The core process is a five step method.
- Capture what has your attention
- Clarify what each item means and what to do about it
- Organize the results
- Reflect on it
- Engage on it.
The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain. (Bottle-necking).
The reason why many people haven’t had a lot of success with getting organized is simpy that they have tried to do all five steps at one time.
1. Capture
It's important in order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything.
Gather 100 Percent of the “Incompletes”
As long as you attach a “should”,” need to” or “ought to” to an item it becomes as “incomplete”.
Capture all incompletes in “Containers”, basically everything potentially meaningful to you is to be collected somewhere other than your head
Tools
Physical In-Tray
Writing Paper and Pads
Digital and Voice Note Taking
E-mail and texting
Whataspp Self Group(My Favourite)
Three Requirements for your capturing
- Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head
- You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with.
- You must empty them regularly.
Get it all out of your head
If you still trying to keep track of too many things in your mental space, you likely won’t be motivated to use and empty your in-trays with integrity.
You have to respect the system.
These collection tools must become part of your lifestyle like brushing your teeth.
The sense of trust that nothing possibly useful will get lost will give you the freedom to have many more good ideas.
Minimize the Number of Capture Locations.
You should have as many as you need, and as few, as you can get by with.
As you have to process them easily and consistently.
Remember to make procrastination your friend and not a foe. So if this stuff will be easy, you might as well process things when you are kinda tired.
Empty the capture tools regularly.
Emptying doesn’t mean that you have to finish what’s there; it just means you have to decide more specifically what it is and what should be done with It.
You must get it out of the container, you never leave it here or put it back “in”.
In-tray works as a safety net that, somewhere in my system there’s a reminder of something that you still have to do, but when the piles of “in” gets overflowed that safety is lost.
2. Clarify
Now Clarification is needed on whatever you have captured.
The first questions is
Is it Actionable?
if No
- Trash It (if it is useless)
- Incubate it (If nothing can be done right now, but something might need to be done later)
- Put it in reference (The item is non-actionable, but useful information).
If Yes
- What “Project” or outcome have you committed to?
- What’s the next action required?
If Actionable
What “Project” or outcome have you committed to? If it’s about a project… You need to capture that outcome on a “Projects” List.
What’s the next action required?
The next action is the next physical visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality of this thing toward completion.
Now Either
- Do It — if an action takes less than 2 minutes it should be done at the moment
- Delegate it — If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are not the right person to do it, put it on the waiting for list.
- Defer it — If the action will take longer than two minutes and you are the right person to do it, defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” List.
3. Organize
The outer ring of the workflow diagram shows eight discrete categories of reminders and materials that will result from your processing all your stuff.
Projects
A project is any desired that result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step.
You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it.
Project Support Material
For many of your projects, you will accumulate relevant information that you will want to organize by theme or topic or projects name. Your projects list will be merely an index.
Next Actions Categories
Next Physical Visible behaviour.
Two Minute Tasks
Self Explanotary
Calendar
time and date specific actions, or information.
Don’t put Daily TO-DO lists on the calendar.(Although I do it)
constant new input shifting priorities
there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, which dilutes the authority of the calendar. it’s okay to create quick informal wanna do list, just don’t make Have-to-do list.
Next Actions
actions that need to be done ASAP.
when next-actions list is more than 20-30 items it should seperated based on contexts. For ex. - at-home, at-store, on-computer.
Waiting For
Actions that are delegated to others.
Non-actionable Items
Trash
Throw It.
Incubation
Keep it for later review
Reference
Keep it as reference information
4. Reflect
Every system needs updates and reviews so does this one.
The Calendar is the first thing that is usually checked to get an idea of the hard landscapes of the day, then you’ll be turning towards your next actions list according the context available.
Weekly Review
Everything that might require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job remembering and reminding.
All of your Projects, active project plans, Next Actions, Agendas Waiting For and even Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week.
This ensures that your brain is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few days have been captured, clarified and organized
You wouldn’t want to distract yourself from too much of the work at hand in an effort to stay totally “squeaky clean” at all the time. But in order to afford the luxury of “getting on a roll” with confidence, you’ll probably need the to clean house and refresh the contents once a week.
Weekly Review is the time to:
Gather and process all your stuff
Review your system
Update your lists
Get clean, clear, current and complete.
5. Engage
Every decision to act is an intuitive one. The challenge is to migrate from hoping it’s the right choice to trusting it’s the right choice.
Making Actions Choices
First of all, trust your intuition to select an action.
Three Models for making action Changes
- The four criteria model for choosing
- Context
- Time Available
- Energy Available
- Priority
- The Threefold Model for Identifying Daily Work
- Doing Predefined Work
- Doing work as it shows up
- Defining your work.
- The six-level model for reviewing your own work
- Horizon 5: Purpose and principles
- Horizon 4: Vision
- Horizon 3: Goals
- Horizon 2: Ares of focus and accountabilities
- Horizon 1: Current Projects
- Ground : Current actions.
We'll will study in depth about all five of these steps in there own chapters, starting from capturing in the very next blog.