How do you feel about the amount of things you have to do each day? At the start of the day, do you feel motivated and focused or rather overwhelmed? And at the end of the day, do you end up calm or exhausted, with the feeling that you didn’t make as much progress as you wanted to?
If you feel like many people: overwhelmed by the number of issues and tasks at hand, blocked, perhaps not knowing where to go next, running from one place to another, putting out fires, and arriving in a hurry (or late) to your commitments, I hope this series of articles will help you to distribute and plan the tasks you have proposed to do to meet your goals and to do it in a strategic and healthy way.
To achieve this, as we saw in the previous article, it is key to have a firm purpose that motivates you to change your rhythm of life, and to define the goals you would like to achieve with it. This will help you, not only to persevere if you falter, but also as a beacon to choose what is of value to you and what you consciously give up. Once you have your compass, you need a plan! Because it’s about making room, leaving space to complete your business calmly, from serenity, and for that you have to get things out, and to get things out the first thing is to know what you have in your hands.
In this third installment of Healthy Time Management, I share with you some techniques to capture and clarify all the information, issues, tasks and interruptions to get them out of your head, manage the daily overload and regain focus on what you are doing, shall we start?
The importance of having a reliable system
‘Sometimes, I believe up to six impossible things before breakfast’, Queen of Hearts
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
This sense of chaos you feel has a fundamental reason: we live in a world saturated with information and constant interruptions, which makes it difficult to concentrate and effectively manage the tasks that bring us closer to our goals. Sound familiar?
Your world will not magically change by applying a time management method; the external interruptions, but also the internal ones, and the workload will still be there. What will change, however, is your sense of control.
A good method allows you to free your mind, preventing you from worrying about what you are not doing or what you might forget. And together with a compass to guide you in your choices , it will allow you to relax and bring you closer to your life goals.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method is for me an excellent, reliable and easy to use option, which allows you to capture all your tasks, ideas and commitments in an objective way, reminding you what to do and when. As we saw in previous articles, this method proposes a multi-step system: Capture, Clarify, Organise, Review and Execute, let’s see in detail how to apply the first two stages of this method and learn the art of capturing tasks and forget about them (or at least get them out of your head).
Capture: Free your mind
The first part consists of getting all those ideas and worries out of your head. Any issues that you consider incomplete should be written down in a reliable system outside your mind.
How to recognise the ‘issues
Many are clear, but you don’t have them written down, or maybe you do, but they are scattered in handwritten notes, emails, digital notebooks… I suggest you set aside 1 hour to make an initial compilation of as many pending issues as possible in one place, you will need a tool to make your list of entries. Don’t try to solve them or decide anything during this exercise, put quantity and speed first. You will see that professional and personal matters, important or superfluous, come up almost at the same time, don’t leave any of them without writing them down! Put all issues on the same list, don’t try to categorise them for the moment.
Tip: if during the initial process of capturing issues you find something urgent and you are afraid of forgetting it among other issues on the list, create a special section where to write it down, to deal with it first when you finish the exercise. This is the only exception, everything else should go in the general entry list.
Some time after completing the exercise you may catch yourself thinking about something that you ‘should’, ‘would’ or ‘ought’ to do, which means that it has become fixed in your mind as a commitment. It has therefore become a new incomplete, and will keep interrupting you recurrently at the wrong time until you deal with it.
From now on, every time one of these ‘dissonances’ – that interruption that breaks your train of thought – comes up, add it to your to-do list. This will give your brain the feeling that the task is ‘dealt with’, freeing you to focus on the task at hand.
In addition to these dissonances, every day we receive new issues to deal with from multiple sources of information: email, teams, social networks, WhatsApp… so it is convenient that when you check each source you also write down the new pending issues in the list of entries. Little by little you will get used to doing it automatically.
Getting into the habit of capturing to-dos in the inbox list as they come up will help you concentrate.
Is it enough to have a list of all the to-do items? Is this enough?
I’m afraid not. And there are several reasons. For one thing, not all unfinished business can be written down on a list, we have junk out of place, physical papers to file or throw away, websites, articles or books to read, podcasts to research or archive for future reference…. And, on the other hand, not all issues have to be attended to with the same priority, at the same time or place.
The success of a capture system depends to a large extent on these factors:
- That it picks up 100% of the incompletes out of your head. This is something you have to practice, when you are assaulted by a new ‘out of place’ issue, stop, catch it in one of your input bins and get back as quickly as possible to what you were doing.
- Keep the number of catch containers to a minimum, so that you can manage in all contexts and in all places. For the moment we have worked with a list of inputs to empty your mind, but you may also want to empty some drawers or cupboards…
- Let these containers be emptied regularly. This doesn’t mean that you have to complete the items they contain, but process them to clarify what they are and what to do with them.
The 6 ‘bins’ of GTD
The GTD method proposes six main places to capture all your information:
- Physical box: A place to deposit physical objects out of place. It can be a box on your desk or a basket at home where you collect everything that is out of place: cables, papers, etc. At the end of the day, spend a few minutes emptying and organising it.
- Physical folder for papers: Set aside a fixed place for the documents you receive, such as business cards, warranty documents, invoices or tickets. It can be a folder or even a pocket in your backpack, the important thing is that it is always the same and that you empty it regularly.
- Notebook: Use a single notebook (physical or digital) to write down everything that captures your attention, both work and personal. This simplifies your system and avoids dispersion. Carry it with you whenever possible.
- Digital repository: Create a space to capture useful information you find online, such as articles, quotes, music or travel ideas. Tools like OneNote, Evernote or Obsidian allow you to save these resources in a quick and organised way.
- To-do’s: Get a single application to record the entry of new to-dos and associated tasks once they have been processed. If possible, look for an option that is synchronised between PC and mobile. It is important that you never use the calendar for to-dos; the calendar is only for fixed time and date commitments.
- Email inbox: This point deserves a special section. Emptying your email inbox gives you unparalleled peace of mind. Review and organise messages to avoid re-reading the same emails over and over again.
NOTE: I personally find it helps to think of Teams messages as their own inbox, so I treat them as an inbox.
For the time being, my suggestion is that you focus on the to-do inbox list. Once you get the hang of it and get into the habit of capturing everything that pops into your head, you can try the same exercise with the other inboxes. How would you feel about an empty inbox?
Clarify: Identify the following action
Once you have done the initial capture of all the in-flight issues, it is time to clarify them and turn them into tasks, i.e. to know what they are and what to do with them. I encourage you to set aside some time to clarify and empty your to-do list. You will need a tool with categories where you can put what you get off your to-do list.
In this exercise you should follow some basic rules:
- Process the items in the order in which they are on the input list: don’t go through the urgent or important ones, the ones you feel like doing the most, or the ones that are easiest for you. You will get to all of them anyway, so stick to the order.
- Process one item at a time.
- Don’t put it back on the entry list: don’t succumb to the temptation to leave it there for later because you find it hard to decide what to do.
What is processing an issue if it’s not about doing it?
I admit that I personally struggled to understand the difference between completing an issue and processing it, and for a long time I bought into the idea that processing was about doing it or just putting it in a category other than the inbox – and that’s not what it’s about!
Processing is about clarifying what you need to do, but not necessarily doing it. It’s about getting issues out of inboxes, turning them into concrete, physical, visible tasks that you can complete in 25 minutes.
Having your goals, both personal and professional, at hand will help you say what to do with each issue.
For each issue describe in a short sentence what would be the satisfactory outcome of resolving the issue you are clarifying – what have you committed to?
Then decide on the next concrete action you can complete that will move you forward in completing the issue.
When you write down a task, be sure to describe it clearly so that when you review it you know exactly what you need to do to move forward. For example:
- Avoid generalities: ‘Report client X’.
- Write better: ‘Write the executive summary for client X’s report due on Friday’.
- If you need additional information to do that task, record it also in your task list: ‘Ask my boss for the report with the details of the KPIs for the month’.
Trick: when some tasks are related, I use the same heading to identify them, followed by the action to be performed. In the example above I would have two tasks:
- ‘Report client X: executive summary >> PTE detail KPIs of the month’.
- ‘Report client X: request boss detail KPIs of the month’.
What if there is no action?
You may have captured things that at some point you wanted to do, but no longer make sense, that you simply don’t need to do anything now or want to have on hand for future reference.
- Rubbish: get rid of it, delete it from your list of input items and don’t create any associated tasks. If in doubt it is just as right to delete it or save it, but never put it back in the inbox. Remember that for healthy time management you don’t have to get to everything, but choose what gets you closer to your goals, professional or life, and giving up is part of the process. When you decide to send a pending issue to the trash, please do it with conviction, with the security that comes from having a clear reason and objectives (you can write them down next to the task before crossing it off your list), so that if at some point this issue comes back to your mind, you can ‘throw it out’ without any complexes.
- To Incubate: decide what you have to do and put it in the “maybe ’ category of your to-do list. You can set it to remind you of the task on a specific date, for example, if the action is to look at the agenda to decide whether or not to attend a course, set the deadline to sign up as a reminder.
- Reference: if you only want to keep it for future reference, you should have a digital archiving system in place. A proposal would be the PARA system, is it information for a project? Does it go in the physical or digital folder of the project? Is it information for an area of knowledge? It goes in the physical or digital folder of that area. Everything else can go in the general ‘future reference’ file.
What about the issues that do require action?
You need to decide what the next action is for the issue to move forward. You don’t need to make a complete list of everything you need to do to complete the issue, just the next action. Once you have decided you will have 3 options:
Do it: only if the action takes 2 minutes or less. But this is a suggestion, if you are faced with a large list of issues to process and you have limited time to do it, you may have to reduce it to 1 minute or even 30 seconds.
Even if it’s not an urgent matter, if it takes you longer to process it than to do it, do it now!
If you have trouble calculating how long 2 minutes is, try using a stopwatch, little by little you will gain experience and you will be able to calculate better.
Delegate it: are you really the person in charge of this issue, is there someone who can help you? Many times we put on our list of issues that are not really our responsibility or do not have to be our responsibility exclusively – do you really have to be the one to empty the storage room this weekend? In this case decide what the next action is:
If delegating takes less than 2 minutes, or the time you have chosen, do it! Make a note of the date and move the task to the ‘on hold ’ category for follow-up.
If it takes longer, maybe you have to explain to the other person what they have to do, move the task to the ‘next actions ’ category to delegate it later.
Defer: Once you have thought about what the expected outcome is and translated the issue into the next physical and visible task to move forward, if you have to do it yourself and it takes more than 2 minutes, move the task to the ‘next actions’ category.
As mentioned above, if several tasks belong to the same ‘project’ or depend on each other, you can put the same label to better identify them.
If during the initial processing you identify a task that is urgent for you to solve at the end of the exercise, move it to the ‘urgent’ category.
Insist on the importance of clarifying during this processing the next action, if you don’t do it and just put it in a category, a vacuum is created that will lead you to postpone the task again and again.
When you have finished processing all the items on your initial list, you should have the following categories in your task app: ‘on hold’, ‘maybe’, ‘next actions’, ‘urgent’.
Note: If you feel like emptying your email inbox as well, you can create these same categories in your email client, and leave the emails there once they have been processed. Note that if an email has a subject or task to process, you will also need to make a note of it in your task app.
When you have more experience in processing and especially in reviewing categories (as we will see in future articles) you can create more categories for projects, or areas, as long as they are as few as possible. For example, I like to have the categories ‘Family and Friends’, ‘Finances’ or ‘Holidays’. You will also see that the actions of capturing and clarifying can be merged, and create the tasks directly processed in your category system, without going through the input list, although you should keep that input container, for those moments when you don’t want to lose a second of concentration and you just need to capture as quickly as possible the issue that has interrupted you to get back to what you were doing.
Just as getting into the habit of capturing issues in the input list as they arise will help you focus, getting into the habit of emptying the list with a daily clarification process will ensure that you have all your issues under control, ready to move forward when the time comes.
Conclusions
Don’t worry, if you find your to-do list unmanageable, or if clearing all the entries seems like a Herculean task, I know it can be daunting at first. The point of this exercise is not to try to complete everything at some point, but to get an idea of the number of items you have on your plate, big or small. Remember that healthy time management is not about figuring out how to get to everything, it will never happen. However, having all your to-dos captured will help you decide what to devote your efforts to at any given moment and feel at peace with it, knowing that you are doing, or even more importantly not doing, the very thing that brings you closer to your goals.
I invite you to take these first steps of the GTD method, capture and clarify, to the areas of your life where you think they can help you. Give yourself time to consolidate before trying more things because although it is simple, it is not magic, and it will require some effort and commitment on your part.
If you already have it and want to keep moving forward, you can delve into the next steps, organise, review and execute, of the GTD method.
And if you falter, remember what motivated you to apply healthy time management techniques. Take action and enjoy the journey!
