DNAphil

It is one of the great questions in GTD: What should I be doing right now? You now have control of your inputs, the ability to process your inputs to determine what do next, and expert filing skills and yet none of that actually tells you what item from your To Do list you should actually be working on at any given time. The answer to that great question requires some understanding of who you are at work and at home. Don’t worry, in this week’s article I am going to help you develop a personal compass to steer you through the maze of your To Do list.

What To Do Next Depends On What You Do

The GTD book says that your priorities are a function of your job description, both at work and at home. That is to say, that there is no simple explanation or flowchart that describes what you should work on at any given time, rather your priorities are a function of the roles you have at at each venue. Before you can determine your priorities, it’s best to take a few moments to figure out what roles you have at work and at home. Take a blank page from your notebook and make a list of all the roles you play at work.

Your work list may look something like this:

• Create new accounts for users
• Write procedures to support corporate department
• Maintain database backups

Make a similar list for home.

• Loving husband
• Maintains landscaping
• In charge of family’s long term investments

Now that you know what roles you have in each venue, use your common sense and instincts to determine the order of your roles from most important to least important. If you are not 100% sure of the order, ask your superiors at work and your spouse or significant other at home. The order you create is a very important component in prioritizing your To Do list, but there are a few other things you will need to take into consideration, which we will discuss below.
Getting Your List In Order

Now that you have a better sense of the roles you fulfill and their order of priority, it’s time to start prioritizing your To Do list. Your roles are not the most important considerations when looking at priorities. The most important consideration for your To Do list are due dates. You never want to fail to deliver a request to someone on time, so your first priorities will always need to be things that have hard due dates. After that, the priorities of your roles will help to round out your list. Below is a hierarchy of priority, from the most important to least important things you should be doing:

• Specific Tasks That Have Due Dates: If a specific request has a specific due date, then you must honor that due date above all else. Find the requests that have due dates and put them in order. Those that are due this current week are your highest priority.
• Projects That Have Due Dates: Specific actions that you are working on may not have hard due dates, but the project they are part of, may have one (typically weeks or months away). The pitfall that many people fall into here is that they do not worry about project due dates and only focus on specific tasks. You should always be working on tasks for projects that have hard due dates to keep them moving closer towards completion. If you need to, assign arbitrary due dates to specific tasks, so that they become a higher priority and continue to treat the actions for your “Projects with Due Dates” as a higher priority. Order your projects in chronological order by due date, and give priority to the tasks that will help get the projects completed.
• Roles You Perform: The next level of priority has to do with the roles that you defined above. Select requests based on the importance of the roles you play from most important role to least important role.
• Everything Else: After you have vetted your list for the above three levels of priority, then just pick tasks that look interesting to you and get them done.

Your list may look something like this:

• Call Matt about the contracts (Due tomorrow)
• Draw entity-relationship diagram for new tables (for the new marketing website, due at the end of the month)
• Order new backup tapes for database server (Role)

You may want to write these To Dos in order of priority. If so, get a fresh page in your notebook and write the date at the top (since priority is almost always related to the time frame when they were prioritized) and write out your list in order from most important to least important. Now, start at the top and work your way down the list. As tasks get completed and time goes on, you will need to re-prioritize your list when new things become due. We will talk more about that next week.

With Your Priorities In Order

Now that you have a better feeling of what you should be working on first, second, third, etc. you will be more effective, since you will be working on what needs to be done and holding at bay less important items. This is going to give you a great feeling as you start to meet all of your deadlines. In addition, you will always be aware of things that need to be done weeks in advance. As you master this skill, your co-workers will start to notice how nothing seems to get past you, and how you always have your deliverables in on time. Enjoy that feeling.

Making It More GTD

The GTD book takes one more factor into consideration when talking about what you are working on, and that is Contexts. Some activities you cannot do, based on where you are. For example, my list could have “pick up new external hard drive” as one of my top priorities, but unless I am at the store, I cannot pick it up. So while the task is a priority, it is not one that I can actually do, unless I am out running errands. As you develop your system more, read up on Contexts and start to break your To Do list into some simple categories: At Home, At Work, Running Errands, etc. Then split your tasks over the Contexts and prioritize each one. That will not only give you the proper priority, but depending on where you are, you will know just what you can do, and what to do first.

Next week we will look at one of the most powerful parts of the GTD system, the Weekly Review. It is in the Weekly Review where all of your GTD components come together and you access the true power of the system.