). As I was drawing out the diagram it occurred to me that I was missing a link to items that were listed/captured in my notebook or research files.

As you can see, the flags, minicards, and Post-It cards all come in the same five colors, to indicate where in the system they will be going (I also print my organizer pages in the same colors):

• Red - Calendar
• Orange - Contacts/Notebook
• Yellow - Research Files
• Green - Waiting For
• Blue - Next Action

I recommend that you perform a workflow analysis for yourself at least once every six months or so, or whenever you change tools or methods. Especially if you get something juicy for your system this Christmas!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6zxxhy. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

How often have you struggled through a stressful day because there was something bothering you from the back of your mind? My guess is that this happens to everyone at one time or another. Perhaps it was an unpleasant task, or even just an idea for a project that you’ve been kicking around.

Where does the stress come from?

Part of the cause of the stress that you are experiencing is due to this unaknowledged commitment bouncing around in your head. Keeping something like this in your mental “RAM” is a waste of your psychic energy and a drain on your motivation. Part of the goal of the practice of Getting Things Done is to create a stress-free environment for you to do your real work, thinking. David Allen writes in Ready for Anything:

“Left only in the mind, these self-commitments create infinite loops that make to progress and produce inner conflict and stress. As soon as you make any sort of commitment with yourself, not completed in the moment, your mind will demand and take psychic energy until it’s resolved. That is mental karma.”
p. 27

How can this be overcome?

There is an elegant solution to the problem of having nagging worries and half-formed ideas in your head: Write it down. Grab a pencil and your Capture Notebook and jot down the idea, the project concept, the errand, whatever it is. Write down its name, what is involved, who needs to be informed, and when it needs to get done. After you have defined the thought, consider why it needs to be done, what will success look like, what is the proper context for tracking it, and what is the very Next Action that you can take to get closer to executing the goal. Taking these steps is extremely important if you have a bit of ADD.

Use the Workflow Method

Now that you have Collected and Processed the thought that has been bothering you, it needs to get Organized and placed into the proper category for action. Is this something that you can do in the next two minutes? If so, just do it! If not, which is much more likely, log it in your Calendar if it is time-specifiic, or add it to the proper Next Action list within its Context. Make a note to Review this thought at your next Weekly Review, and then move on to the next thing.

The benefits of trusting your system

Following these very simple steps can be an aid to clearing your mind and reducing the level of stress that you experience. From Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff:

“…there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress…As you lower your tolerance to stress, you will find that you’ll have far less stress to handle, as well as creative ideas for handling the stress that is left over.”
pp.53-55

When you can rely on yourself to use your capture system, and you trust that your system will work to provide you with the information that you need when you need it, your stress level will go down. Review your Workflow system on a quarterly basis, making sure that it is as invisible as it can be. Use your system, let it work for you.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike (/wink, nudge): Mike St. Pierre and Geoff are thinking about this too.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5flrx6. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen