Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches or pounds or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking. -David Schwartz
How Big-Picture Thinking Can Make You More Successful
The most successful people in life focus on and work within their strengths, and many of them are fairly narrow when it comes to talent and abilities. However, there are very few successful people who lack the ability to see the big picture. It’s very difficult for someone who loses perspective to be successful because one needs to see the big picture in order to make good decisions.
The Art of Stress-Free Productivity David Allen
20021231
About This Book
Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective results and unleash our creative potential. From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work and live, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.
Getting Things Done is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the whole game, providing a brief overview of the system and an explanation of why it’s unique and timely, and then presenting the basic methodologies themselves in their most condensed and basic form. Part 2 show you how to implement the system. It’s your personal coaching, step by step, on the nitty-gritty application of the models. Part 3 goes even deeper, describing the subtler and more profound results you can expect when you incorporate the methodologies and models into your work and your life.
The basic purpose of Getting Things Done workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. You can move from hope to trust in your actions, immediately increasing your speed and effectiveness.
Three Models for Making Action Choices
1. The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment
You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels. For most people the magic of workflow management is realized in the consistent use of the review phase. This is where you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops on a weekly basis. It’s your chance to scan all the defined actions and options before you, thus radically increasing the efficacy of the choices you make about what you’re doing at any point in time.
The outer ring of the workflow diagram shows the eight discrete categories of reminders and materials that will result from your processing all your “stuff.” Together they make up a total system for organizing just about everything that’s on your plate, or could be added to it, on a daily and weekly basis.
For nonactionable items, the possible categories are
trash
incubation tools
reference storage
If no action is needed on something, you toss it, “tickle” it for later reassessment, or file it so you can find the material if you need to refer to it at another time.
Assuming that you have collected everything that has your attention, your job now is to actually get to the bottom of “in.” Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve collected. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to to with it.
When you’ve finished processing “in,” you will have
trashed what you don’t need;
completed any less-than-two-minute actions;
handed off to others anything that can be delegated;
sorted into your own organizing system reminders of actions that require more than two minutes; and
identified any larger commitments (projects) you now have, based on the input.
It is important to know what needs to be collected and how to collect it most effectively so you can process it appropriately. In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task for trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do, and that at some point in the near future you will process and review all of it.
Gathering 100 Percent of the “Incompletes”
In order to eliminate “holes in the bucket,” you need to collect and gather together placeholders for or representations of all the things you consider incomplete in your world.
The core process for mastering the art of relaxed and controlled knowledge work is a five-stage method for managing workflow. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do. This constitutes the management of the “horizontal” aspect of our lives – incorporating everything that has our attention at any time.
