GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

necessarily necessary.[13]

As outlined in chapter 2 (pages 48-53), I have found three priority frameworks to be enormously helpful in the context of deciding actions:

• The four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment

• The threefold model for evaluating daily work

• The six-level model for reviewing your own work

These happen to be shown in reverse hierarchical order— that is, the reverse of the typical strategic top- down perspective. In keeping with the nature of the Getting Things Done methodology, I have found it useful to once again work from the bottom, up, meaning I'll start with the most mundane levels.

The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment

Remember that you make your action choices based on the following four criteria, in order:

1 | Context

2 | Time available

3 | Energy available

4 | Priority

Let's examine each of these in the light of how you can best structure your systems and behaviors to take advantage of its dynamics.

Context

At any point in time, the first thing to consider is, what could you possibly do, where you are, with the tools you have? Do you have a phone? Do you have access to the person you need to talk with face-to-face about three agenda items? Are you at the store where you need to buy something? If you can't do the action because you're not in the appropriate location or don't have the appropriate tool, don't worry about it.

As I've said, you should always organize your action reminders by context — 'Calls,' 'At Home,' 'At Computer,' 'Errands,' 'Agenda for Joe,' 'Agenda for Staff Meeting,' and so on. Since context is the first criterion that comes into play in your choice of actions, context-sorted lists prevent unnecessary reassessments about what to do. If you have a bunch of things to do on one to-do list, but you actually can't do many of them in the same context, you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.

If you're stuck in traffic, and the only actions you can take are calls on your cell phone, you want to be able to pull out just your 'Calls' list. Your action lists should fold in or out, based on what you could possibly do at any time.

A second real benefit accrues from organizing all your actions by the physical context needed: that in itself forces you to make the all-important determination about the next physical action on your stuff. All of my action lists are set up this way, so I have to decide on the very next physical action before I can know which list to put an item on (is this something that requires the computer? a phone? being in a store?). People who give them-selves a 'Misc.' action list (i.e., one not specific to a context) often let themselves slide in the next-action decision, too.

I frequently encourage clients to structure their list categories early on as they're processing their in-baskets, because that automatically grounds their projects in the real things that need to get done to get them moving.

Time Available

The second factor in choosing an action is how much time you have before you have to do something else. If your meeting is starting in ten minutes, you'll most likely select a different action to do right now than you would if the next couple of hours were clear.

Obviously, it's good to know how much time you have at hand (hence the emphasis on calendar and watch). A total-life action-reminder inventory will give you maximum information about what you need to do, and make it much easier to match your actions to the windows you have. In other words, if you have ten minutes before that next meeting, find a ten-minute thing to do. If your lists have only the 'big' or 'important' things on them, no item listed may be possible to handle in a ten-minute period. If you're going to have to do those shorter action things anyway, the most productive way to get them done is to utilize the little 'weird time' windows that occur throughout the day.

Energy Available

Although you can increase your energy level at times by changing your context and redirecting your focus, you can do only so much. The tail end of a day taken up mostly by a marathon budget-planning session is probably not the best time to call a prospective client or start drafting a performance-review policy. It might be better to call the airline to change a reservation, process some expense receipts, or skim a trade journal.

We all have times when we think more effectively, and times when we should not be thinking at all

— Daniel Cohen

Just as having all your next-action options available allows you to take advantage of various time slots, knowing about every-thing you're going to need to process and do at some point will allow you to match productive activity with your vitality level.

I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you're in one of those low-energy states, do them. Casual reading (magazines, articles, and catalogs), telephone/address data that need to be inputted onto your computer, file purging, backing up your laptop, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler—these are some of the myriad things that you've got to deal with sometime anyway.

There is no reason not to be highly productive, even when you're not in top form.

This is one of the best reasons for having very clean edges to your personal management system: it makes it easy to continue doing productive activity when you're not in top form. If you're in a low-energy mode and your reading material is disorganized, your receipts are all over the place, your filing system is chaotic, and your in- basket is dysfunctional, it just seems like too much work to do to find and organize the tasks at hand; so you simply avoid doing anything at all and then you feel even worse. One of the best ways to increase your energy is to close some of your loops. So always be sure to have some easy loops to close, right at hand.

These first three criteria for choosing action (context, time, and energy) bespeak the need for a complete next-action reminder system. Sometimes you won't be in a mode to do that kind of thinking; it needs to have already been done. If it is, you can operate much more 'in your zone' and choose from delineated actions that fit the situation.

Priority

Given the context you're in and the time and energy you have, the obvious next criterion for action choice is relative priority: 'Out of all my remaining options, what is the most important thing for me to do?'

'How do I decide my priorities?' is a question I frequently hear from people I'm working with. It springs from their experience of having more on their plate to do than they can comfortably handle. They know that some hard choices have to be made, and that some things may not get done at all.

It is impossible to feel good about your choices unless you are clear about what your work really is.

At the end of the day, in order to feel good about what you didn't get done, you must have made some conscious decisions about your responsibilities, goals, and values. That process invariably includes an often complex interplay with the goals, values, and directions of your organization and of the other significant people in your life, and with the importance of those relationships to you.

The Three fold Model for Evaluating Daily Work

Setting priorities assumes that some things will be more important than others, but important relative to what? In this context, the answer is, to your work—that is, the job you have accepted from yourself and/or from others. This is where the next two frameworks need to be brought to bear in your thinking. They're about defining