Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve captured. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.
If you’re not sure what you’ll use as the reminder system, grab a notebook for now.
Processing Guidelines
- one item at a time
- Never put anything back into “in”
Process means deciding what the thing is and what action is required and then put reminders of it accordingly.
Key Processing Question: “What’s the next Action?”
Find out the next action regarding the item.
What if there is not Action
Then it is either
Trash
Item to incubate
These are the thing in your in-tray about which you say to yourself, “There’s nothing to do on this now, but there might be later”, like a bucket list item, or an tech you want to buy.
Reference
This is the information related to something, which you don’t need right now, but might want to reference it later. Referencing and filing should be fun and immediate.
If there is and Action… What is It?
The next action should be easy to figure out, but there are often some quick analyses and several planning steps that haven’t occurred yet in you mind, and these have to happen before you can determine precisely what has to happen to complete the item even, if it’s a fairly simple one.
Examples-
Clean the Garage
Well I just have to get in there and start. No, wait a minute there’s a big refrigereator in there that I need to get rid of first. I should find out if John Patrick wants it for his camp. I should…
Cal John Regarding Refrigerator in garage.
Do my taxes
…but I actually can’t start on them until I have my last investment income documents back. Can’t do anything until then So I’m…
Waiting for documents from Acme Trust
The Action Step Needs to Be the Absolute Next Physical Thing to do.
Decide the next Action now, cause if you don’t decide now, you’ll still have to decide at some other point, and what this process is designed to do is actualy get you to finish the thinking exercise about the items.
If you haven’t decided the next Physical action there will be a psychological gap every time you even think about it vaguely.
You’ll tend to resist it, which leads to Procrastination
Sometimes you just need more information before you can make a decision, so the next action can be call this person, or surf internet for this and so on.
Once You decide What the Action step is-
Divide it into
- Do It (if it takes a few minutes)
- Delegate It (If you’re not the right person for the action)
- Defer it (If you’re the right person, but it takes more than a few minutes)
Do It
Even if the item is not a high-priority one, do it now if you’re ever going to do it at all, if it takes two minutes or less.
You don’t need to track these bitches.
And Yes you shouldn’t either become slave to spending your day doing two-minute actions only.
Delegate It
If Task is going to take longer than two minutes and you’re not the right person to do it, then Hand it off to the appropriate party, systematically.
Tracking the Hand-off : If you do delegate an action to someone else and if you want something to happen as result then you’ll need to track it in the list “Waiting for”.
It’s also important that you record the date on everything that you hand off to others, for future reference.
Defer It
It’s likely that most of the next actions you determine for things in “in” will be yours to do and will take longer than two minutes to complete. Keep them at one place.
Identifying the Projects You Have
Project is any outcome you are committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete.
If you look at your action list, there are items that are to be followed with some other items like, after you get the reply from John Regarding the Refrigerator you’ll need do something else, and that’s where projects list swoops in
The purpose of the projects list is not to reflect priorities but just to ensure that you’ve got placeholders for al those open loops.
We’ve done the clarification of what is what but now we’ll have to organize all this data into different places, this brings us to the next part Organizing.