How to Get a Handle on Things
It's all about asking yourself the right questions.
In an earlier post, I noted that keeping up with life in the Information Age requires fielding a ceaseless in-flow of inputs. In his influential book Getting Things Done (first published in 2001 and revised in 2015), productivity expert David Allen vividly described this stream of stuff:
Many of the things you have to do are being collected for you as you read this. Mail is coming into your various mailboxes—physical and virtual. You’re likely still getting packages and letters at home. Physical stuff is still landing in your in-tray at work, along with e-mail, texts, and voice mails into your digital tools. But at the same time, you’ve been capturing things in your environment and in your head that don’t belong where they are, the way they are, for all eternity. Even though it may not be as obviously “in your face” as your e-mail, the stuff still requires some kind of resolution—a loop to be closed, something to be done. Strategy ideas loitering in a notebook, “dead” gadgets in your desk drawers that need to be fixed or thrown away, and out-of-date magazines on your coffee table all fall into this category of stuff.
By “stuff,” Allen means something very specific, even technical:
Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined what, exactly, it means to you…
Ambiguity and Anxiety
To stay on top of our lives, we need to learn to surf our stuff: to ride the tide of new information. Otherwise, we will keep “wiping out” and feeling overwhelmed by wave after wave of ill-managed inputs. When the inundation of “incompletes” gets really severe, we may even feel like we’re drowning.
As self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie related in his 1936 book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Herbert E. Hawkes, a dean at Columbia University, once told him that “confusion is the chief cause of worry.” In other words, our main source of anxiety is ambiguity.
Very few understand this causal connection. That is why so many suffer from chronic and intractable stress. Instead of curing the underlying condition, they merely mitigate the emotional symptoms by practicing “positive thinking” and other forms of “self-care,” when what they really need is to get a better handle on their stuff.
Gotta Catch It All
According to Allen, wrangling your stuff starts with routinely routing it all into a set of “collection containers” (i.e., “inboxes”). In Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD)—which is the name of his methodology as well as his book—this is called “Capture,” which is the first of five stages for managing workflow.
As Allen wrote:
In order to eliminate “holes in your bucket,” you need to collect and gather placeholders for, or representations of, all the things you consider incomplete in your world—that is, anything personal or professional, big or little, of urgent or minor importance, that you think ought to be different than it currently is and that you have any level of internal commitment to changing. […]
In order to manage this inventory of open loops appropriately, you need to capture it into “containers” that hold items in abeyance until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what, if anything, you’re going to do about them.
For example, the collection containers I use most frequently are:
my email inboxes
the “Unreads” screen of my work’s messaging platform
a physical tray for stuff captured on paper, including handwritten notes and printouts
an “Inbox” database in my Notion app for stuff captured digitally, including typed notes, links, and files
Stacks, Stagnation, and Stress
But for your capture practice to really be of service, it must be followed by the second stage of workflow management, which in GTD is called “Clarify.” You need to regularly review everything you’ve captured and determine what exactly each item means to you. Regularly clarifying your stuff is an indispensable habit for maintaining peace of mind. Just as ambiguity is a major source of anxiety, clarity is a master key to calm.
But a major obstacle to clarity is complexity. Sometimes we get stumped by our stuff because what it means to us is so multifaceted and difficult to untangle. This can cause our workflow to seize up and break down. As Allen put it:
You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-tray, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander to another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to you because you know right away what to do with it—and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmph” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.
As Allen warned, this is a perilous practice. Unless you treat such “hmph” piles as new inboxes to regularly process, the stuff will get stuck in the stacks. The sight of those stacks will induce stress because you don’t have a plan for dealing with them. So, while you might continue to add to the them, you will tend to avoid reviewing their contents, which is necessary for subtracting from them. This will result in growing piles. And the bigger the pile grows, the more stress-inducing and daunting it will become. Thus, you will get stuck in a vicious cycle: the more you avoid your piles, the more they’ll mount; and the more they mount, the more you’ll avoid them.
This will corrode your quality of life. “Hmph” piles are work quagmires: swamps for your stuff, which will stagnate, not only in the physical stacks, but in your psyche. There, in the back—and sometimes the front—of your mind, all those meaningful but murky matters will fester and spoil your peace of mind.
The Universal Solvent of Stuff
How can we avoid stacking up the stuff that stumps us? When we encounter an inbox item and aren’t sure what to do with it, what can we do in lieu of throwing it in a “hmph” pile?
We can break the item down by applying the universal solvent of stuff, which is thinking. As Allen wrote:
The answer is, thinking. Not a lot; just enough to solidify your commitment about a discrete pressure or opportunity and the resources required dealing with it.
For many of us, getting ourselves to regularly think in this way is harder than you might think:
Thinking about the stuff you’ve accumulated usually does not happen naturally, of its own accord. You must apply conscious effort to get yourself to think, like getting yourself to exercise or clean house.
And, since aversion to exertion is part of human nature:
Most people have a resistance to initiating the burst of energy that it will take to clarify the real meaning, for them, of something they have let into their world, and to decide what they need to do about it.
However, by learning methods—or “tricks”—that make it easier to think about and clarify our stuff, we can reduce the effort required and, consequently, our aversion to it. Teaching such tricks is one of the most valuable services that Allen has provided to his audience and clients.
Teaching them the item-by-item thinking required to get their collection containers empty is perhaps the most critical improvement I have made for virtually all the people I’ve worked with.
An especially critical part of this teaching has been a series of clarity-seeking questions that Allen advises people to ask themselves and answer about their stuff:
What do you need to ask yourself (and answer) about each e-mail, text, voice mail, memo, page of meeting notes, or self-generated idea that comes your way?
It makes sense that questions would facilitate the kind of thinking that creates clarity, because questioning is key to thinking in general. As Andrew Pudewa, founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), wrote:
…what is thinking other than having a conversation with yourself? Good thinking is being able to ask good questions and using wisdom to judge the appropriateness of the answers you give yourself.
In other words, effective thinking is asking yourself pertinent questions and giving yourself astute answers.
First the Facts
The first question Allen advises us to ask ourselves about any inbox item is simply, “What is it?”
“This is not a dumb question,” Allen assures us. Even among the smart and successful executives who make up most of Allen’s clientele, failure to consider this question has yielded many “hmph” piles:
I’ve unearthed piles of messages in stacks and desk drawers that were tossed there because the client didn’t take just a few seconds to figure out what, in fact, the communication or document was really about.
When your stuff is straightforward and you’re mentally sharp, the “What is it?” question can be efficiently answered in your head. But if an item is complicated and you’ve got brain fog, writing down facts can jumpstart your thought process, helping you formulate more useful answers faster. Also useful for formulating fact-finding questions are what Rudyard Kipling called his “six honest serving-men”:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
For example, to wrap your head around a long email, you could ask yourself:
What, in a nutshell, is this message saying?
Why is it important to me?
When do I need to deal with it?
How should I deal with it?
Where do I need to be to act on it?
Who do I need to contact about it?
To Act or Not to Act?
After you have a grasp on what the item is, it should be easy for you to answer the next question that Allen prescribes: “Is it actionable?” In other words, does someone—whether you or another person—need to act on it?
If yes, the next question is: “What’s the next action?” In other words, decide what the next concrete, specific physical step you will take toward dealing with this. As Allen wrote:
This may sound easy—and it is—but it requires you to do some fast, hard thinking. Much of the time the action will not be self-evident; it will need to be determined. On that first item, for example, do you need to call someone? Fill something out? Get information from the Web? Buy something at the store? Talk to your assistant? E-mail your boss? What?
You might need to refine your answer to the “next action” question. Your first answer might be too vague or not doable yet. Allen gives as an example the following typical thought process for figuring out the next action:
Clean the garage . . . Well, I just have to get in there and start. No, wait a minute, there’s a big refrigerator in there that I need to get rid of first. I should find out if John Patrick wants it for his camp. I should . . . Call John re: refrigerator in garage.
Once you’ve figured out the next action, ask yourself this question about it: “Do, Delegate, or Defer?”
Can you do the next action you specified now within two minutes? If so, you should just do it without further ado.
Is the action for someone else to do? If so, delegate the task to that person via email or some other messaging platform. Then put a reminder about it on a “Waiting For List” to remind you to follow up about it later if necessary.
Is the action for you to do, but it will take longer than two minutes to do it? If so, then, to avoid derailing your inbox processing, you should defer the action by putting it on a “Next Actions List” to remind you to do it later.
Finally, ask yourself: “Will performing this action settle the matter”? If not, what outcome would settle it? Write that outcome on a “Projects List” that you regularly review to remind you to keep figuring out further next action steps until the project is done.
What if the answer to “Is it actionable?” was no? In that case, ask yourself: “Incubate, Reference, or Trash?” In other words, is this something that may become actionable later? If so, incubate it by putting a reminder to revisit it it on a “Someday/Maybe List” that you regularly or on a future date in your calendar. Alternatively, is this something you’d like to be able to look up later? If so, than file it in some kind of a physical or digital reference system. Finally, is it something that will never actually be relevant to you? If so, then trash it by deleting it or tossing it in the trash.
Putting reminders in appropriate places within your system is the third stage of Allen’s workflow: “Organize.” Regularly revisiting those places is the fourth stage: “Review.” And acting on those reminders is the fifth and final stage: “Engage.”
Allen’s questions take a while to describe, but once you get the hang of them, they should be pretty quick to ask and answer. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to get your “stuff” into a trustworthy external system of reminders and out of your head. That will give you more headspace with which to be more creative, present, and serene.