already. Our lists now look like Figure 5-7. As you can see, it took us six hours to complete five hours of tasks.
Step 6: Leave the Office
Figure 5-7 shows a list on which every item in the Done? column has a mark. You've managed every item on your list. No, they aren't all completed, but they were managed. Sometimes managing an item means making sure it got the appropriate amount of attention; for low-priority items, that means they were moved to tomorrow. The important thing is that they were not forgotten.
You can look at your to do list and get the satisfaction of knowing you've managed everything on your plate today. Congratulate yourself. Smile. Put your coat on and go home happy. You deserve it.
I used to leave work every day feeling terrible. I felt like I had worked and worked, but I felt no sense of accomplishment. When I use The Cycle, I'm able to look at my list of items, see that each one was managed, and feel closure. I can leave the office with a smile on my face.
Step 7: Repeat
Let's pretend it's Tuesday. You can repeat The Cycle with today's list of items.
Today I'll introduce some advanced topics and show you how to manage them. In particular, you'll see how The Cycle works with a request-tracking system, voice mail messages, and interruptions.
Create today's schedule
You should start each day by checking your calendar for any appointments and filling them into your day's schedule. Today you have no meetings, so your hour-by-hour schedule is blank except for one hour for lunch, which leaves you eight hours for work out of your typical nine-hour day.
So far, so good!
Create today's (Tuesday's) to do list
Yesterday, four new tasks were added to your plate. Let's call them Task1, Task2, Task3, and Task4. They're low-priority tasks delegated to you during the staff meeting. They were not as important as the tasks you had to do yesterday, so you recorded them directly onto the first to do list that you thought was realistic, which happened to be today's (Tuesday's). This is in addition to the tasks that you managed yesterday by placing them on today's to do list.
When you arrived at your office today, your voice mail light was flashing, so you listened to the three messages and recorded them in your to do list, even if they didn't require any action.
It turns out that the first one was a company-wide notice about the east entrance of your building being blocked. You're
The next message is from your Cisco salesperson. You record the number, since you're going to call him back (but before you cross out the item, you will verify that your contact database—described in Chapter 12—has the same number listed). The third message is a salesperson cold-calling you. You're not going to return that call, so you just write 'junk' and mark an X in the Done? column. Your Tuesday list now looks like Figure 5-8.
The day hasn't started, and you've already completed two items! You rule!
You might be wondering why you write down a task that you immediately mark as completed. You do this because it becomes a log of your phone calls, which can be a good 'cover your ass' measure. This is one reason I prefer a PAA to a PDA. With a PAA, it's less effort to write junk items that immediately get crossed off.
I've already mentioned a couple of times that having some kind of request-tracking system is a good idea. How do you handle that in The Cycle System? You designate a specific amount of time each day to work on your tickets. I once had a job where I was expected to spend one-third of my day working on such requests. Therefore, every day I added a two-hour task called Tickets to my list. I wouldn't handle those tickets only during a two-hour block in the morning, but rather I used Tickets as a time holder for those moments in the day when I needed to work on tickets because one of them had become an unexpected priority.
