GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Much of what comes across your desk and into your life in general is reference material. There's no action required, but it's information that you want to keep, for a variety of reasons. Your major decisions will be how much to keep, how much room to dedicate to it, what form it should be stored in, and where. Much of that will be a personal or organizational judgment call based upon legal or logistical concerns or personal preferences. The only time you should have attention on your reference material is when you need to change your system in some way because you have too much or too little information, given your needs or preferences.

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it's still 'stuff'—that is, they haven't decided what's actionable and what's not. Once you've made a clean distinction about which is which, what's left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it's just your library.Your only decision then is how big a library you want. When you've fully implemented this action-management methodology, you can be as big a packrat as your space (physical and digital) will allow. As I've increased the size of the hard disk in my computer, I've kept that much more e-mail in my archives. The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned, since increasing the volume of pure reference material adds no psychic weight.

The Variety of Reference Systems

There are a number of ways to organize reference material, and many types of tools to use. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the most common.

• General-reference filing—paper and e-mail

• Large-category filing

• Rolodexes and contact managers

• Libraries and archives

General-Reference Filing As I'Ve said, a good filing system is critical for processing and organizing your stuff. It's also a must for dealing with the sometimes huge volume of paper-based materials that are valuable for you for one reason or another. Ideally you will already have set up a general-reference filing system as you were processing 'in.' You need to feel comfortable storing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later, and your system must be informal and accessible enough that it's a snap to file it away in your alphabetized general- reference system, right at hand where you work. If you're not set up that way yet, look back at chapter 4 for help on this topic.

Your filing system should be a simple library of data, easily retrievable — not your reminder for actions, projects, priorities

Most people seem to wind up with 200 to 400 paper-based general-reference files and 30 to 100 e-mail reference folders.

Large-Category Filing Any topic that requires more than fifty file folders should probably be given its own section or drawer, with its own alpha-sorted system. For instance, if you're managing a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paper-work, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at least a whole file drawer for those designated hobbies.

Bear in mind that if your 'area of focus' has support material that could blend into other 'areas of focus,' you may run into the dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference or in the specialized reference files. When you read a great article about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your 'Garden' cabinet or in the general system with other information about home-related projects? As a general rule, it's best to stick with one general-reference system except for a very limited number of discrete topics.

Rolodexes and Contact Managers Much of the information that you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You need to track contact information of all sorts—home and office phone numbers and addresses, cell-phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you may want to maintain information about birthdays, names of friends' and colleagues' family members, hobbies, favorite wines and foods, and the like. In a more rigorous professional vein, you may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates, goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff development purposes.

The telephone/address section of most of the organizers sold in the last fifty years is probably (along with the calendar) their most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track of phone numbers. It's instructive to note that this is purely and simply reference material. No action is required—this is just information that you might need to access in the future.

So there's no big mystery about how to organize it, aside from the logistics for your individual needs. Again, the only problem comes up when people try to make their Rolodexes serve as tools for reminding them about things they need to do. That doesn't work. As long as all the actions relative to people you know have been identified and tracked in your action reminder lists, there's no role for telephone and address systems to fill other than being a neutral address book.

The only issue then becomes how much information you need to keep and where and in what equipment you need to keep it in order to have it accessible when you want it. Nothing's perfect in that regard, but as the small digital tools become easier to use and connect to larger databases, you'll be able to have more information at hand with the same or less effort.

Libraries and Archives: Personalized Levels Information that might be useful lives at many levels. You could probably find out pretty much anything if you were willing to dig deep enough. The question of how much to keep, how close, and in what form, will be a changing reality, given the variables of your needs and your particular comfort levels with data. Relative to your personal organization and productivity, this is not a core issue, so long as all of your projects and actions are in a control system that you work with regularly. Reference material in all its forms then becomes nothing more or less than material to capture and create access to according to your particular proclivities and requirements.

If material is purely for reference, the only issue is whether it's worth the time and space required to keep it.

Some degree of consistency will always make things easier. What kinds of things do you need with you all the time? Those must go into your ubiquitous planner or PDA. What do you need specifically for meetings or off-site events? That should be put into your briefcase, pack, satchel, or purse. What might you need when you're working in your office? That should be put into your personal filing system or your networked computer. What about rare situations relative to your job? Material needed for those could be archived in departmental files or off-site storage. What could you find anytime you might need it, on the Web? You don't need to do anything with that information, unless you need it when you're away from a Web connection, in which case you should print the data out when you're online and store it in a file you can take with you.

Do you see how that personal organization of reference material is simply a logistical issue? Distinguishing actionable things from nonactionable ones is the key success factor in this arena. Once you've done that, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want. It's a highly individual decision that ought to be based on the ratio of the value received to the time and effort required to capture and maintain it.

Someday/Maybes

The last thing to deal with in your organization system is how to track things that you may want to reassess in the future. These could range from a special trip you might want to take one day, to books you might want to read, to projects you might want to tackle in the next fiscal year, to skills and talents you might want to develop. For a full implementation of this model you'll need some sort of 'back burner' or 'on hold' component.

Someday/Maybe's are not throwaway items. They may be some of the most interesting and creative things you'll ever get involved with.

There are several ways to stage things for later review, all of which will work to get them off your current radar and your mind. You can put the items on various versions of 'Someday/Maybe' lists or trigger them on your calendar or in a paper-based 'tickler' system.