How confident are you that all your priorities have been captured outside your head?

For most people, their regular practice is to keep their responsibilities and duties saved only in brain cells. Storing these things in our fallible minds makes it hard to be confident about our next actions. Once people discover this problem, they often try to create elaborate systems to remember. However, this may prove just as problematic. GTD founder David Allen explored this problem in a recent blog post:

It’s natural to want to create a system for priority coding (like “A, B, C” or the flagging feature in many apps) to tell you the most important things to do. But it’s a short-term insurance policy that won’t give you the trust you need when the time comes to take action.

If these complex approaches don’t work, is there a better way? David certainly believes so as he adds:

People would often love to be able to give up the non-stop accountability for their intuitive judgment calls about the moment-to-moment allocation of their resources. That’s why the ABC-priority and daily-to-do-list structures have often seemed so attractive as a way to “get a grip.” But reality has a way of requiring us to be more on our toes than that.

So how can we really know for sure what action to take? Prepare for the worst, imagine the best, and shoot down the middle.

Dive deeper into this philosophy by reading the rest of the post.

The pursuit of productivity is never just a goal in and of itself.

It is possible to whip off lots of items from your “to do” list and not actually accomplish anything of true merit. In fact, there are two things necessary to ensure that your productivity skills are being used for meaningful work. The first is to be clear on strategy, mission and objectives. The second is more subtle, but probably more impactful. It is to understand the current reality. If the truth of the situation is misunderstood, strategy is moot.

In a blog post earlier this year, David Allen of GTD fame mapped out the case for current reality. He notes that many problems stem from a lack of understanding the exact nature of what is really going on.

Companies, departments, and individuals may have big goals, even well expressed, and yet there can be a lack of energy, or a lack of real actions being defined and in motion. Groups bicker about the smallest things and can’t seem to get in gear. And the biggest problem about this is that they don’t know what the problem is. They are probably trying to build a house on sand. There’s no stake in the ground. There’s no traction.

To overcome this problem, David believes it necessary to unearth the relevant facts about the situation, even if they are hard to face. Only then can a person or group move forward.

The great challenge is to face current reality head on without letting it “get to you” and cause you to program the next one as no better. Bean counters are a critical component to the team. You need to know how many beans you have. But if all you’re doing is just protecting your current beans, soon you may not have any more beans to count. You cannot drive by just looking at the rearview mirror.

Read the entire blog post at the Getting Things Done web site.