• To stimulate, activate, or produce.
• Something considered typical or representative.

One of the big things that David Allen covered in GTD was the distinction between simple, mindless tasks that required little thought or focus, and those complicated projects where copious amounts of planning and thought are required, and which can send you into a spiral of stress and confusion. Allen described the former as widget cranking – the equivalent of going to work in a factory and doing whatever simple task was required of you as items came down the conveyor belt.

The thing about cranking widgets is it’s easy, measurable and, perhaps more importantly, it’s low-stress and satisfying in a very simple way. You know what you’re producing and how fast you’re doing it. It’s easy to know when you’re being productive and when you’re not. You don’t have to put in any heavy thinking. Unfortunately such work is hard to find nowadays and when it comes to all those intimidating projects and tasks, things quickly become much more complicated.

In the modern workplace, it’s no longer enough to just crank widgets all day. You won’t get paid for just stamping and stapling the paperwork all day. You will get paid for dealing with what paper to use, what goes on the paper, how it gets presented and who it gets sent to. In effect, you have to put in the thinking and planning yourself to deal with the increased complexity and detail.

However, as David Allen argues, you can still crank widgets, or at least achieve the essence of working that way, by breaking your work down to next actions.

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• Productivity
• Organization
• Stuff
• Weekly Review
• Contexts
• Next Actions
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Someday/Maybe

If you are interested I suggest you give them a quick read and let me know whether you agree with my definitions. The productivity one in particlar is open to debate. As for the future, I’m now a little stumped on what to cover next so I’m going to throw the question out to you. What productivity related terms would you like me to cover and why? I look forward to your responses!

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• At an indefinite time in the future.
• A possibility or uncertainty.

Someday/maybe covers a list of tasks that you intend to reassess in the future, but have no immediate intentions to act on them because they are currently outside the scope of your day-to-day life. They include interests like learning a new language, buying a particular book, building a new extension on your home or even taking a hiking trip across Europe… basically all those ideas and plans that you don’t have the time, information, inclination or capability to pursue today. For instance, the hiking trip would first rely on you building up some savings. You can’t fly over to Europe immediately but someday, maybe you’ll be able to do it.

Someday/maybe lists differ to other similar types of lists in that it is regularly reviewed and thought about (perhaps in a weekly review) much like any other element in a GTD system. This means you can potentially make these little seeds of an idea or intention blossom into full blown, actionable projects (or delete any that you no longer have an interest in). However, it’s worth noting that the someday/maybe list isn’t for fantasies. Many guys I know would love to be Premiership footballers but realism and practicality has to taken presidence.

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• Producing or capable of producing an intended result.
• Doing something adequately to accomplish a purpose.

Effectiveness is all about doing the right things. While what projects and tasks one can class as appropriate to do will vary between situations and individuals, the general rule of thumb is to determine how much value the task will provide to you (or the company) by doing it. If attending a conference full of open minded people will lead to lots of new clients, that is an high value task making good use of your time and energy. However, if you were to start randomly ringing people up from your phonebook in the hopes of raising business that would be a poor choice of task, likely to result in minimal rewards for the amount of time it sucks up.

A lot of productivity is about how efficiently you do something, with what you’re actually working on a seperate issue entirely. However, this often leads to doing work for the sake of it or just generally falling into a state of busyness. Just because work is done well, does not make it worth doing, however. Effectiveness is significant because without a careful consideration of what tasks you should be doing, you will inevitably end up wasting time and energy on unnecessary work. A common tool for determining what work is most worth doing is the 80/20 rule, which basically states that 20% of inputs result in 80% of your outputs. Applied to effectiveness this means that by carefully shifting more of your time and energy onto those 20% of tasks you will see a significant increase in results.

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• Producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or effort.
• Ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time.

Efficiency and productivity (in its traditional sense) have a key similarity. They both involve doing work in the most economical way possible and as a result there are numerous tips, practices and suggestions you can follow to achieve that. Efficiency can be measured in any number of ways, from how well you use your time to how little energy and stress you exert in doing your work. Nobody wants their work to become a chore but by being efficient this can be minimized.

Consider for instance, working on a project when you are procrastinating. That’s not an efficient use of your time because what might take an hour to achieve, for instance, gets dragged out to an entire afternoon as you idly browse websites and play with your phone. Getting stressed out because you can’t find your notes is also inefficient as it trying to focus on your tasks when you are too tired. Ironically, it is often better to put off your work until you are in the right frame of mind. Trying to fight through it will invariably lead to burnout. The amount of time wasted when doing a project inefficiently usually ends up being more than if you were to simply put it off for a few hours/days so you can recharge.

It’s worth noting that being efficient and doing things quickly is not the same thing. By rushing what you do you will make mistakes, which in turn will actually slow you down. With efficiency the quality of the work you are doing is still important.

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• Organized activity to accomplish an objective.
• The most important work or activity in a specific field or area.

Next actions are the next physical steps you need to take to move a project. When you look at a project it can often be difficult to determine where to start. That’s why you take time to define what the next action would be. Most projects can be vague and abstract, such as “tidy the house.” But where do you start? What do you do next? Without deciding on a next action, it can often be difficult to see how to move a project forward, or to even start it. Taking the house tidying project as an example again, it would typically be broken down into individual room mini-projects. Maybe on a to-do list you would simply put down to clean the bedroom. However, where to start with that? The next physical action could be to clear the floor of all rubbish and clothes. Next, it could be to dust and finally you would hoover up.

Next actions are not always immediately obvious. Putting down a next action of “ring John” might seem simple enough, until you realize you don’t have his number. You can’t action this task, it’s not the next physical step. The next action ends up being to search for his number instead. Though the GTD approach of defining your next actions can mean more thought and time with planning, when it comes to actually working on your projects your path to completing them is much more clear.

For detailed information on defining your next actions read my guide.

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• The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting.
• That which surrounds, and gives meaning to, something else.

GTD encourages the use of contexts to break down long and expansive to-do lists. Without them where would you start? What would you choose to do at any particular time? By breaking down your lists according to different settings and situations, it becomes a simple matter of selecting a list and tasks appropriate to your current context. For instance, if you are near a phone, you only need look at those next actions that require you to make a phonecall.

An extra benefit of contexts is that it it stops you from being distracted by next actions that are not relevant to your current circumstances. For instance, you don’t have to look at any tasks that are to do at home when you are at work. This is known as contextual limitation as it stops your attention being taken up by work you can’t do at that time.

Contexts can be as simple or as complicated as required depending on the actual depth and size of your to-do lists. Traditionally, the author of GTD, David Allen, puts a @ symbol in front of all contexts, and while this is not a requirement, it has become the common defining symbol for them. The symbol means location as in “Where are you at?”. Thus, @computer means “At your computer”.

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• To examine with an eye to criticism or correction.
• Going over a subject again in study so as to fix it in the memory.

The weekly review in GTD is one of the most critical elements of the entire methodology, and also one of the hardest to implement regularly. While most aspects of GTD are open to individual interpretation, the weekly review is the one element that David Allen is clear and specific on. You need to do it weekly, you need to do it thoroughly and you certainly can’t cut any corners. Despite your best intentions, stuff always slips through holes in your system. Next actions go undefined, projects don’t get updated and loose ends pile up in your inbox. The review is the one clearly defined period in your week where your primary goal is to catch up on those leaks, get up to date and clear the decks of any loose ends.

The weekly review also allows you to re-focus your mind on your system and keep it fresh. People take it for granted that they can implement an organizational system and it will just work. Normally, however, it becomes stale, out of date and it eventually falls apart. If you can’t rely on the information kept in your system to be up to date and relevant how can you trust it?  The weekly review gives you a chance to think about what’s working and what isn’t and tweak things accordingly.

What should you do in a weekly review? While that is a question that could take up an entire post, for the purposes of this definition I will provide a basic overview. You must process any loose paper, receipts, reference materials, etc. that you may have forgotten about or been putting off. You must also review your calender and check for any upcoming dates you need to be aware of, any dates that need changing, etc. You should also review all your next action lists, project lists, waiting-on lists and someday/maybe lists. A thorough weekly review can be time consuming but it is critical in keeping your entire GTD system up to date, and you yourself up to date with what’s going in in your life.

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• Property, as personal belongings or equipment; things.
• Worthless things or matter: to clean the stuff out of a closet.

Stuff is often used as a catch-all term covering everything from thoughts bouncing around our heads to letters, voicemails, notes and a multitude of other things that potentially require you to do something with them, but which are currently unorganized or unprocessed. A pile of unopened letters in your in-tray might as well be just stuff because until they are opened and you decide what to do with them, they are meaningless. They are not formed into something actionable and the desired outcome from them is far from clear. One of those letters could be a bill, which would need paying, or a bank statement, which would need filing. However, until you make that distinction, it’s all just stuff as far as your mind is concerned. And stuff – physically or mentally – is just clutter.

Stuff doesn’t just have to be actual items or objects, they can be thoughts in your head – get new batteries from the shops, go grocery shopping, pay the bills, fix the television – that induces stress and anxiety and slowly but surely bogs your productivity down. This is because they represent open loops in your mind. These thoughts will keep swirling around in your head until you make a conscious decision as to what exactly to do with them. Even then, if you can’t rely on your mind to remember all these decisions, the anxiety will continue.

GTD is useful in this situation because it encourages you get all this stuff out of your head into a trusted system, whether that be on paper or in an eleborate computer setup. Your brain isn’t good with stuff, so by noting it all down in your system and clarifying what actually needs to be done, it relieves your brain from having to remember and process it all.

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• Something that has been made into an ordered whole.
• Conforming entirely to standards, rules, or demands.

Organization is a key aspect of being productive. An unorganized individual is not able to see what needs doing at a quick glance. If you have to waste time sorting through piles of paperwork or just generally trying to figure out what needs doing, then that is a massive drain on your energy. Many people assume this sort of planning and organization can be naturally figured out within the mind but this almost never possible. The mind is not an organizing tool, you can’t rely on it to remind you about things when you need it to (how many times have you been in a shop and completely forgotten to pick up items that you needed?). What’s more, your brain doesn’t put all your thoughts into neat little compartments for easy access. If you have lots of things going on in your head it will just be like a jumbled mess, leading to confusion and lack of focus.

Instead, you need a reliable, trustworthy system that takes all this content out of your mind and organizes it for you, whether it be on paper or on a laptop. However, the system needs to be quick and simple to use. There is no motivation to use something that is a burden and the one advantage the brain has is speed. If you have to wait for something to boot up, then go through loads of menus to get where you want, or flick through hundreds of pieces of paper then the system will simply fall out of use and thoughts will pile up in your head again.

Organization doesn’t just relate to your productivity system, it alo applies to your work desk, your home, your office and any other aspect of your life that would otherwise waste time and energy. By de-cluttering these areas they stop being a distraction, allowing you to be more focused. If you are trying to do work in an office that is a mess, with all your research material scattered around, it’s easy to see how dibilitating being disoranized can be.

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