GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

A discussion of "priorities" would have to incorporate all of these levels of current agreements between yourself and others. If you get this "job description" checklist in play and keep it current, you'll probably be more relaxed and in control than most people in our culture. It will certainly go a long way toward moving you from hope to trust as you make the necessary on-the-run choices about what to do.

30,000 to 50,000+ Feet Whereas the three lower levels have mostly to do with the current state of things—your actions, projects, and areas of responsibility—from here up the factors of the future and your direction and intentions are primary. There is still an inventory to take at these plateaus, but it's more about "What is true right now about where I've decided I'm going and how I'm going to get there?" This can range from one-year goals in your job ("30,000 feet") to a three-year vision for your career and personal net worth ("40,000 feet") to intuiting your life purpose and how to maximize its expression ("50,000+ feet").

When you're not sure where you're going, you'll never know when enough is enough.

I'm blending the three uppermost levels together here because situations often can't easily be pigeonholed into one or another of these categories. Also, since Getting Things Done is more about the art of implementation than about how to define goals and vision, I won't offer a rigorous examination here. But by its very nature this investigation can broach potentially deep and complex arenas, which could include business strategy, organization development, career planning, and life direction and values.

For our purposes, the focus is on capturing what motivators exist for you in current reality that determine the inventory of what your work actually is, right now. Whether your directions and goals should be changed—based on deeper thinking, analysis, and intuition—could be another discussion. Even so, there are probably some things you can identify right now that can help you get current in your own thinking about your work and what's important in it.

If you were to intuitively frame a picture of what you think you might be doing twelve to eighteen months from now, or what the nature of your job will look like at that point, what would that trigger? At this level, which is subtler, there may be things person-ally you need to let go of, and people and systems that may need to be developed to allow the transition. And as the job itself is a moving target, given the shifting sands of the professional world these days, there may need to be projects defined to ensure viability of the outputs in your area.

In the personal arena, this is where you would want to consider things like: "My career is going to stagnate unless I assert my own goals more specifically to my boss (or my boss's boss)." Or "What new things are my children going to be doing next year, and what do I need to do differently because of that?" Or "What preparation do I need to ensure that I can deal with this health problem we've just uncovered?"

Through a longer scope you might assess: How is your career going? How is your personal life moving along? What is your organization doing relative to changes in the environment, and what impact does that have on you? These are the one-to-five-year-horizon questions that, when I ask them, elicit different and important kinds of answers from everyone.

Not long ago I coached someone in a large international bank who, after a few months of implementing this methodology and getting control of his day-to-day inventory of work, decided the time was right to invest in his own start-up high-tech firm. The thought had been too intimidating for him to address initially, but working from the "runway level" up made it much more accessible and a natural consequence of thinking at this horizon.

If you're involved in anything that has a future of longer than a year (marriage, kids, a career, a company, an art form), you would do well to think about what you might need to be doing to man-age things along that vector.

Questions to ask yourself here are:

• What are the longer-term goals and objectives in my organization, and what projects do I need to have in place related to them to fulfill my responsibilities?

• What longer-term goals and objectives have I set for myself, and what projects do I need to have in place to make them happen?

• What other significant things are happening that could affect my options about what you I'm doing?

Here are some examples of the kinds of issues that show up at this level of conversation:

• The changing nature of your job, given the shifting priorities of the company. Instead of managing the production of your own training programs in-house, you're going to outsource them to vendors.