GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

It's a lot easier to complete agreements when you know what they are.

Not only that, but if you have a boss, what do you think he or she is going to do, after noticing the high levels of competency and productivity you're demonstrating? Right again—give you more things to do! It's the catch-22 of professional development: the better you get, the better you'd better get.

So, since you're not going to significantly lower your standards, or stop creating more things to do, you'd better get comfortable with the third option, if you want to keep from stressing yourself out.

Renegotiate Your Agreement

Suppose I'd told you I would meet you Thursday at 4:00 P.M., but after I made the appointment, my world changed. Now, given my new priorities, I decide I'm not going to meet you Thursday at four. But instead of simply not showing up, what had I better do, to maintain the integrity of the relationship? Correct—call and change the agreement. A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.

Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, 'No, not now.' Here's the problem: it's impossible to renegotiate agreements with yourself that you can't remember you made!

It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all.

- Father

The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at the same time.

If you're like most people, you've probably got some storage area at home—maybe a garage that you told yourself a while back (maybe even six years ago!) you ought to clean and organize. If so, there's a part of you that likely thinks you should've been cleaning your garage twenty-four hours a day for the past six years! No wonder people are so tired! And have you heard that little voice inside your own mental committee every time you walk by your garage? 'Why are we walking by the garage?! Aren't we supposed to be cleaning it!?' Because you can't stand that whining, nagging part of yourself, you never even go in the garage anymore if you can help it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself:

1 | Lower your standards about your garage (you may have done that already). 'So I have a crappy garage ... who cares?'

2 | Keep the agreement—clean the garage.

3 | At least put 'Clean garage' on a 'Someday/Maybe' list. Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, 'Not this week.' The next time you walk by your garage, you won't hear a thing internally, other than 'Ha! Not this week.'

I'm quite sincere about this. It seems that there's a part of our psyche that doesn't know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company. In there, they're both just agreements—kept or broken. If you're holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you're not moving on it in the moment.

The Radical Departure from Traditional Time Management

This method is significantly different from traditional time-management training. Most of those models leave you with the impression that if something you tell yourself to do isn't that important, then it's not that important—to track, manage, or deal with. But in my experience that's inaccurate, at least in terms of how a less-than-conscious part of us operates. It is how our conscious mind operates, however, so every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn't happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves.

In my experience, anything that is held only in 'psychic RAM' will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

How Much Collection Is Required?

You'll feel better collecting anything that you haven't collected yet. When you say to yourself, 'Oh, that's right, I need to get butter next time I'm at the store,' and you write it on your grocery list, you'll feel better. When you remember, 'I've got to call my banker about the trust fund,' and you write that down someplace where you know you'll see it when you're at a phone, you'll feel better. But there will be a light-year's difference when you know you have it all.

When will you know how much you have left in your head to collect? Only when there's nothing left. If some part of you is even vaguely aware that you don't have it all, you can't really know what percentage you have collected. How will you know when there's nothing left? When nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind.

This doesn't mean that your mind will be empty. If you're conscious, your mind will always be focusing on something. But if it's focusing on only one thing at a time, without distraction, you'll be in your 'zone.'

I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist. To fully realize that more productive place, you will need to capture it all. It takes focus and a change of habit to train yourself to recognize and download even the smallest agreements with yourself as they're created in your mind. Doing the collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behavior of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering and productive.

When Relationships and Organizations Have the Collection Habit

What happens when everyone involved on a team—in a marriage, in a department, on a staff, in a family, in a company—can be trusted not to let anything slip through the cracks? Frankly, once you've achieved that, you'll hardly think about whether people are dropping the ball anymore-—there will be much bigger things to occupy your attention.

But if communication gaps are still an issue, there's likely some layer of frustration and a general nervousness in the culture. Most people feel that without constant baby-sitting and hand-holding, things could disappear in the system and then blow up at any time. They don't realize that they're feeling this because they've been in this situation so consistently that they relate to it as if it were a permanent law, like gravity. It doesn't have to be that way.

I have noticed this for years. Good people who haven't incorporated these behaviors come into my environment, and they stick out like a sore thumb. I've lived with the standards of clear psychic RAM and hard, clean edges on in-baskets for more than two decades now. When a note sits idle in someone's in-basket unprocessed, or when he or she nods 'yes, I will' in a conversation but doesn't write anything down, my 'uh-oh' bell rings. This is unacceptable behavior in my world. There are much bigger fish to fry than worrying about leaks in the system.

Bailing water in a leaky boat diverts energy from rowing the boat.

I need to trust that any request or relevant information I put on a voice-mail, in an e-mail, in a conversation, or in a written note will get into the other person's system and that it will be processed and organized, soon, and available for his or her review as an option for action. If the recipient is managing voice-mails but not e-mail and