Getting things done

Tips to survive and work your agenda in this frenetic world.

I recently have returned to David Allen’s seminal work “Getting Things Done”.  I had read his book and loved it many years ago.  But, like so many other useful things I have learned, I declared the process complete and moved on.  These last couple weeks I returned to it.

What can you learn from this?  Many things.

First, the act of reading a master’s work, does not make you a master.  I am really good at skimming thorough theoretical works at a shallow level.  I pick up enough understanding and vocabulary to sound like I understand.  Which is fine if your goal is to bullshit your way through a conversation.  But, if your goal is to apply and master a body of knowledge, it takes practice.

Second, when I first worked with ‘Getting Things Done’ I categorized it, like we humans do, as a tactical set of tools, applicable to tactical things.  I mused that the downside to this type of toolset is that it misses the bigger picture; the ‘Why’.  It focuses on checking off tasks instead of finding ways to pull the big levers that change your life.

Getting Things Done is tactical.  But, it is tactical on purpose.  It realizes that the biggest issue most of us face is clearing the decks of the tactical tasks to make mental and emotional room for the larger exploratory missions.

And third, it’s been 20 years since the inception of the book, a lot has changed.  Work has changed.  We are globally connected to our task lists now and we need better ways to defend our time and our sanity.  This generation is connected 24 X 7 and there is the real possibility that you can spend an entire day just reacting to other people’s agendas.  Mr. Allen has updated and globalized Getting Things Done in the latest edition.

Why di I go back to Getting Things Done?

In my latest work role, I found that I was getting out of control.  My default strategies were not as applicable to the environment I found myself in.

Let me explain.

My default strategy is to look for those things that have an outsized impact on myself and the goals of the organization and focus on doing those well.  This means looking at the job and saying, “Right, what are the important things?”  You can’t do everything.  By selecting out the important things you can have a bigger, positive impact, than by just rigorously executing the next task on the list.

What I found in this new role, especially in the Apocalypse, the smaller tasks required response.  When I was working in a startup or leading an organization, I could choose not to do those tasks or have someone else do them.  Now that I’m in a larger organization I am inheriting urgent tasks, that, while they may not be important to me, are important to someone else that makes them important to me.

The net result is that I could have an entire week’s worth of priorities shifted by one customer problem.  Or, on a smaller scale, an hour or two worth of focus time swept clean by some urgent ‘fill out this spreadsheet’ request from the organization.

When your calendar gets superseded like that at a moment’s notice, what happens to the things you were planning to do?  They either become outstanding items that now have their own time-pressure, that need to be rushed through at lower quality, or they fall off the plate entirely and become missed opportunities.

You don’t write that letter.  You don’t make that phone call.  You push the meeting out another month.  You don’t do the follow up.  Especially the follow up.  With cascading emergency tasks and back to back interactions I found the one place I was really falling down on was follow up.

It can be a downward spiral.  You never catch up.  At some point you get so far behind you just give up.

Even a sanguine, balanced and experienced person can starts to get work anxiety.  You start to miss things.  You start to deliver lower quality work.  You have a mental overhang of things undone.

Another thing I found was that the global Zoom call world is particularly exhausting and time consuming.  I’m a long-time business traveler.  Some people don’t like to travel for business, but it was part of my life and I enjoyed it.  I had methods and systems to use that travel time to my advantage.  With the Covid world I lost all that.

Now I could be in a stand up Zoom call from 7:30 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening with few breaks.  This is not only exhausting but provides very few long chunks of time to work on bigger projects.  By the end of the day your energy level is so low you can’t get anything requiring deep thought or creativity done.

This schedule does provide lots of little chunks of time that are hard to get anything done in, unless you have a strategy to do so.  I found that I was losing these little chunks of time and that at the end of the day they add up to a significant lost opportunity to get things done.

Then, I had an epiphany.

Even though I’m not a tactical person by nature, I needed to get tactical and get good at swimming in this soup of tactical that I find myself in or drown.

That is where I turned once more to the master of mastering the tactical ,David Allen and “Getting Things Done” once more.

David has a simple formula to getting things done.  The first thing he realizes is that you need to capture everything no matter how big or how small.  Your brain wasn’t designed to hold all these unfinished tasks.  It takes up energy to hold all this in your brain.  Once you start capturing and offloading all these things into some place you can trust, you brain can let them go and think about other things.

That’s step one.  Capture everything.

The next step is to triage these things either as they come in, even if you don’t know what to do with them, at least store them so you can circle back.  It really doesn’t matter if this ‘inbox’ is on paper or in some sort of system, as long as you are capturing everything and putting it in a secure place with an appropriate context as possible.

It turns out that most people will have a list of open tasks that is 100 – 500 items long at any point in time.  These tasks will be a combination of work tasks and personal tasks.  They can be urgent sort term tasks like ‘get little Billy to the ball game’ or ‘complete the report’.  And they can be future, someday tasks like ‘learn how to figure skate’ or ‘establish better relationships in the customer’.

In order to get things done you need to know what to do next.  What to do today.  What to do now.  This is a concept of ‘next steps’.  For each of these tasks what is the next action that needs to be taken?

Because some of these tasks aren’t tasks at all.  ‘Learn how to figure skate’ is not a task.  It’s a goal maybe.  To get to that desired figure skating prowess is a project with a number of steps.  In order to get anything down about it you need to know what the very next step is.  Maybe it’s ‘talk to a coach’.  Maybe it’s ‘buy skates’.  Whatever that is that is the task that falls into your task list.

Finally, the only way to keep the right tasks on your agenda this week or today is to look at the list of all these things at least once a week.  This planning session will mollify your brain’s desire to have everything accounted for and will allow you to come up with your short list of things you want to do and start dropping them into the calendar.

I’m just starting to get reorganized around these principle again.  I have done it before.  My goal is to be make sure I capture everything and don’t miss or drop anything.  Then to be able to fit the work I have to do efficiently into the time I have to do it in such a way that I still have the time I need to do the things I want to do.