Minimal ZTD: The Simplest System Possible

The 10 Habits of ZTD
Each of these habits should be learned and practiced one at a time if possible, or 2-3 at a time at the most. Focus on your habit change for 30 days, then move on to the next. The order listed below is just a suggestion — you can adopt them in whatever order works best for you, and you don’t need to adopt all 10 habits. Experiment and find the ones that work best with your working style. Habits 1-8 are the most essential, but I suggest you give Habits 9-10 serious consideration too. I will expand on each of these 10 habits in future posts.

1 collect. Habit: ubiquitous capture. Carry a small notebook (or whatever capture tool works for you) and write down any tasks, ideas, projects, or other information that pop into your head. Get it out of your head and onto paper, so you don’t forget it. This is the same as GTD. But ZTD asks you to pick a very simple, portable, easy-to-use tool for capture — a small notebook or small stack of index cards are preferred (but not mandated), simply because they are much easier to use and carry around than a PDA or notebook computer. The simpler the tools, the better. When you get back to your home or office, empty your notes into your to-do list (a simple to-do list will work for now — context lists can come in a later habit). Read more.

2 process. Habit: make quick decisions on things in your inbox, do not put them off. Letting stuff pile up is procrastinating on making decisions. Process your inboxes (email, physical, voicemail, notebook) at least once a day, and more frequently if needed. When you process, do it from the top down, making a decision on each item, as in GTD: do it (if it takes 2 minutes or less), trash it, delegate it, file it, or put it on your to-do list or calendar to do later. See Getting Your Email to Empty and Keeping Your Desk Clear for more.

3 plan. Habit: set MITs for week, day. Each week, list the Big Rocks that you want to accomplish, and schedule them first. Each day, create a list of 1-3 MITs (basically your Big Rocks for the day) and be sure to accomplish them. Do your MITs early in the day to get them out of the way and to ensure that they get done.

4 do (focus). Habit: do one task at a time, without distractions. This is one of the most important habits in ZTD. You must select a task (preferably one of your MITs) and focus on it to the exclusion of all else. First, eliminate all distractions. Shut off email, cell phone, Internet if possible (otherwise just close all unnecessary tabs), clutter on your desk (if you follow habit 2, this should be pretty easy). Then, set a timer if you like, or otherwise just focus on your task for as long as possible. Don’t let yourself get distracted from it. If you get interrupted, write down any request or incoming tasks/info on your notepad, and get back to your task. Don’t try to multi-task. See How NOT to Multi-Task for more.

5 simple trusted system. Habit: keep simple lists, check daily. Basically the same as GTD — have context lists, such as @work, @phone, @home, @errands, @waiting, etc. ZTD suggests that you keep your lists as simple as possible. Don’t create a complicated system, and don’t keep trying out new tools. It’s a waste of time, as fun as it is. Either use a simple notebook or index cards for your lists, or use the simplest list program possible. You don’t need a planner or a PDA or Outlook or a complicated system of tags. Just one list for each context, and a projects list that you review either daily or weekly. Linking actions to both projects and contexts is nice, but can get too complicated. Keep it simple, and focus on what you have to do right now, not on playing with your system or your tools.

6 organize. Habit: a place for everything. All incoming stuff goes in your inbox. From there, it goes on your context lists and an action folder, or in a file in your filing system, in your outbox if you’re going to delegate it, or in the trash. Put things where they belong, right away, instead of piling them up to sort later. This keeps your desk clear so you can focus on your work. Don’t procrastinate — put things away.

7 review. Habit: review your system & goals weekly. GTD’s weekly review is great, and ZTD incorporates it almost exactly, but with more of a focus on reviewing your goals each week. This is already in GTD, but isn’t emphasized. During your weekly review, you should go over each of your yearly goals, see what progress you made on them in the last week, and what action steps you’re going to take to move them forward in the coming week. Once a month, set aside a little more time to do a monthly review of your goals, and every year, you should do a yearly review of your year’s goals and your life’s goals.

8 simplify. Habit: reduce your goals & tasks to essentials. One of the problems with GTD is that it attempts to tackle all incoming tasks. But this can overload us, and leave us without the necessary focus on the important tasks (MITs). So instead, ZTD asks you to review your task and project lists, and see if you can simplify them. Remove everything but the essential projects and tasks, so you can focus on them. Simplify your commitments, and your incoming information stream. Be sure that your projects and tasks line up with your yearly and life goals. Do this on a daily basis (briefly, on a small scale), during your weekly review, and your monthly review.

9 routine. Habit: set and keep routines. GTD is very unstructured, which can be both a strength and a weakness. It’s a weakness for some people because they need more structure. Try the habit of creating routines to see if it works better for you. A morning routine (for example) could include looking at your calendar, going over your context lists, setting your MITs for the day, exercising, processing email and inboxes, and doing your first MIT for the day. An evening routine could include processing your email and inboxes (again), reviewing your day, writing in your journal, preparing for the next day. Weekly routines could include an errands day, a laundry day, financial day, your weekly review, family day, etc. It’s up to you — set your own routines, make them work for you.

10 find your passion. Habit: seek work for which you’re passionate. This could be your last habit, but at the same time your most important. GTD is great for managing the tasks in your life, and trying not to procrastinate on them. But if you’re passionate about your work, you won’t procrastinate — you’ll love doing it, and want to do more. The habit to form here is to constantly seek things about which you’re passionate, and to see if you can make a career out of them when you find them. Make your life’s work something you’re passionate about, not something you dread doing, and your task list will almost seem like a list of rewards.

See also:

• ZTD Habit 1: Collect
• ZTD Habit 2: Process
• ZTD Habit 3: Plan
• Forming the 10 ZTD Habits
• ZTD Minimalist System

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Getting Things Done

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Getting Things Done is also the title of two other books on time management: (ISBN 0-553-25848-6) by Edwin C. Bliss and Malcolm Hancock, 1976, and (ISBN 0-7181-2842-7) by Roger Black, 1990.

Getting Things Done, commonly abbreviated as GTD, is an action management method, and the title of a book by David Allen.

GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks.

Contents [hide] 1 What GTD is about 2 Principles 2.1 Collect 2.2 Process 2.3 Organize 2.4 Review 2.5 Do 3 Tools and techniques 4 The cult of GTD 5 References 6 External links 6.1 Excerpts from Getting Things Done (Business Week):

[edit]

What GTD is about

Unlike other time management experts, Allen does not start his emphasis on setting priorities. Instead he advocates creating lists of tasks that are specific to a context, for example, having a list of telephone calls to make or errands to do downtown. He also suggests that any new task which can be completed in less than two minutes should be done immediately.

The psychology of GTD is based on making it easy and fun to store, track and retrieve all the information related to the things you need to get done. Allen suggests that many of the mental blocks we encounter in regard to doing certain activities are caused by insufficient 'front-end' planning (i.e. for any project we need to clarify what is to be achieved and what specific actions are needed to achieve it). It is most practical, according to Allen, to do this thinking in advance, generating a series of actions which we can later undertake without any further planning.

Allen also contends that our mental 'reminder system' is rather inefficient and seldom reminds us what we need to do at the time and place that we can do it. Consequently, the 'next actions' stored by context in the 'trusted system' act as an external support which ensures that we are presented with the right reminders at the right time. There are many associated personal management tips and tricks detailed in Getting Things Done which can be useful for implementing the workflow described by Allen.

A capsule description of GTD from Allen's book Ready for Anything:

“Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up — not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you're doing (and not doing) at any time.”

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Principles

The core principles of GTD are as follows:

[edit]

Collect

Capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on in what Allen calls a 'bucket': either a physical inbox, email inbox, tape recorder, notebook, or any combination of these. Get everything out of your head and into your collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be processed to empty at least once per day.

[edit]

Process

When you process your inbox, follow a strict workflow:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into 'in'.
• If an item requires action:

• do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
• delegate it, or
• defer it.

• If not,

• file it for reference,
• throw it away, or
• incubate it for possible action later.

The 2-minute Rule: If it would take less than 2 minutes to do something, just do it right away. Two minutes is a guideline, roughly the time it would take to formally defer the action.

[edit]

Organize

Allen describes a suggested set of lists which you can use to keep track of items awaiting attention:

• Next actions - For every item requiring your attention, decide what is the next action that you can physically take on it. For example, if the item is 'Write project report', the next action might be 'Email Fred for meeting minutes', or 'Call Jim to ask about report requirements', or something similar. Though there may be many steps and actions required to complete the item, there will always be something that you need to do first, and this should be recorded in the next actions list. Preferably, these are organized by the context in which they can be done, such as 'in the office', 'by the phone', or 'at the store'.
• Projects - every 'open loop' in your life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a 'project'. These are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it and can thus be moved forward.
• Waiting for - when you have delegated an action to someone else or are waiting for some external event before you can move a project forward, this must be tracked in your system and periodically checked to see if action is due or a reminder needs to be sent.
• Someday/Maybe - things that you want to do at some point, but not right now. Examples might be 'learn Chinese', or 'take diving holiday'.

A calendar is also important for keeping track of your appointments and commitments; however, Allen specifically recommends that the calendar be reserved for what he terms the 'hard landscape': things which absolutely have to be done by a particular deadline, or meetings and appointments which are fixed in time and place. 'To-do' items should be reserved for the next action lists.

A final key organizing component of GTD is the filing system. Getting Things Done says that a filing system, if it is to be used, must be easy, simple and fun. Even a single piece of paper, if you need it for reference, should have its own file. Allen's suggestion is that you keep a single, alphabetically organized filing system, in order to make it as quick and easy as possible to store and retrieve the information you need.

Users of Google's Gmail online email service can also use labels to create 'To-Do' lists and projects as explained in Bryan Murdaugh "Getting Things Done with Gmail" [1] whitepaper. It keeps many of the same concepts of GTD but implements them into online email.

[edit]

Review

The lists of actions and reminders will be of little use if you don't review them at least daily, or whenever you have time available. Given the time, energy and resources that you have at that particular moment, decide what is the most important thing for you to be doing right now, and do it.

At least weekly, the discipline of GTD requires that you review all your outstanding actions, projects and 'waiting for' items, making sure that any new tasks or forthcoming events are entered into your system, and that everything is up to date. Allen suggests the creation of a tickler file in order to help refresh your memory each week with your outstanding tasks and projects.

[edit]

Do

Any organizational system is no good if you spend all your time organizing your tasks instead of actually doing them! David Allen's contention is that if you can make it simple, easy and fun to take the actions that you need to take, you will be less inclined to procrastinate or become overwhelmed with too many 'open loops'.

[edit]

Tools and techniques

A slice of '43 Folders'

One device that Allen suggests is the tickler file for organising your paperwork (also known as the '43 folders'). Twelve folders are used to represent each month and an additional 31 folders are used to represent each day. The folders are arranged to help remind you of activities to be done that day. Each day you open to the numbered folder representing today's date. You take all the items out of the folder and put the empty folder into the next month. This sort of management allows you to file hardcopy reminders to yourself. For instance, if you had a concert on the 12th of the month, you would store the tickets in the 12th folder, and when the 12th came around, they would be there waiting for you.

[edit]

The cult of GTD

Since the original publication of Getting Things Done in 2001, Allen's ideas have been popularized through the Internet, especially via blogs, and achieved something of a cult status particularly among IT workers. The GTD movement is associated with a 'back-to-basics' approach to personal management, and a rejection of over-engineered, high-tech solutions in favor of simple, inexpensive tools such as the Hipster PDA or even the Moleskine paper pad. Ironically, David Allen himself is a happy user of a Palm PDA, although in his FAQ he says he only uses the software it came with and records "events of the day" on paper to be processed later.

[edit]

References

• Allen, David (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-200028-0.
• Allen, David (2003). Ready for Anything. Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03250-6.

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External links

• David Allen & Co. official site
• Lifehack.org The community blog on GTD and Productivity
• 43 Folders, a wiki devoted to GTD-related tips and tricks
• GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age (Wired magazine)
• Sabina Dosani learns how to Get Things Done (Guardian Unlimited)
• GTD Gmail Extension, a Firefox extension for using Gmail for GTD.
• 9 Online or Browser-Based Tools for Implementing GTD.

[edit]

Excerpts from Getting Things Done (Business Week):

• BW Online | GTD - Chapter 1: “The Art of Getting Things Done”
• BW Online | GTD - Chapter 6: “Processing: Getting ”In“ to Empty”

A new online application, Nozbe, describes itself as “Simply Get Things Done!” It lives up to its tag line, showing a lot of promise for an early beta.

Why? It gets to the heart of the matter…projects, contexts and next actions, without forcing the process down the user’s throat.

A project is a group of related actions. A context is what you need or where you need to be to get that action done, not directly related to the project. So if the next action in a project is to make a phone call, but you’re nowhere near a phone, it does no good to be focused on that call. Go on to the action that’s in a context that are you able to deal with, in the time you have available to deal with it. Next actions are how you prioritize the actions that need to be done in a project. Don’t focus on the tasks that are at the end, keep your eye on what has to be done next. Start at the beginning and take it one step at a time, yet step back and take a bird’s eye view on a regular schedule to make sure you still have the big picture in focus.

The developer notes that Nozbe was inspired by 37Signals’ Backpack. Fans of the GTD system who don’t want to download a dedicated desktop application love hacking existing online tools to get them to fit into the methodology they really want to use. You can “do” GTD with Backpack, Gmail, Remember the Milk, and more. Nozbe is built for GTD from the ground up.

Gettings Things Done with Google

Thu, 02/08/2007 - 03:21 — starkos

I’ve been using David Allen’s Getting Things Done for a few years now and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I get more done in less time. I spend much less time and energy figuring out what I need to next. It has freed up mental cycles and allowed me to start to focusing on bigger goals. And it makes me look good at work, where I have sailed through major crunches without breaking a sweat on more than one occasion.

If you haven’t read the book this article might not make much sense. You really ought to go get the book — it is inexpensive and will pay for itself in no time at all!

I’ve tried several different methods and applications for managing my action lists and projects, with various degrees of success. I spent the last year using paper (the Hipster PDA) for my action lists, with project information stored on the computer. Now I am entirely online — on Google to be specific — and I only carry paper for capturing new items.

Project verbs

Finalize	Resolve	Handle
Look into	Submit	Maximize
Organize	Design	Complete
Ensure	Roll out	Update
Install	Implement	Set-up

Next-action verbs

Call	Organize	Review
Buy	Fill out	Find
Purge	Look into (Web)	Gather
Print	Take	Waiting for
Load	Draft	Email

6 powerful “look into” verbs (+ 1 to avoid)

In one of the recent podcast interviews I did with David Allen, we talked about procrastination and how he tries to get people — especially knowledge workers — back to just “cranking widgets.”

I love this term, because, in his humorous way, David captures how any thing we want to accomplish in this world eventually has to manifest itself in an intentional physical activity. Seemingly over-huge super-projects like “World Peace,” “Cancer Cure,” or “Find Mutually Satisfying Vehicle for Jim Belushi” all still come down to physical actions, such as picking up a phone or typing an email.

And David is wise, in that interview, also to highlight the importance of what he refers to as a “‘look-into’ project,” which just means that even deciding if a project is interesting and useful to undertake can be a project in itself. It also means that, even with an outcome of “deciding,” that meta-project still consists solely of physical actions. In this case, it’s the physical actions that help you locate the additional information you’ll need to make a timely and wise decision about whether to proceed at all. In sum, no matter what, it all still should come back to widgets and how they get cranked.

---

Like a lot of you, I’ve struggled with how you turn “thinky work” into physical action widgets, but here are a few of my favorite task-verbs to get you started in the right direction. They’re presented here in a rough approximation of the order in which I use them in my own “look-into” projects:

1. web-research - Usually my first stop in learning the broadest possible information about anything. And, for me, that means I’m primarily visiting two sites: Wikipedia and Google. Go to either or both and just type in the keywords that get you started. Then just follow your nose for a few minutes. If you started every project with 20 minutes of Wikipedia and Google time, you’d already be so much further along than if you’d just sat around staring into space, waiting for kismet to bring you a slice of cake. At least now you have something to start with. Yes, you probably have your own go-to sites for this kind of work; just do remember to use them.
2. brainstorm - Try doodling, free writing, white-boarding, or mind-mapping to freely generate ideas, possibilities, and connections. Whatever works best for you in your own situation. You must give yourself permission to really cut loose and not evaluate here — as they say, the goal is quantity not quality. You’re just looking to stimulate new nouns and verbs that that can provide hooks into finding more information. Lightly structured brainstorming is the best way to shape unrelated and seemingly unconnected material into a useful map for further action.
3. email - Once you’ve given yourself an independent education on a topic and feel that you’ve learned enough to ask good questions, consider writing a short email asking for advice and input from a colleague or people on your team. All the usual rules apply here, but a fast email along the lines of “Do you have a preference in foo over bar, and why?” can be a quick way to bring one honeycomb of the hive mind’s experience quickly into play.
4. call - Some of the information you need to make decisions is almost certainly available in the brain of someone close to you. When needed, make a short call to someone who you think can help guide your way. This could be anything from the person in the next cube to a customer service line to a library reference desk to that wisest of institutional historians, your Mom. Again, all the usual admonitions about respecting time still apply, but a phone call, used efficiently, can be the fastest path to an answer.
5. agenda - If you have a big pile of a little questions that can wait for now, just capture them all into your list for “agenda-boss,” “agenda-team,” “agenda-spouse” or what have you. You can then quickly blow through them all at one time. (And yes, Professor Grammarpants, this is technically a verb, since it’s just a short way of writing “Ask n person next time I see them…”)
6. write - Once you’ve gathered any amount of information — and, seriously, don’t go to committee forever on this stuff — try writing a letter, email, one-page-report, or even a theoretical blog post about your topic. No one ever needs to see it, but if you were to explain everything you’ve learned about your new topic alongside how you feel about it, you might be surprised to discover you know, think, and feel more than you had realized before you started writing. My layman’s theory here is that writing puts demands on the left side of your brain to turn mushy clouds of ideas into semi-coherent pyramids of information. (Sometimes those pyramids will end up looking more like they were created by a dog’s behind than having arisen from the dream-visions of Pharaohs, but you’ll never find out until you commit that “Shitty First Draft“)

---

You’ll notice I left off the verb you were really casting about for here, which is almost certainly “decide.” This is not an oversight.

This one I can’t help you with, because — unless you own and utilize a jokey “Executive Decision Maker” purchased from the Sky Mall catalog — deciding is most definitely not a physical action.

Deciding, as I hope you learned today, is actually a kind of project outcome. Trying to pretend it’s an action, as your author has painfully discovered, is like trying to see our notional dog’s yard pyramid as an “@dogbowl” action; that’s simply not how it works and it completely confuses the process and order of thinking vs. deciding vs. doing.

Decisions can only be delivered after you’ve nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information. Once the fetal decision has consumed these sufficient data, a bouncy baby outcome cannot help but be born. You just need to be there to slap it on the ass and give it a good name. Just please don’t call it a verb.

The Six D's

Gegax bases his time-management principles on the "six D's": don't do it, delay it, deflect it, delegate it, do it imperfectly and do it.

"When something pops ups, rather than robotically just doing it, I start with the first option," Gegax says. "If that doesn't apply, I move on to the second. I keep cruising down the list until I reach the appropriate action."

For instance, many seemingly urgent tasks disappear if you don't do them or delay them, he says, leaving you more time and energy to focus on the tasks that matter.

And while some flare-ups need immediate attention, your involvement isn't always required. Carefully consider whether to deflect the situation to another department or delegate it to a subordinate, Gegax advises.

If you do opt to tackle the problem yourself, Gegax cautions against automatically shifting into "perfectionist mode."

"A large number of my projects could hardly be described as perfect, yet were successful nevertheless," he says.

Of course, reserve the final "D" -- do it -- for the tasks you've determined will keep you moving toward your goals.

The Multitasking Trap

Multitasking may seem like a way to productively "juggle" numerous tasks, but it actually prevents you from getting things accomplished, says Laura Stack, president of Denver-based consultancy The Productivity Pro and author of Leave the Office Earlier. She offers these tips on how to better manage your time and stay focused:

• Batch: Email kills your concentration. Turn off the notification function on your email program. Set aside a specific number of times per day to check and deal with your email.
• Prioritize: Don't get sidelined by interruptions. If you're working on the last-minute details of a report for a meeting that starts in 30 minutes, don't accept a drop-in visitor's request to "ask you something really quick."
• Control Self-Interruption: Many times you interrupt yourself. You're sitting at your desk when all of a sudden, your brain starts talking to you. "Oh, I need to tell Chris this," it says, and you pick up the phone or dash off an email to "blurt" out whatever you were thinking about before you forget. Instead, get yourself a three-ring binder, some loose-leaf paper and A-Z tabs. Create a sheet of paper for each person with whom you communicate frequently. When your brain reminds you of something, simply turn to that person's communication log. Jot down the thought or idea, and then go back to what you were doing. When that person's log has several thoughts saved up, call the person and set up a meeting or phone conference.

Getting Things Done with Gmai[1]

Natural Planning Method:

1. Define purpose and principles.
2. Outcome visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identify Next Actions

Geek to Live: Control your workday

by Gina Trapani

Getting out of the office on time is tough when there's always another task, project or drive-by boss request to knock out before you leave. Results from yesterday's reader poll show that over 25% of you get caught up in late day work that keeps you at the office longer than you expected, and almost 13% have given up leaving on time entirely! It's easy to lose a day checking email, going to meetings and putting out fires only to find you haven't gotten started on your Most Important Task at 5 or 6 or 7PM.

There is a better way.

When you're not clear and focused on your highest priority todos, getting out the door on a regular workday with a sense of accomplishment is impossible. "Rush hour" - that last hour (or two or three) of the day - becomes your stressful closing window to get to the stuff you thought you had all day to accomplish a mere 8 hours earlier.

Get one thing done first - THEN check your email

Author of Never Check Email in the Morning Julie Morgenstern suggests spending the first hour of your workday email-free. Choose one task - even a small one - and tackle it first thing. Accomplishing something out of the gate sets the tone for the rest of your day and guarantees that no matter how many fires you're tasked with putting out the minute you open your email client, you still can say that you got something done. Once you're "open for business" and paying attention to incoming requests, it's too easy to get swept away into the craziness. So get your day started off on the right foot, with just one thing done.

I'll be honest: I scoffed at Morgenstern's advice at first, because my work has so much to do with what's happening in my inbox. However, right now it's 9:30AM and I haven't yet checked my email. I'm not sure what's going on in there, but this article that's due tomorrow no matter what? It'll be done.

Deliberately choose your MIT

You've got a million things to do every day, but chances are there are 1 or 2 that are top priority. Even if you're not big on fancy-schmancy prioritized todo lists, you can probably identify one or two Most Important Tasks for a given day.

So here's your assignment.

It's Friday. Near the end of the day, deliberately decide on your MIT for Monday morning. Make sure it's tiny, achievable and important. Write it down and place it somewhere you will see it, even if it's a Post-It note on your keyboard. Monday morning when you arrive? That's the first thing you're going to do. No matter what.

Get your priorities straight

It doesn't feel like it - especially at the beginning of what seems like a long work day - but your time is limited. There are only a certain amount of hours in the day, but there are an unlimited number of things you could work on. Make sure you work on the most important tasks.

Recently we had to make a tough decision here at Lifehacker. For the past year we've prided ourselves on the fact that we responded to every email that appeared in the Lifehacker inbox. Over time, the amount of messages we receive each day kept increasing into the hundreds, and even though we'd applied every shortcut in the book to our process, it took us more and more time to get through the onslaught of messages.

When the amount of time we spent processing email started to cut into the the time we spend writing posts, something had to give. A post benefits all of Lifehacker's readership, where an email only benefits the recipient, and we've only got so much time. So, we decided to reduce our responses to only the messages which absolutely need one to focus on keeping the site fresh. This was a very difficult compromise to make, but posts are more important than email responses. It's as simple as that.

If you're having a hard time getting out the door on time or frequently find yourself panicked at the end of the day because something critical is undone, it's time to reprioritize and reshuffle. Figure out what matters most and focus on that first thing. Some things may have to fall by the wayside, but you want to get the most bang for your time buck.

Make post-work appointments

If your kid has to be picked up at daycare at 5:30, or your buddy's waiting for you at the bowling alley, or you've got reservations with your other half for dinner, chances are your butt's going to be up and out of your desk chair on time. Make dates with yourself or friends for the gym, a movie, or simply dinner at home at 6 sharp to get yourself out the door on time. Carpooling with a co-worker will not only cut off your day at a predetermined time, it'll save you money on gas and tolls, too.

Wrap-up alerts

One last "get out of the office on time" trick: decide what time you're going to leave at the beginning of the day, and set a "wrap-up" timer. If Love is cooking you dinner tonight and you need out the door at 6PM, set an alert to go off at 5PM, 5:30, 5:45 and 5:55 (more, if necessary) saying "Hey! Time to wrap up and get home!" Prepare yourself mentally to start closing up shop ahead of time so you're not surprised when your spouse calls at 6:30 wondering where the heck you are.

What are your strategies for not letting office craziness sweep you away till 9PM at the office? Let us know in the comments or to tips at lifehacker.com.

The INBOX is a staging area for new actions and incoming thoughts. You can add new tasks to this section prior to assigning them to a project or context. This is useful when a sudden brainstorm hits and you realize you need to do something, but you don't yet know how to categorize it in your GTD system.

PROJECTS is an area for defining and planning the actions of your various projects. For many people, the bulk of their Kinkless editing occurs in this section. Here you can define new projects, add and edit actions within projects, order those actions in a sequence within those projects and just generally get a clear picture of what your projects look like and what you need to do to finish them.

ACTIONS is an area for viewing only currently active actions organized by context. For many people, this is where they actually Get Things Done. The Actions section lists all of your currently active contexts (contexts that have uncompleted actions in them) and the next actions for your projects in those contexts.

The Workflow

The workflow is a very powerful thing. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, yet it’s the hardest one to put into practice. The stages of the workflow are this:

Once you see something that needs to be organized, you ask the question What is it? (Odds are you don’t need to really ask this question out loud for every object, due to our mind’s ability to stay about 9 steps ahead of our inner monologue, as well as how annoying you would sound to anyone in the room. However, asking “What is it?” out loud is acceptable if you’re referring to something you just pulled out from under your car seat that looks kinda fuzzy and smells like goat cheese. There are definitely some questions that need to be answered at that point.)

Is it doable?

Well, if it’s doable or actionable (meaning it takes 2 or less minutes to complete), go ahead and do it. Simple enough, right?

If it’s doable, but takes multiple actions, we call that a project. Dump that project into a “projects” list, as a reminder that it might take a little more time to finish. You’re going to review this project list on a regular basis, so don’t worry about forgetting it.

We’ve also got some other options for doable items. We can either delegate it (my personal favorite), or defer it (the procrastinator’s favorite). If you’re going to defer it (you lazy bum), then it should be broken down into next actions (more on that soon), or put on a calendar.

Dude, it’s not doable

Don’t fret! If the “thing” isn’t doable (or doesn’t need any action to complete it), you can either trash it, put it in a tickler file, or place it in a reference file.

The Tickler File

Ok, ok… get your snickering out now before you go any further. Trust me, it’s not what you think.

The tickler file is a file system made up of 43 folders, one for each month (12) and one for each day in the month (31). The tickler file has anything that needs reminding at regular intervals (ie. the cable bill needs to be paid on the 13th). The tickler file should be reviewed often.

Reference Files

These are collections of general or topic-based catch-alls that hold materials that can easily be retrieved. But don’t get carried away storing everything like a pack-rat, it only muddies the system. Keep what you need, nothing more.

Next Actions

Any item that takes longer than the magic number of 2 minutes should go on a “next action” list, and reviewed daily. It’s like a glorified to-do list, except these lists are divided into different physical contexts (ie “while I’m at the office” or “while I’m at the store”, etc.) We’ll have more on this to come.

Conclusions

Ok, we’ve made it through the first part. That wasn’t so bad, right?

Next up, we’ll be talking about how to use the GTD workflow to take all of the mental and physical clutter surrounding us, and organize it effectively.