Getting Things Done

PRACTICING STRESS-FREE PRODUCTIVITY I PART TWO

Organizing Action Reminders

If you've emptied your in-basket, you'll undoubtedly have created

a stack of "Pending" reminders for yourself, representing longer-

than-two-minute actions that cannot be delegated to someone

else. You'll probably have anywhere from twenty to sixty or sev-

enty or more such items. You'll also have accumulated reminders

of things that you've handed off to other people, and perhaps

some things that need be placed in your calendar or a "Someday/

Maybe" kind of holder.

You'll want to sort all of this into groupings that make sense

to you so you can review them as options for work to do when you

have time. You'll also want to decide on the most appropriate way

physically to organize those groups, whether as items in folders or

on lists, either paper-based or digital.

The Actions That Go on Your Calendar

For the purposes of organization, as I've said, there are two basic

kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or

at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as

you can get to them, around your other calendared items. Calen-

dared action items can be either time-specific (e.g., "4:00—5:00

meet with Jim") or day-specific ("Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she

got the proposal").

As you were processing your in-basket, you probably came

across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed

up. You may have realized that the next action on

getting a medical checkup, for example, was to call

and make the appointment, and so (since the action

required two minutes or less) you actually did it when

it occurred to you. Writing the appointment into

your calendar as you made it would then have been

common sense.

What many people want to do, however, based

The calendar should
show only the "hard
landscape" around
which you do the
rest of your actions.