Making It All Work – Getting Perspective

This is the eleventh entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

For me, this is the exact point at which the book moved from an interesting rearrangement of the ideas in Getting Things Done to something on an entirely different level: a deep, critical look at life priorities and how they affect what you do on many different levels.

Why spend half of the book on effectively remaking Getting Things Done, then? Simply put, it’s foundational material for the rest. Without some sort of sensible system for keeping track of all of the things you have to do, you’re going to be spending most of your long-term focus on simply keeping tab on things without the space to really think deeply and figure out the larger directions in your life and how they connect with the day-to-day elements of your life.

In other words, Getting Things Done is akin to forming a strong foundation upon which you can conceive and build some of the great things in your life. Without it, you’re building on top of sand – all of it is inherently weakened because you don’t have control of the day-to-day in your life.

Allen looks at it from a somewhat different angle on page 200:

Let’s assume that, having read or listened to the first part of the book, you’ve gotten things under control. Now the question is: Where do you put your focus? The purpose of getting control in the first place is to be able to be clear of distraction. But why? And distraction from what?

In other words, when you’ve got a good grip on what needs to be done, the next step is to back off a bit and figure out, in a broader way, what actually needs to be done. That requires perspective and consistent reflection.

Allen spends a lot of this chapter looking at this issue through a very specific example: reading materials. We all have a lot of reading materials that we’d like to get to someday (I know I certainly do).

That accumulation of material in itself is a problem. It’s just a pile with no real priority within it. Which of these is actually the most important to read? Page 101:

What, of all the things you’ve captured that you think you ought to read, should you really be reading? Here comes the perspective part. Is there material in that stack that was interesting a while ago but has since lost its luster for you? Which of the reading is truly important for you?

When I consistently asked these questions of myself and of the books I had on my shelves, I came to some very fundamental conclusions about what I was doing wrong.

First, having a big shelf full of books that I’m not going to read anytime soon is a waste. Why have them? They’re sitting around taking up space and often distracting me from what I might actually want to read. If I want to have a big list of “someday” books, why not just have a big list of “someday” books instead of a big waste of space?

Second, the decision on what book to read next is often best made when I’ve finished a book and am selecting another one. Having a strict “queue” often resulted in frustration. I’d come to the next book that I had decided long ago would be the next one and I’d realize that my interest in that book had passed. I’d try to force myself through it, but then I’d burn completely out on it and get nothing out of the hours I’d invested in the book.

Because I stepped back and really thought about my accumulated books and reading habits, I came to some very different conclusions than I had held before and it’s made my reading habits much more efficient. Rather than spending my time accumulating books for a bookshelf, books that I might get around to reading someday, I’m just reading the book that looks the most interesting to me, deciding whether to keep or trade it when I’m finished, and moving on to the next one. If I know of a book I want to read now, I reserve it at the library – if I finally get that reserved book and it’s no longer of interest to me, I just return it immediately.

Why did this happen? I used to think about reading from a longer term perspective quite a lot, but I began to find that although my interest in reading is a higher level life value, my specific choice of reading material was actually often a day-to-day thing. I’m far better off choosing my books on a whim (or from an accumulated list of “to be read” books) than I am trying to decide a queue far in advance.

Thus, I spend much less of my time thinking about books in a “meta” sense and much more time doing the actual, enjoyable reading, which is what I really enjoyed spending my time on to begin with.

That kind of thought process can be used in almost every aspect of our lives, from how we manage our money to how we choose to spend our lazy afternoons. Our day-to-day actions are often tied to larger goals and ideas that we rarely think about consciously, but if we step back and think about them for a while, we often easily find better ways of doing things in our day-to-day lives.

The next several chapters focus on these types of perspective shifts.

View the original article here

Making It All Work – Getting Perspective on the Runway: Next Actions

This is the eleventh entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

Starting with this chapter, Making It All Work spends some time focusing on how to determine what’s actually important (and unimportant) and how to prioritize things at each level of focus in one’s life, moving from your to-do list all the way up to your overall life goals. For me, these chapters were the real value of the book, because they gave me a framework to step back and really re-evaluate what my priorities were in each area.

The first chapter focuses on your “next actions” – in other words, your immediate to-do list of stuff you need to get done in the next few days. Allen, on page 210:

Wash the car, call your mom, draft a proposal, talk to your boss about a new idea, surf the Web for a gift for your brother, buy nails at the hardware store, check your voice mail.

This category refers to all the physical, visible actions that you can take. They could be the next things to do on your projects or larger outcomes, or simply single-step eventsthat you pursue because of some area of interest or responsibility.

To put it simply, this is the kind of stuff that your to-do list should be composed of each day: specific tasks broken down so that you don’t have to think about what to do in the heat of the moment. Your only decision should revolve around which one to do next.

How can you make that decision easier? Interestingly, Allen points to having a complete to-do list on page 211:

You will automatically feel better about what you’re doing if the invesntory of defined actions available to you is as complete as possible. At the risk of stating the overly obvious, the more aware you are of what you’ve told yourself you need to get done, and the more accessible the options are for you to consider, the more you will trust your plan of attack and your choices about the actions you’re not taking.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re looking at your to-do list and it’s as complete as you can possibly make it. You know everything you need to do is on that list, so you can just look through the items, pick the one that feels the most important or relevant to the moment, and run with it.

On the other hand, imagine you’re looking through your to-do list, but as you’re looking, your mind is constantly coming up with things that you need to be doing that aren’t on your list. Should you do something on your list … or one of those ideas that popped up in your head?

This is why the list preparation process is so important and why it’s well worth investing the time in getting a system rolling that can create this kind of thorough list for you. By doing it, you no longer have to think in the heat of the moment. You can just glance at your options and move forward with great confidence.

That sounds great, but it feels unapproachable. How can a person be that organized? Allen touches on this question on page 213:

In our two-day intesnive coaching with individuals, usually 90 percent of the program is focused on this horizon, simply because its approach is so unfamiliar and the volume of material to deal with is so sizable.

Trust me, it can be done, but it takes a lot of upfront work. In fact, it takes so much upfront work that for a long time, I didn’t believe that the work would ever be worth it. Yet, in the end, I find that every single day, my day is made smoother by having this list of genuinely important specific tasks. I am able to move from item to item much, much faster than before and I can focus on the item while I’m doing it with a depth that didn’t happen before.

The startup time was immense, but the rewards I get from all of that effort – turning all of the stuff in my life into a to-do list – is something that rewards me greatly every single day.

View the original article here

Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Ten Thousand Feet: Projects

This is the thirteenth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

All of us have ongoing tasks in our lives – individual things that need to be done but are too large to be accomplished in a single sitting or require various things for various steps along the way.

I know that my own life is littered with such projects. I’d like to rearrange my office, moving my mostly-empty bookshelf over to another wall and replacing it with shelving for my game collection. I’d like to write a third book. The list goes on and on.

I like how Allen describes them, on page 217:

A project is essentially a miniature goal, something that can be finished and marked off as “done.” The reason for the “within a year” parameter is that any commitment you have that can be completed in that time period – even very big ones – should probably be reviewed at least once a week.

In other words, a project is any large task that you can reasonably complete within a year. It’s usually composed of enough work that you can’t get it all done in one session – instead, you have to break it down into smaller chunks, spread out over time. Sometimes, those chunks require something to happen between them – time must pass, someone else must accomplish something, or so on.

A big key to completing your projects is review. In other words, keep track of your ongoing projects, then once a week, review all of those projects and determine what your specific next action for each of those projects is. A “next action” should be something small enough that you can do it in one session.

So, for example, with the projects listed above, I might have a “next action” of looking for an appropriate shelving unit for the games. I might have another “next action” that involves an outline of the book.

It should be noted that projects are tangible things that you can wrap your hands around. They’re not nebulous – they have a clear and definite conclusion, one that can be reached within a year.

Allen offers up some keywords that can help you define the projects in your life. On page 218:

The following verbs point to typical outcomes that I refer to as projects:

Finalize
Implement
Research
Publish
Distribute
Maximize
Learn
Set up
Organize
Create
Design
Install
Repair
Submit
Handle
Resolve

If you’re curious about what and how many projects you actually have, just use the above as a checklist, and include everything that can be linked with one of these words.

I currently have a list of forty-five ongoing projects that almost entirely match up with the words on that list.

Each week, I do a review of this project list and try to look for the “next step” with each of these projects. This keeps them all moving forward or helps me to realize that I need to abandon them.

Allen riffs on the weekly project review idea on page 222:

During a weekly look at all your projects, actions, and schedule provides an “inner coordination” that is fundamentally intuitive because of all the shifitng factors involved in the complexities of your life.

In other words, you’ll find that when you look at your project list at the end of a week, you’ve changed a bit as a person. You no longer find one project to be as vital, but now find this other project to be really important to you.

In many ways, this reflection helps you to connect your ongoing projects to the higher level things going on in life – your areas of focus, your goals, your purpose in life. As these subtly shift over time, you’ll find more radical shifts at the lower levels.

I can make a very clear example of this in my own life. Five years ago, being a parent was barely on my radar screen as a central value in life and my day-to-day activities showed it. Today, that’s completely different – one of my main life goals is to be a great parent to my kids. This shows up not only at the “purpose in life” level, but it begins to have bigger and bigger effects going down. Today, some of my projects involve things like potty training and teaching reading and teaching arithmetic, things that would not be projects in my life if I didn’t value my role as a parent so highly. The broader elements of my life greatly affect the projects I choose, which thus affect the things I choose to do every day.

A final thought: one really compelling idea I found in this chapter comes on page 224:

One of the most inspiring examples of how this elevated look at your commitments can add huge value to your life is the family weekly review. Establishing a context in which life partners (and children) can mutually debrief their past week, share a thorough and concrete overview of their commitments and projects, compare calendars, look ahead to the immediate future, and make decisions and plans together can be a phenomenal way to experience winning at the business of life.

I can’t tell you how much I love this idea nd I can’t wait until my children are a bit older so we can start doing this. Right now, my children are a little young to have ongoing projects of any real kind other than their ongoing epic castle made out of Magna-Tiles and Legos.

What sorts of projects will our family members have and share when we grow older together? It’s really hard to say, but I not only see this as a way to teach my children how to be more organized, but also a way to bond more deeply as a family.

View the original article here