Getting Things Done

THE ART OF GETTING THINGS DONE | PART ONE

your taxes are due in a month; or for September 12, that Swan
Lake will be presented by the Bolshoi at the Civic Auditorium in
six weeks.
For further details, refer to chapter 7.

Reference Material
Many things that come your way require no action but have
intrinsic value as information. You will want to keep and be able
to retrieve these as needed. They can be stored in paper-based or
digital form.
Paper-based material—anything from the menu for a local
take-out deli to the plans, drawings, and vendor information for a
landscape project—is best stored in efficient physical-retrieval
systems. These can range from pages in a loose-leaf planner or
notebook, for a list of favorite restaurants or the phone numbers
of the members of a school committee, to whole file cabinets
dedicated to the due-diligence paperwork for a corporate merger.
Electronic storage can include everything from networked
database information to ad hoc reference and archive folders
located in your communication software.
The most important thing to remember here is that refer-
ence should be exactly that—information that can be easily
referred to when required. Reference systems generally take
two forms: (1) topic- and area-specific storage, and (2) general-
reference files. The first types usually define themselves in terms
of how they are stored—for example, a file drawer dedicated to
contracts, by date; a drawer containing only confidential
employee-compensation information; or a series of cabinets for
closed legal cases that might need to be consulted during future
trials.

General-Reference Filing The second type of reference system is
one that everyone needs close at hand for storing ad hoc informa-
tion that doesn't belong in some predesignated category. You need
somewhere to keep the instruction manual for your cell phone,