How I’m Getting Things Done (Part 3)

August 26, 2008

KM2P ver. 2 by hawkexpress

The next stage was to ensure that everything I had dug up in my initial sweep was dealt with. This meant one of four things had to happen to each and every item in my physical and electronic baskets:

1. Do it. If there was a simple action directly associated with the item that would only take a couple of minutes to complete, I just did it and cleared it off my plate.
2. Defer it. If the action needed to complete the item was too involved to do there and then, the item went into an actions basket to be tackled later, in the third round of organising. Similarly, if the action was to happen at a later date, the item ended up in the same basket.
3. Delegate it. Some things just weren’t mine. These items found their way to their rightful owner
4. File it. In case the item didn’t have an action associated with it, but couldn’t be thrown out, it ended up in a basket to be filed.

At the end of this round, I was starting to feel pretty good. After finishing all the quick tasks and offloading all the delegated tasks, things were beginning to feel back under control. I had a clean desk, clean inbox and two clear baskets left: Actions and Filing.

Filing was fairly straightforward. After being so ruthless with throwing away whatever really didn’t need to be kept, I was able to fill one shelf of archive material (kept away from my desk) and one drawer of reference material, kept in clearly labelled folders close at hand. This allowed me to remove many of the extra shelves from my desk, as they weren’t needed anymore. The fewer flat surfaces around me, the less chance I had to start building piles of paper up again. Suddenly, I had my whole desk back again!

At this point, everything I had done could have been seen as a once-off effort to clear the decks and tidy up (and were, judging by the puzzled comments of colleagues). However, I knew that it had to be more than that. I had to implement a system to ensure that things didn’t slide back into the mess that they were to start with. That’s when I started work on my basket of actionable items and began to put in place a plan to keep everything under control, regardless of how hectic things got…

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 4)
(link to part 5)

Posted in GTD