Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity pdfdrive com

The Process: Managing Action
You can train yourself, almost like an athlete, to be faster, more responsive,
more proactive, and more focused in knowledge work. You can think more
effectively and manage the results with more ease and control. You can
minimize the loose ends across the whole spectrum of your work life and
personal life and get a lot more done with less effort. And you can make front-
end decision-making about all the “stuff” you collect and create standard
operating procedure for living and working in this new millennium.
Before you can achieve any of that, though, you’ll need to get in the habit of
keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do 
that,
as we’ve seen, is not by
managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. After all:
• you don’t manage five minutes and wind up with six;
• you don’t manage information overload—otherwise you’d walk into a
library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even
opened a phone book, you’d blow up; and • you don’t manage priorities
—you 
have
them.
Instead, the key to managing all of your “stuff” is managing your 
actions.

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Managing Action Is the Prime Challenge
What you 
do
with your time, what you 
do
with information, and what you 
do
with your body and your focus relative to your priorities—those are the real
options to which you must allocate your limited resources. The real issue is how
to make appropriate choices about what to 
do
at any point in time. The real issue
is how we manage 
actions
.
That may sound obvious. However, it might amaze you to discover how many
next actions for how many projects and commitments remain undetermined by
most people. It’s extremely difficult to manage actions you haven’t identified or
decided on. Most people have dozens of things that they need to do to make
progress on many fronts, but they don’t yet know what they are. And the
common complaint that “I don’t have time to ” (fill in the blank) is
understandable because many projects seem overwhelming—and 
are
overwhelming because you can’t 
do
a project at all! You can only do an action
related to it. Many actions require only a minute or two, in the appropriate
context, to move a project forward.
The beginning is half of every action.
—Greek proverb
In training and coaching thousands of professionals, I have found that lack of
time is not the major issue for them (though they themselves may think it is); the
real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and
what the associated next-action steps required are. Clarifying things on the front
end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after
trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.
Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because
the doing of them has not been defined.

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