I’ve always been one of those people who Gets Things Done. Not everything, mind. Some things have fallen through the cracks over the years. But it’s interesting to think about times when I failed. Why didn’t that get done? How could that be fixed for next time? (Or to be pedantic, how could that be fixed so there isn’t a next time!)
Dave Allan’s Getting Things Done methodology, when you look at it in a chart, is all pretty obvious. It’s probably the way a lot of us–or at least those of us with a nodding acquaintanceship with organisational skills–do things instinctively. But the one little piece that I thought was absolute gold was the identifying of the very next action that needs to be taken to progress something. Jobs languish. Sometimes they die, and it’s for the want of us doing a little to point them in the direction of completion. That small action, whatever it is, is the very next thing that needs to be done. We don’t analyse the job enough to break it down into discrete steps; we don’t plan and therefore it all seems harder than it turns out to be when we have sat down and looked at our job and worked out the very next small task that needs to be accomplished.
This works well with jobs that I tend to procrastinate over. I can manage to get enough energy to plan or to do some small thing towards a job, I just don’t think I have the energy to do the whole task. Fine. If I just do the tiniest bit I will have progressed the task. At least it is moving, even if at a snail’s pace, towards done.
And there’s never a ‘too hard’ basket, because if I look at the next action I have identified for the task and it’s something that I absolutely know I cannot do, it’s someone else’s next action. In that case, my next action is contact that person so they can schedule it. And then my next action after that is to follow up so the job gets completed in a timely manner. Easy. Done.