GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

• The direction in which you feel you need to move in your career. You see yourself doing a different kind of job a year from now, and you need to make a transition out of the one you have while exploring the options for a transfer or promotion.

• The organization direction, given globalization and expansion. You see a lot of major international travel looming on the horizon for you, and given your life-style preferences, you need to consider how to readjust your career plans.

• Life-style preferences and changing needs. As your kids get older, your need to be at home with them is diminishing, and your interest in investment and retirement planning is growing.

At the topmost level of thinking, you'll need to ask some of the ultimate questions. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? What is the core DNA of your existence, personally and/or organizationally, that drives your choices. This is the "big picture" stuff with which hundreds of books and gurus and models are devoted to helping you grapple.

"Why?": this is the great question with which we all struggle.

You can have all the other levels of your life and work ship-shape, defined, and organized to a T. Still, if you're the slightest bit off course in terms of what at the deepest level you want or are called to be doing, you're going to be uncomfortable.

Getting Priority Thinking Off Your Mind

Take at least a few minutes, if you haven't already done so, to jot down some informal notes about things that occurred to you while you've been reading this chapter. Whatever popped into your mind at these more elevated levels of your inner radar, write it down and get it out of your head.

Then process those notes. Decide whether what you wrote down is something you really want to move on or not. If not, throw the note away, or put it on a "Someday/Maybe" list or in a folder called "Dreams and Goals I Might Get Around to at Some Point." Perhaps you want to continue accumulating more of this kind of future thinking and would like to do the exercise with more formality—for example, by drafting a new business plan with your partners, designing and writing out your idea of a dream life with your spouse, creating a more specific career map for the next three years for yourself, or just getting a personal coach who can lead you through those discussions and thought processes. If so, put that outcome on your "Projects" list, and decide the next action. Then do it, hand it off to get done, or put the action reminder on the appropriate list.

With that done, you may want to turn your focus to develop-mental thinking about specific projects that have been identified but not fleshed out as fully as you'd like. You'll want to ensure that you're set up for that kind of "vertical" processing.

10. Getting Projects Under Control

CHAPTERS 4 THROUGH 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level—what needs your attention and action across the horizontal landscape of your life. The last piece of the puzzle is the vertical level—the digging deep and pie-in-the-sky thinking that can leverage your creative brainpower. That gets us back to refining and energizing our project planning.

The Need for More Informal Planning

After years of working with thousands of professionals down in the trenches, I can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative out-put with minimal effort.

I've discovered that the biggest improvement opportunity in planning does not consist of techniques for the highly elaborate and complex kinds of project organizing that professional project managers sometimes use (like GANTT charts). Most of the people who need those already have them, or at least have access to the training and software required to learn about them. The real need is to capture and utilize more of the creative, proactive thinking we do—or could do.

The major reason for the lack of this kind of effective value-added thinking is the dearth of systems for managing the potentially infinite amount of detail that could show up as a result. This is why my approach tends to be bottom-up. If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you'll resist focused planning. An unconscious pushback occurs. As you begin to apply these methods, however, you may find that they free up enormous creative and constructive thinking. If you have systems and habits ready to leverage your ideas, your productivity can expand exponentially. In chapter 3, I covered in some detail the five phases of project planning that take something from the idea stage into physical reality.