Tim Noyce Advies

When I was a child my school gave us road safety training by teaching us to repeat ”Look Right, Look Left, and if All’s Clear, Cross the Road”. They had to change that when they noticed that some children were standing on the edge of the road, reciting the “Look left, Look Right” mantra and then stepping out into traffic…

This came to mind because I recently coached someone who had had a short GTD training (not from me) focussed on Outlook workflow. When I sat down with him he had his folders already neatly set up and had considerably reduced his inbox, but the first thing I saw on his Next Action list was “Alice”.

Given that Alice is not even a verb I took a few moments with him to boil it down: Alice (one of his team members) needed access to a building, so he needed to get the authorisation for her, so he needed to send an electronic form etc. We ended up with a clear “fill in form X” action (he had all the input he needed) and it went on the Next Action List and a project “Authorisation obtained for Alice” went on his projects list.

This is the fundamental thinking process in action, but it had obviously not yet sunk in with this chap. It made me think a bit too: I have myself been guilty of giving people the “Clear your Outlook Inbox” short version of GTD but it has a couple of serious disadvantages. Firstly, it focusses too much on a particular tool, while GTD is completely independant of software and can be applied to anything you encounter. Secondly, it takes your attention off the fundamental thought process and puts it on the “Look Right Look Left” questions: “What is it”, “Is it actionable” etc.

Please take this away from this story: for everything in your world that is not exactly where you want it to be you need to determine what successful outcome you are trying to achieve and what the next, concrete, physical, visible action is that will move you towards that outcome. Do that for all the e-mails and voicemail and post-its in your life (and store the results in a place where you will see them) and your inbox will empty itself.