GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Easels and Whiteboards

If you have room for them, whiteboards and/or easel pads are very functional thinking tools to use from time to time. They give you plenty of space on which to jot down ideas, and it can be useful to keep them up in front of you for while, as you incubate on a topic. Whiteboards are great to have on a wall in your office and in meeting rooms, and the bigger the better. If you have children, I recommend that you install one in their bedrooms (I wish I'd grown up with the encouragement to have as many ideas as I could!). Be sure to keep plenty of fresh markers on hand; it's frustrating to want to start writing on a whiteboard and find that all the markers are dry and useless.

How do I know what I think, until I hear what I say?

— E. M. Forster

Whenever two or more people are gathered for a meeting, someone should start writing somewhere where the other(s) can see. Even if you erase your thoughts after a few minutes, just the act of writing them down facilitates a constructive thinking process like nothing else. (I've found it immensely helpful at times to draw informal diagrams and notes on paper tablecloths, place mats, or even napkins in restaurants, if I didn't have my own pad of paper at hand.)

The Computer

Many times I like to think on my laptop, in my word processor. There are so many things I might want to do later on with my thinking, and it feels terrific to already have it in some digital form for later editing and cutting and pasting into various other applications. Once I've booted up and the screen is ready in front of me, I find that thinking just automatically starts to happen. This is another good reason to ensure that your typing and keyboard skills are sufficient to make engaging with the computer at least easy, if not downright fun.

Leverage your computer as a think station.

The Support Structures

In addition to good tools ubiquitously at hand, it is productive to have accessible formats into which project thinking can be captured. Much as a pen and paper in front of you supports brain-storming, having good tools and places for organizing project details facilitates the more linear planning that many projects need.

Create File Folders or Loose-Leaf Pages as Needed

A good general-reference filing system, right at hand and easy to use, is not only critical to manage the general workflow process, but highly functional for project thinking as well. Often a project begins to emerge when it's triggered by relevant data, notes, and miscellaneous materials, and for this reason, you'll want to create a folder for a topic as soon as you have something to put in it. If your filing system is too formal (or nonexistent), you'll probably miss many opportunities to generate a project focus sufficiently early. As soon as you return from that first meeting with your initial notes about a topic that has just emerged on the horizon, create a file and store them in it right away (after you have gleaned any next actions, of course).

Many times, in coaching clients, I find that the mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organize random notes and potentially relevant materials gives them a significantly improved sense of control. It's a way of physically, visibly, and psychologically getting their "arms around it."

If you like to work with a loose-leaf notebook or planner, it's good to keep an inventory of fresh note paper or graph paper that you can use to set up a page on a theme or project as it shows up. While some projects may later deserve a whole tabbed section or even an entire notebook of their own, they don't start out that way. And most of your projects may need only a page or two to hold the few ideas you need to track.

If you don't have a good system for filing bad ideas, you probably don't have one for filing good ones, either.

Software Tools

Software is in one sense a dark black hole to explore in search of good "project management" tools. For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage. They're appropriate only for the very small percentage of the professional world that actually needs them. The rest of us usually find bits and pieces of applications more informal and project-friendly. As I've noted, I have never seen any two projects that needed the same amount of detailing and structure to get them under control. So it would be difficult to create any one application that would suffice for the majority.