We put a lot of emphasis on encouraging you to notice and capture all your action-orientated thoughts. Meanwhile our email systems need no encouragement in delivering plenty of new raw material for each of us to decide about. All this is akin to pressing the accelerator on our "productivity vehicle" – it tends to result in more and more actions on our lists.

Ironically, having embraced the idea that complete lists of next actions are good – because we can trust them in a way we can’t trust incomplete lists – we immediately find ourselves confronted by the "dark side" of completeness: our lists are much bigger than they used to be!

So what can we offer by way of advice that’s akin to putting the brakes on? Where are the safety valves?

First – a word of warning: It might be tempting to leave some thoughts un-acknowledged, or at least un-captured. Surely that would result in shorter lists? Well, yes, but doing that would tend to undermine that very valuable trust factor that flows from completeness. Denial is not a useful safety valve.

Notice, Capture, Pause, Decide, Park

Once some "stuff" has been captured, the next thing we do with it is to consider what, if anything, we intend to do about it. The key here is that little phrase "if anything". One of the great but subtle advantages of having a short pause in time between capturing and deciding is that you can detach yourself just a little bit from each new thing that comes along. Even a ten minute interval can be useful, especially if other things happen in the meantime.

Why detach? We all have a natural bias to overrate what’s new – perhaps because in our evolutionary history there have been big payoffs in taking certain opportunities - to eat, defend ourselves, reproduce – this very instant rather than sometime later. I haven’t noticed many sabre-tooths around my clients’ offices lately, but I’ve seen plenty of behaviour that seems to be based on the belief that they’re still roaming about out there.

So when we leave a short pause before deciding, it allows us to get a little more perspective about the relative importance (or unimportance) of each new thing that comes our way. This creates the first opportunity to screen things out.

Using the N-word

The most obvious way to do this is simply to say "no, I’m not going to do anything about this after all". Delete (or file, without action) the email, bin the "note to self" you jotted down, move on. That’s appropriate sometimes.

A variation on this theme is to direct the requestor to someone else, or to say "yes" and delegate the doing as soon as possible. That’s also appropriate in some cases.

D for Dither, or D for Defer?

Another option worth adding to your repertoire is to accept ownership but defer action. There are several reasons why this might be a clever thing to do. Firstly, some problems go away by themselves. What looks like a misunderstanding brewing between colleagues, for instance, could smooth itself over. Consider making a note to yourself, in your "defer until" category, to revisit this in a few days’ time and decide whether it needs action.

Taking action right away could cause something to take on a life of its own.

Secondly, you might want to see what happens elsewhere before deciding what to do. Perhaps someone else will chime in with some helpful suggestions or information. Again, a note in "defer until" to revisit the subject after an appropriate pause might be the wise and efficient thing to do.

Another form of deferred action is to use "someday maybe". Whereas "defer until" works well in cases where you can make a reasonably good guess about when it would be sensible to revisit something, "someday maybe" involves an open-ended deferral. This is good for things which are clearly not going to get resourced any time soon, and for things for which a go/no go decision within the next week or two really isn’t possible or sensible.

The golden key to feeling OK about putting things in "someday maybe" is trusting that you’ll look at them again soon enough. You need to know in your heart of hearts that "someday maybe" is a back-burner not a backwater, so that it’s OK to put potentially important items in there in the first place.

We’ll meet again...

Your Weekly Focus Session (you are doing those weekly, aren’t you?) is the time to be looking at your "someday maybe" list and checking whether anything there could do with being re-activated.

This highlights the fact that having a healthy Weekly Focus Session habit is actually essential to being able to decide about your stuff and park it appropriately from day to day.

What if next week is shorter than the sum of its parts?

Here’s another reason why Weekly Focus Sessions are key – they give you a trigger to renegotiate your commitments if needs be. This applies both to explicit and implicit agreements with others, and to those things you’ve been telling yourself to do. It applies particularly strongly to work which has due dates attached (you’re not just making up those due dates, are you?). If there’s too much genuinely urgent stuff to do in the coming week, something has to give, and it’s usually better to handle that openly and with due notice to others than to let it hit the wall.

This is the time to be calling or emailing people and getting agreement to re-phase work. This is the time to be moving or curtailing diary appointments. So that when you take a combined look at your lists and your calendar during the week, your immediate response is not "who are you trying to kid?" We’re aiming to hit the middle ground between cushy and delusional.

Making allowances

And here’s a third reason why the Weekly Focus Session is key - the Weekly Focus Session is an ideal opportunity to choose the amount of remaining work that’s going to appear in your line of sight during the coming week. Back the rest off to somewhere out of sight and, for now, out of mind.

Have you ever looked at your next action lists and asked yourself how many hours-worth of work they represent? I wouldn’t want to tie you down with laborious estimating – it isn’t worth it – but just a rough guess. Is it a lot more than you could do in a week?

Have you ever wondered how much work it’s useful to have in your line of sight at any one time, or what factors to consider when deciding the answer to that? As a rule of thumb, you probably need rather more than a week’s-worth of work on your lists at any given time, but not a lot more than one week’s-worth.

For one thing, it’s hard to estimate how long work will take, so it’s a good idea to leave a margin for estimating error. Finding yourself staring at an empty list may produce a brief moment of exhilaration, but it’s also rather inconvenient to have to go and look in the storeroom for some more when you’re deeply into "doing mode".

For another thing, you may have a sudden change of plan, and find yourself unexpectedly in a situation where you can do more work from your lists than you thought, or that you can do more of a certain kind of work than you expected to. Have a think about the kinds of places you might find yourself, the kinds of facilities you might have available to you in those situations, and make sure you have an extra few hours-worth of work that could be done in those situations. Naturally, we suggest that you give preference to items which have the closest due dates. Also keep a small extra supply of "stupid" things to do, in case you’re feeling low on energy or your computers break down.

While you’re doing your Weekly Focus Session, anything that doesn’t make the cut for this week should be consigned to a deferral category such as someday maybe. There is no harm in doing this with items that have due dates, provided the due dates aren’t too imminent – anything that isn’t due this week or early next week should be safe enough.

Continue to add newly-arriving work to your next action lists from day to day, as you go along.

Remember that during the next Weekly Focus Session, you will re-run the selection process and the cycle starts again.

Keep it real

Above all, remember that your lists are there to remind you of the things you actually intend to do, not the things you feel that you should do. If seeing an item on a list doesn’t enhance your feeling of having been offered a meaningful set of options, that item should probably be on a different list, or no list at all.

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