Yesterday I suggested that our first priority when designing a system for keeping track of all our commitments and intentions is maximizing our peace of mind. And I asserted that the key to maximizing our peace of mind is getting everything we care about into existence outside of our memory. That’s why I refer to a personal productivity system as an “existence system.”
Everyone who gets serious about improving their existence system finds themselves wondering what tools are best suited to the purpose. Does it work best to use paper or to go digital, and if one takes the digital route, which of the myriad to-do list apps and organizers out there works best?
Some of us get fairly obsessed with this question, and go on a hunt for the perfect tool or set of tools to keep ourselves organized. There’s a belief, or maybe a hope, that finding the right tool will somehow automate the process of navigating our lives, ensuring that we always do what needs to be done without having to give it a thought.
Of course, there’s no such tool. No matter how well designed our productivity tools may be, it’s our productivity practices that get the job done. Optimizing the tool-set can make executing those practices more efficient and less fussy, but it will never eliminate the need for them.
The goal of any productivity system is to make these practices routine, even habitual, to the extent that you find not doing them uncomfortable. There are five such practices, two that need to be ubiquitous — that is, woven into how we operate throughout the day; two more that need to be done at least once a day; and one that needs to be done once a week. (There are a couple more practices that need to be done less frequently — monthly, quarterly or yearly — and I’ll get to those later.)
So what are these five crucial practices? Here’s the list:
Practice #1
Capture everything that:
- Comes to mind;
- You’re concerned about;
- You intend to do something about; or
- Might have usefulness to you.
Frequency: Ongoing
Capturing means noticing when something has popped into your head — e.g., “Oh, I need to remember to do X” and writing it down. I’m using the term “writing it down” loosely here, since it could mean typing it into your computer, tapping it into your phone, or speaking it to Siri, Alexa or some other digital entity. The point is, you get that thought into existence outside of your memory. Then you go back to what you’re doing without having to worry that whatever it is might be forgotten.
Practice #2
Clarify what you want to do about each of the things you captured, and transfer them into your larger system.
Frequency: At least once a day
It’s not enough to capture everything that has your attention. At some point you also need to make a decision about just what you’re going to do about what you captured. I could be sitting in a meeting and suddenly realize that my mother’s birthday is coming up. I might capture that by jotting down “Mom’s birthday” in my notebook. But at some point I need to look at that notation and ask myself what I want to do about my mother’s birthday, and then make the appropriate entries in my calendar or to-do list.
At a minimum, this clarify-and-transfer practice needs to be executed once a day. Some people make it part of a shut-down routine that they do at the end of their workday. But if I return to my desk from a meeting at which I captured a number of follow-up actions I need to take, I’ll typically do that clarify-and-transfer step as soon as I get back to my desk.
Practice #3
Create reminders for anything that needs to happen at a particular time or place, things that you previously would have relied on your memory for.
Frequency: Ongoing
Like the first practice, this is something we need to do to get things out of heads so that we don’t forget them and so we don’t have to expend cognitive resources to remember them. These reminders might take the form of alarms on your phone to do something at a particular time; Post-Its left in strategic locations — your dashboard where you’ll see it when you get in the car, or on the kitchen counter where you’ll see it when you get home from work; or physical reminders, like leaving something by the front door that you need to take with you when you leave the house. The goal here is that nothing you intend to do requires that you remember to do it.
A caveat: You don’t need reminders for things that have become habitual. I don’t need a Post-It note in the bathroom, for example, reminding me to brush my teeth. The idea is to remind yourself of anything that you would otherwise need to make a point of remembering — or to put it another way, anything that you might conceivably forget.
Practice #4
Daily Planning
- Review your to-do list and highest priority projects, and
- Plan your day
Frequency: Once a day
If you plan how you’re going to use your day, in consultation with your existence system, you will use your day more productively. The best time to do this is either at the beginning or end of the day.
Practice #5
Weekly Review:
- Bring your entire system up to date.
- Review all your projects (What’s the status and what needs to happen next?).
- Make a plan for the week.
Frequency: Once a week
For some reason, for many people, this is the hardest practice to implement reliably. It can feel burdensome, it always seems as if there are more urgent things to do with the time, and because it involves reviewing all your work in progress, it can be confronting — for busy people, coming to face to face with everything we’re responsible for, everything we’ve committed to, can be discomforting. For that reason it’s easy to develop an avoidance reaction to doing a weekly review.
I once shared with David Allen, who emphasizes the importance of weekly reviews in his book Getting Things Done, that I find them onerous, and asked what his secret was for making them less so. He surprised me by saying that weekly reviews are onerous for him too, but he does them anyway because of how crucial they are to his effectiveness and peace of mind.
Occasional Practices
As I noted above, there are a couple of others practices that need to be done less frequently. In the interest of being thorough, here they are:
- You should review what David Allen calls your “Someday Maybe list” about once a month. That’s the list of things that you have no commitment to doing anything about now, but that you might want to revisit in the future. Having these on a list prevents you from being distracted by thoughts along the lines of “Whatever happened to the idea of doing X?” But this only works if your mind is satisfied that you can be counted on to review the list on a regular, if infrequent, basis.
- You should also do higher-level planning — reviewing and updating your goals, objectives, and overall purpose in life — at appropriate intervals.
These occasional practices can be implemented fairly easily: get them on your calendar and do them as planned. It’s the first five that really needed to be embedded in your life — that you need to make habitual. Of course you should experiment with different tools and techniques for making these practices easier and less time-consuming — “frictionless” as some productivity mavens say. That can be fun, as long as you don’t get so wrapped up in the search that it keeps you from attending to your actual work.