The Core Processes for Managing Your Work Flow

Get It Out of Your Head!

You shouldn’t have a thought more than once, unless you simply like having the thought. Otherwise it takes up psychic RAM space and creates unnecessary pressure and stress. In other words, write it down! Everything! Little, big, personal, professional, urgent, not urgent, hare-brained, not-sure-what-to-do-with-it – anything!

Your mind is for having ideas to begin with – it does that really well. It also reviews and analyzes data. It’s not for storing and organizing the data. Your head has limited room and it’s a crappy office. Your mind is not designed to hang on to things and remind you. It does a lousy job of it, as a matter of fact. You will tend to remember things based upon how recently it happened or how much emotional content there was attached to it – neither one of which is a very strategic way to get reminders. Your mind can accumulate up to only about ten discrete items before it loses perspective on all of them.

Another problem is that things stored in your head, especially commitments to do stuff, operate absent of a sense of past or future – it’s all now. That means as soon as you tell yourself to do something (“call Fred,” “Prune the backyard tree,” “Re-write the proposal,” etc.) there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all, all the time. So, as soon as you file two things in your mind, you create instant stress and failure, because a part of you is trying to get them both done right now, and it can’t do that. That’s why people often find it hard to focus and are so easily distracted.

The more sophisticated you get in life, the more you will have ideas that can’t be implemented where you have the idea. You’ll be buying bread in the store, thinking of something to talk to one of your clients about. And you’ll be talking to a client and remember you need bread. So, if you want bread to happen where bread is, and you want the agenda with your client to be in front of you when you are with the client you must capture the thought the moment you have it.

That means keeping notepads, pens, and in-baskets in appropriate places around your life and work, and using them to collect whatever you’re thinking about that might have usefulness past the moment. If I’m anywhere longer than ten minutes, and there’s a flat surface, I will always have a legal pad and pen out and ready. Who knows when the external (or internal) phone will ring? My wife and I keep junior size pads at every phone (so we can write single notes on single sheets for each other’s in-baskets). I carry a small pad and pen with my wallet. I have an in-basket at my desk, an in-basket area in my bedroom/closet area (for holding scraps of papers until I can go to the office), and a portable in-basket in my briefcase (red plastic folder).

Capturing all the things we have on our mind in some externally review-able form is absolutely critical for clarity of focus and peace of mind. There is more to mastering your workflow, to be sure, because even though a thought has been written down, sooner than later it must be processed for its more specific meaning to you. But collecting everything you have any attention on is the first component of stress-free productivity – to ensure that all agreements with our selves and others have been corralled for safe keeping and not lost to the quagmire of post-it piles in your mind.