Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

As I've said, my simple answer is, trust your heart. Or your spirit. Or, if you're allergic to those kinds of words, try these: your gut, the seat of your pants, your intuition.

Ultimately and always you must trust your intuition. There are many things you can do, however, that can increase that trust.

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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 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

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.

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.

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

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

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 Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work These days, daily work activity itself presents a relatively new type of challenge to most professionals, something that it's helpful to understand as we endeavor to build the most productive systems. As I explained earlier, during the course of the workday, at any point in time, you'll be engaged in one of three types of activities:You may be doing things on your action lists, doing things as they come up, or processing incoming inputs to determine what work that needs to be done, either then or later, from your lists.

I've noticed that people are actually more comfortable dealing with surprises and crises than they are taking control of processing, organizing, reviewing, and assessing that part of their work that is not as self-evident. It's easy to get sucked into "busy" and "urgent" mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your e-mail, and on your mind.

It is often easier to get wrapped up in the urgent demands of the moment than to deal with your in-basket, e-mail, and the rest of your open loops.

In fact, much of our life and work just shows up in the moment, and it usually becomes the priority when it does. It's indeed true for most professionals that the nature of their job requires them to be instantly available to handle new work as it appears in many forms. For instance, you need to pay attention to your boss when he shows up and wants a few minutes of your time. You get a request from a senior executive that suddenly takes precedence over anything else you thought you needed to do today. You find out about a serious problem with fulfilling a major customer's order, and you have to take care of it right away.

These are all understandable judgment calls. But the angst begins to mount when the other actions on your lists are not reviewed and renegotiated by you or between you and everyone else. The constant sacrifices of not doing the work you have defined on your lists can be tolerated only if you know what you're not doing. That requires regular processing of your in-basket (defining your work) and consistent review of complete lists of all your predetermined work.

If choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, that's playing the game the best way you can. Most people, however, have major improvements to make in how they clarify, manage, and renegotiate their total inventory of projects and actions. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you're not dealing with, the result is frustration and anxiety. Too often the stress and lowered effectiveness are blamed on the "surprises." If you know what you're doing, and what you're not doing, surprises are just another opportunity to be creative and excel.

In addition, when the in-basket and the action lists get ignored for too long, random things lying in them tend to surface as emergencies later on, adding more ad hoc work-as-it-shows-up to fuel the fire.

Many people use the inevitablity of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It's easy to get seduced into not-quite-so-critical stuff that is right at hand, especially if your in-basket and your personal organization are out of control. Too often "managing by wandering around" is an excuse for getting away from amorphous piles of stuff.

This is where the need for knowledge-work athletics really shows up. Most people did not grow up in a world where defining the edges of work and managing huge numbers of open loops were required. But when you've developed the skill and habits of processing input rapidly into a rigorously defined system, it becomes much easier to trust your judgment calls about the dance of what to do, what to stop doing, and what to do instead.

The Moment-to-Moment Balancing Act To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which "life" is made.

You can do only one of these work activities at a time. If you stop to talk to someone in his or her office, you're not working off your lists or processing incoming stuff. The challenge is to feel confident about what you have decided to do.

Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. But at a certain point, if you're not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your People often complain about the interruptions that prevent them from doing their work. But interruptions are unavoidable in life. When you become elegant at dispatching what's coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of the "weird time" windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly. You can be processing e-mails while you're on hold effectiveness. And ultimately, in order to know whether you should stop what you're doing and do something else, you'll need to have to have a good sense of what your job requires and how that fits into the other contexts of your life. The only way you can have that is to evaluate your life and work appropriately at multiple horizons.

The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work The six levels of work as we saw in chapter 2 (pages ) may be thought of in terms of altitude:It makes sense that each of these levels should enhance and align with the ones above it. In other words, your priorities will sit in a hierarchy from the top down. Ultimately, if the phone call you're supposed to make clashes with your life purpose or values, to be in sync with yourself you won't make it. If your job structure doesn't match up with where you need to be a year from now, you should rethink how you've framed your areas of focus and responsibilities, if you want to get where you're going most efficiently.

Let's look at that first example from the bottom up. The phone call you need to make (action) is about the deal you're working on (project), which would increase sales (responsibility). This particular deal would give you the opportunity to move up in the sales force (job goal) because of the new market your company wants to penetrate (organization vision). And that would get you closer to the way you want to be living, both financially and professionally (life).

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

Or, from the other direction, you've decided that you want to be your own boss and unlock some of your unique assets and talents in a particular area that resonates with you (life). So you create a business for yourself (vision), with some short-term key operational objectives (job goal). That gives you some critical roles you need to fulfill to get it rolling (responsibility), with some immediate outcomes to achieve (projects). On each of those projects you'll have things you need to do, as soon as you can do them (next actions).

The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

There is magic in being in the present in your life. I'm always amazed at the power of clear observation simply about what's going on, what's true. Finding out the exact details of your personal finances, clarifying the historical data about the company you're buying, or getting the facts about who really said what to whom in an interpersonal conflict can be constructive, if not downright healing.

Getting things done, and feeling good about it, means being willing to recognize, acknowledge, and appropriately manage all the things that have your consciousness engaged. Mastering the art of stress-free productivity requires it.

Working from the Bottom Up

You're never lacking in opportunities to clarify your priorities at any level. Pay attention to which horizon is calling you.

In truth, you can approach your priorities from any level, at any time. I always have something that I could do constructively to enhance my awareness and focus on each level. I'm never lacking in more visions to elaborate, goals to reassess, projects to identify or create, or actions to decide on. The trick is to learn to pay attention to the ones you need to at the appropriate time, to keep you and your systems in balance.

Because everything will ultimately be driven by the priorities of the level above it, any formulation of your priorities would obviously most efficiently begin at the top. For example, if you spend time prioritizing your work and then later discover that it's not the work you think you ought to be doing, you may have "wasted" time and energy that could have been better spent defining the next job you really want. The problem is that without a sense of control at the implementation levels (current projects and actions), and without inner trust in your own ability to manage those levels appropriately, trying to manage yourself from the top down often creates frustration.

From a practical perspective, I suggest going from the bottom up instead. I've coached people from both directions, and in terms of lasting value, I can honestly say that getting someone in control of the details of his or her current physical world, and then elevating the focus from there, has never missed.

Trying to manage from the top down, when the bottom is out of control, may be the least effective approach.

The primary reason to work from this bottom-up direction is that it clears the psychic decks to begin with, allowing your creative attention to focus on the more meaningful and elusive visions that you may need to challenge yourself to identify. Also, this particular method has a high degree of flexibility and freedom, and it includes a thinking and organizing practice that is universal and effective no matter what it's focused on. That makes it worth learning, no matter what the actual content you're dealing with at the moment may be. Change your mind, and this process will help you adjust with maximum speed. And knowing that you have that ability will give you permission to play a bigger game. It's truly empowering.

While the "50,000-foot level" is obviously the most important context within which to set priorities, experience has shown me that when we understand and implement all the levels of work in which we are engaged, especially the runway and 10,000-foot levels, we gain greater freedom and resources to do the bigger work that we're all about. Although a bottom-up approach is not a key conceptual priority, from a practical perspective it's a critical factor in achieving a balanced, productive, and comfortable life.

Runway The first thing to do is make sure your action lists are complete, which in itself can be quite a task. Those who focus on gathering and objectifying all of those items discover that there are many they've forgotten, misplaced, or just not recognized.

Aside from your calendar, if you don't have at least fifty next actions and waiting-fors, including all the agendas for people and meetings, I would be skeptical about whether you really had all of them. If you've followed through rigorously with the steps and suggestions in part 2, though, you may have them already. If not, and you do want to get this level up-to-date, set aside some time to work through chapters 4 through 6 in real implementation mode.

When you've finished getting this level of control current, you'll automatically have a more grounded sense of immediate priorities, which is almost impossible to achieve otherwise.

Taking the inventory of your current work at all levels will automatically produce greater focus, alignment, and sense of priorities.

If you make a complete list of all of the things you want to have happen in your life and work at this level, you'll discover that there are actions you need to do that you hadn't realized. Just creating this objective inventory will give you a firmer basis on which to make decisions about what to do when you have discretionary time. Invariably when people get their "Projects" list up-to-date, they discover there are several things that could be done readily to move things they care about forward.

Very few people have this clear data defined and available to themselves in some objective form. Before any discussion about what should be done this afternoon can take place, this information must be at hand.

Again, if you've been putting into practice the methodology of Getting Things Done, your "Projects" list will be where it needs to be. For most of our coaching clients, it takes ten to fifteen hours of collecting, processing, and organizing to get to the point of trusting the thoroughness of their inventory.

You may have some of these roles already defined and written out. If you've recently taken a new position and there's an agreement or contract about your areas of responsibility, that would certainly be a good start. If you've done any kind of personal goal-setting and values-clarifying exercises in the past and still have any materials you created then, add those to the mix.

Next I recommend that you make and keep a list called "Areas of Focus." You might like to separate this into "Professional" and "Personal" sublists, in which case you'll want to use them both equally for a consistent review. This is one of the most useful checklists you can create for your own self-management. It won't require the kind of once-a-week recalibration that the "Projects" list will; more likely it will have meaning on a longer recursion cycle. Depending on the speed of change in some of the more important areas of your life and work, this should be used as a trigger for potential new projects every one to three months.

If you're not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.

You probably have somewhere between four and seven key areas of responsibility in your work, and a similar number personally. Your job may include things like staff development, systems design, long-range planning, administrative support, marketing, and scheduling, or responsibility for facilities, fulfillment, quality control, asset management, and so on. If you're your own business, your attention will be on many more areas than if you have a very specialized function in a large organization. The rest of your life might entail areas of focus such as parenting, partnering, church, health, community service, home management, financial management, self-development, creative expression, and so forth.

The operational purpose of the "Areas of Focus" list is to ensure that you have all your projects and next actions defined, so you can manage your responsibilities appropriately. If you were to create an accounting of those and evaluate them objectively, in terms of what you're doing and should be doing, you'll undoubtedly uncover projects you need to add to your "Projects" list. You may, in reviewing the list, decide that some areas are just fine and are being taken care of. Then again, you may realize that something has been "bugging" you in one area and that a project should be created to shore it up. "Areas of Focus" is really just a more abstract and refined version of the "Triggers" list we covered earlier.

Every client I have coached in the last twenty years has uncovered at least one important gap at this level of discussion. For instance, a common "hat" a manager or executive wears is "staff development." Upon reflection, most realize they need to add a project or two in that area, such as "Upgrade our performance-review process."When you're not sure where you're going, you'll never know when enough is enough.

I'm blending the three uppermost levels together here because situations often can't easily be pigeonholed into one or another of these categories. Also, since Getting Things Done is more about the art of implementation than about how to define goals and vision, I won't offer a rigorous examination here. But by its very nature this investigation can broach potentially deep and complex arenas, which could include business strategy, organization development, career planning, and life direction and values.

Not long ago I coached someone in a large international bank who, after a few months of implementing this methodology and getting control of his day-to-day inventory of work, decided the time was right to invest in his own start-up high-tech firm. The thought had been too intimidating for him to address initially, but working from the "runway level" up made it much more accessible and a natural consequence of thinking at this horizon.

If you're involved in anything that has a future of longer than a year (marriage, kids, a career, a company, an art form), you would do well to think about what you might need to be doing to manage things along that vector.

Questions to ask yourself here are:Here are some examples of the kinds of issues that show up at this level of conversation:You can have all the other levels of your life and work shipshape, defined, and organized to a T. Still, if you're the slightest bit off course in terms of what at the deepest level you want or are called to be doing, you're going to be uncomfortable.

Getting Priority Thinking Off Your Mind Take at least a few minutes, if you haven't already done so, to jot down some informal notes about things that occurred to you while you've been reading this chapter. Whatever popped into your mind at these more elevated levels of your inner radar, write it down and get it out of your head.

With that done, you may want to turn your focus to developmental thinking about specific projects that have been identified but not fleshed out as fully as you'd like. You'll want to ensure that you're set up for that kind of "vertical" processing.