Chapter 9 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 9 called Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

This chapter is all about how to decide, in a given moment, what to do exactly in the face of a multitude of different options. A lot of the answer comes down to trusting your intuition/heart/spirit.

A helpful tool in this context is the four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment. It recommends making the choice based on four successive criteria:

1. Context: The first thing is to consider what actions are possible given your current location and tools at hand. Some tasks require an internet connection, you being at home or in the office. This is the first filter for your available options and the reason why it's important to organise your action lists by context, i.e. if you have a buch of things to do on one large list, but you can't actually do many of them in the same context, then you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.
2. Time Available: The second factor in choosing an action is how much time you have before you have to do something else. If your next meeting starts in ten minutes, you'll most likely select a different action to do right now than you would if the next few hours were free.
3. Energy Available: Some tasks require more mental energy than others. Hence, it's advisable to invest your most productive hours (for most people those are in the morning) into the most important tasks each day, while postponing all the small stuff (like responding to emails and phone calls) to a later time. (For more on this check this video from Julie Morgenstern on the topic of "Never Check Email in the Morning".) Therefore, it is good to always keep an inventory of things that need to be done to require little mental or creative energy. When you are in a low energy state, that's the perfect time to tackle them. Careful: It is vital to be organised, because if you're in low-energy state, but your reading material is disorganised, your filing system is chaotic, you tend to simply avoid doing anything at all and then you feel even worse.
4. Priority: Given your current context, available time, and energy you will have to select your next action item based on relative priority. Ask yourself for example "Out of all my remaining options, what is the most important thing for me to do?" At the end of the day, in order to feel good about what you didn't get done, you must have made some conscious decisions about your responsibilities, goals, and values.

Moreover, it is also useful to think of work as falling into three categories:

1. Doing predefined work
2. Doing work as it shows up
3. Defining your work

To be as productive as possible, you need to maintain a good balance between these three types. Many people fall into the trap of getting sucked into the second activity - dealing with things that show up spontaneously - much too easily, and let the other slide. Like many other authors, such as Steven Covey, have noted it is important not to let the (seemingly) urgent crowd out all the truly important tasks in your life. It's easy to get sucked into the "busy" and "urgent" mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your email and on your mind. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you are not dealing with, the results will be anxiety and frustration.

However, if choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, then that is playing the productivity game as best as you can.

Another word of caution: Many people use the inevitability of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It is way too easy to get seduced into non-quite-that-critical stuff that is right at hand, particularly if your in-basket and your personal organisation are out of control. To often "managing by wandering around" is an excuse for getting away from those amorphous piles of "stuff".

Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. However, at a certain point, if you are not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.191-210.