GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

need a new stockbroker? You just have to call a friend for a recommendation. You want to set up a printer at home? You just need to surf the Web to check out different models and prices. I estimate that 80 percent of projects are of that nature. You'll still be doing the full planning model on all of them, but only in your head, and just enough to figure out next actions and keep them going until they're complete.

If the project is still on your mind, there's more planning to do.

Another 15 percent or so of projects might require at least some external form of brainstorming—maybe a mind-map or a few notes in a word processor or PowerPoint file. That might be sufficient for planning meeting agendas, your vacation, or a speech to the local chamber of commerce.

A final 5 percent of projects might need the deliberate application of one or more of the five phases of the natural planning model. The model provides a practical recipe for unsticking things, resolving them, and moving them forward productively. Are you aware of a need for greater clarity, or greater action, on any of your projects? If so, using the model can often be the key to making effective progress.

Need More Clarity?

If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale. People are often very busy {action) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction.They need to pull out their plan, or create one {organize). If there's a lack of clarity at the planning level, there's probably a need for more brainstorming to generate a sufficient inventory of ideas to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the vision of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the best how-to thinking. If the outcome/vision is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you're engaged in the situation in the first place {purpose).

Need More to Be Happening?

If more action is what's needed, you need to move down the model. There may be enthusiasm about the purpose of a project but at the same time some resistance to actually fleshing out what fulfilling it in the real world might look like. These days, the task of 'improving quality of work life' may be on the radar for a manager, but often he won't yet have defined a clear picture of the desired result. The thinking must go to the specifics of the vision. Again, ask yourself, 'What would the outcome look like?'

Plans get you into things but you've got to work your way out.

If you've formulated an answer to that question, but things are still stuck, it's probably time for you to grapple with some of the 'how' issues and the operational details and perspectives {brainstorming). I often have clients who have inherited a relatively clearly articulated project, like 'Implement the new performance-review system,' but who aren't moving forward because they haven't yet taken a few minutes to dump some ideas out about what that might entail.

If brainstorming gets hung up (and very often it does for more 'blue sky' types), rigor may be required to do some evaluation of and decision-making about mission-critical deliverables that have to be handled {organizing). This is sometimes the case when an informal back-and-forth meeting that has generated lots of ideas ends without producing any decision about what actually needs to happen next on the project. 

And if there is a plan, but the rubber still isn't hitting the road like it should, someone needs to assess each component with the focus of 'What's the next action, and who's got it?' One man ager, who had taken over responsibility many months in advance for organizing a major annual conference, asked me how to prevent the crisis all-nighters her team had experienced near the deadline the previous year. When she produced an outline of the various pieces of the project she'd inherited, I asked, 'Which pieces could actually be moved on right now?' After identifying half a dozen, we clarified the next action on each one. It was off and running.

In the last two chapters, I have covered the basic models of how to stay maximally productive and in control, with minimal effort, at the two most basic levels of our life and work: the actions we take and the projects we enter into that generate many of those actions.

You need no new skills to increase your productivity-just a new set of behaviors about when and where to apply them.

The fundamentals remain true—you must be responsible for collecting all your open loops, applying a front- end thought process to each of them, and managing the results with organization, review, and action.

For all those situations that you have any level-of commitment to complete, there is a natural planning process that goes on to get you from here to there. Leveraging that five-phase model can often make the evolution easier, faster, and more productive.

These models are simple to understand and easy to implement. Applying them creates remarkable results. You need essentially no new skills—you already know how to write things down, clarify outcomes, decide next actions, put things into categories, review it all, and make intuitive choices. Right now you have the ability to focus on successful results, brainstorm, organize your thinking, and get moving on your next steps.

But just knowing how to do all of those things does not produce results. Merely having the ability to be highly productive, relaxed, and in control doesn't make you that way. If you're like most people, you can use a coach—someone to walk you step by step through the experience and provide some guideposts and handy tricks along the way, until your new operational style is elegantly embedded.

You'll find that in part 2.

Part 2. Practicing Stress-Free Productivity

4. Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools

IN PART 2 we'll move from a conceptual framework and limited application of workflow mastery to full-scale implementation and best practices. Going through this program often gives people a level of relaxed control they may never have experienced before, but it usually requires the catalyst of step-by-step procedures to get there. To that end, I'll provide a logical sequence of things to do, to make it as easy as possible for you to get on board and glean the most value from these techniques. 

Implementation—Whether Ail-Out or Casual—Is a Lot About 'Tricks'

If you're not sure you're committed to an all-out implementation of these methods, let me assure you that a lot of the value people get from this material is good 'tricks.' Sometimes just one good trick can make it worthwhile to range through this information: I've had people tell me, for example, that the best thing they got from my two- day seminar was advice on setting up and using a tickler file. Tricks are for the not-so-smart, not-so-conscious part of us. To a great degree, the highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives. I know that's true of me. The smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part responds to almost automatically, creating behavior that produces high-performance results. We trick our-selves into doing what we ought to be doing.