First, clarify your projects. So many people try to organize unclear stuff—you can’t. If you had a pile of documents on your desk and I said to you, “Please organize those quickly.” You’d probably say, “Well . . . I can’t do that until I look at each paper first.” Exactly. People try to “get organized” when the stuff they’re trying to organize is still in a vague and unclear form. You can’t prioritize a mess.
Remember this: everything on your to-do list is either attracting you or repelling you; there’s no neutral territory. You’re either looking at something and saying, “Awesome! When can I do this and mark it off?” or, “Yuck! I don’t even want to think about this because there is so much involved it’s overwhelming.”
The solution is to decide on stuff only once. That means when you put an action item on a list, clearly identify what the next action is—the very next physical, visible activity you need to take to move things forward. Your to-do list should be only next actions, so that when you decide to do one of those actions, you can be confident it’s the right thing to do. And make sure your items start with verbs like these: Call, Read, Draft, Email, Text, Download. And so on.
Second, organize your tasks so that you can start doing and stop analyzing. The way people typically organize to-dos and tasks is either in one big list or by topic. The problem with the first approach is that it results in huge lists. I’m guessing you don’t just have 25 to-dos. If you did, then one list would work. I’m guessing you have 100 to 150 to-dos in your personal and professional life—maybe more. So, when it’s time to get things done, you end up spending more time sifting through the massive list to figure out which task to do.
Then if we do segment our lists, we tend to group them by topic or project. The potential problem with these approaches is that we often run into issues related to context and resources.
Here’s the principle: Make it easier for yourself to see the tasks you need to accomplish, when you can accomplish them. Here’s how you do that: Organize to-dos according to the location you need to be in, or the resources and people you need to be connected to, in order to complete the action.
Organizing by context was initially counterintuitive for me, but once I tried it out with “both feet in” I became far more productive and focused, and with less effort. I’m convinced I’ll never go back to organizing by project, topic, or one big list.
When you organize by context or resource, your focus is on the actions you can take, not on sorting and sifting. And that’s really the point of Getting Things Done.