GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

when they get it down to 'set meeting.' But that's not the next action, because it's not descriptive of physical behavior. How do you set a meeting? Well, it could be with a phone call or an e-mail, but to whom? Decide. If you don't decide now, you'll still have to decide at some other point, and what this process is designed to do is actually get you to finish the thinking exercise about this item. If you haven't identified the next physical action required to kick-start it, there will be a psychological gap every time you think about it even vaguely. You'll tend to resist noticing it.

Until you know what the next physical action is, there's still more thinking required before anything can happen.

When you get to a phone or to your computer, you want to have all your thinking completed so you can use the tools you have and the location you're in to more easily get things done, having already defined what there is to do. What if you say to yourself, 'Well, the next thing I need to do is decide what to do about this?' That's a tricky one. Deciding isn't really an action, because actions take time, and deciding doesn't. There's always some physical activity that can be done to facilitate your decision-making. Ninety-nine percent of the time you just need more information before you can make a decision. That additional information can come from external sources ('Call Susan to get her input on the proposal') or from internal thinking ('Draft ideas about new reorganization'). Either way, there's still a next action to be determined in order to move the project forward.

Determine what you need to do in order to decide.

Once You Decide What the Action Step is

You have three options once you decide what the next action really is.

• Do it (if the action takes less than two minutes).

• Delegate it (if you're not the most appropriate person to do the action).

• Defer it into your organization system as an option for work to do later.

Do It

If the next action can be done in two minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. If the memo requires just a thirty-second reading and then a quick 'yes'/'no'/other response on a Post-it back to the sender, do it now. If you can browse the catalog in just a minute or two to see if there might be anything of interest in it, browse away, and then toss it, route it, or reference it as required. If the next action on something is to leave a quick message on someone's voice-mail, make the call now.

Even if the item is not a 'high priority' one, do it now if you're ever going to do it at all. The rationale for the two-minute rule is that that's more or less the point where it starts taking longer to store and track an item than to deal with it the first time it's in your hands-—in other words, it's the efficiency cutoff. If the thing's not important enough to be done, throw it away. If it is, and if you're going to do it sometime, the efficiency factor should come into play.

The two-minute rule is magic.

Many people find that getting into the habit of following the two-minute rule creates a dramatic improvement in their productivity. One vice president of a large software company told me that it gave him an additional hour a day of quality discretionary time! He was one of those 300-e-mails-a-day high-tech executives, highly focused for most of the workday on three key initiatives. Many of those e-mails were from people who reported to him—and they needed his eyes on something, his comments and OKs, in order to move forward. But because they were not on a topic in his rifle sights, he would just stage the e-mails in 'in,' to get to 'later.' After several thousand of them piled up, he would have to go in to work and spend whole weekends trying to catch up. That would have been OK if he were twenty-six, when everything's an adrenaline rush anyway, but he was in his thirties and had young kids. Working all weekend was no longer acceptable behavior. When I coached him we went through all 800-plus e-mails he currently had in 'in.' It turned out that a lot could be dumped, quite a few needed to be filed as reference, and many others required less-than-two-minute replies that he whipped through. I checked with him a year later, and he was still current! He never let his e-mails mount up beyond a screenful anymore. He said it had changed the nature of his division because of the dramatic decrease in his own response time. His staff thought he was now made of Teflon!

That's a rather dramatic testimonial, but it's an indication of just how critical some of these simple processing behaviors can be, especially as the volume and speed of the input increase for you personally.

Two minutes is in fact just a guideline. If you have a long open window of time in which to process your in- basket, you can extend the cutoff for each item to five or ten minutes. If you've got to get to the bottom of all your input rapidly, in order to figure out how best to use your afternoon, then you may want to shorten the time to one minute, or even thirty seconds, so you can get through everything a little faster.

It's not a bad idea to time yourself for a few of these while you're becoming familiar with the process. Most clients I work with have difficulty estimating how long two minutes actually is, and they greatly underestimate how long certain actions are likely to take. For instance, if your action is to leave someone a message, and you get the real person instead of his or her voice-mail, the call will usually take quite a bit longer than two minutes.

You'll be surprised how many two-minute actions you can perform even on your most critical projects.

There's nothing you really need to track about your two-minute actions—you just do them. If, however, you take an action and don't finish the project with that one action, you'll need to clarify what's next on it, and manage that according to the same criteria. For instance, if you act to replace the cartridge in your favorite pen and discover that you're out of cartridge refills, you'll want to decide on the next action about getting them ('Buy refills at the store') and do, delegate, or defer it appropriately.

Adhere to the two-minute rule and see how much you get done in the process of clearing out your 'in' stacks. Many people are amazed by how many two-minute actions are possible, often on some of their most critical current projects.

Let me make one more observation regarding the two-minute rule, this time as it relates to your comfort with typing e-mails. If you're in a large-volume e-mail environment, you'll greatly improve your productivity by increasing your typing speed and using the shortcut keyboard commands for your operating system and your common e-mail software. Too many sophisticated professionals are seriously hamstrung because they still hunt and peck and try to use their mouse too much. More work could be dispatched faster by combining the two-minute rule with improved computer skills. I've found that many executives aren't resisting technology, they're just resisting their keyboards!

Delegate It

If the next action is going to take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, 'Am I the best person to be doing it?' If not, hand it off to the appropriate party, in a systematic format.

 Delegation is not always downstream. You may decide, 'This has got to get over to Customer Service,' or 'My boss needs to put his eyes on this next,' or 'I need my partner's point of view on this.'

A 'systematic format' could be any of the following:

• Send the appropriate party an e-mail.

• Write a note or an overnote on paper and route the item 'out' to that person.

• Leave him or her a voice-mail.

• Add it as an agenda item on a list for your next real-time conversation with that person.

• Talk to him or her directly, either face-to-face or by phone.

Although any of these options can work, I would recommend them in the above order, top to bottom. E-mail is usually the fastest mode into the system; it provides an electronic record; and the receiver gets to deal with it at his or her convenience. Written notes are next because they too can get into the system immediately, and the recipient then has a physical particle to use as an organizational reminder. If you're passing on paper-based