Too busy to read?

A big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means as soon as you tell yourself that you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pinpointed.

recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you're in one of those low-energy states, do those things. Casual reading (magazines, articles, catalogs, Web surfing), contact data that needs to be inputted, file purging, backing up your computer, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler--these are some of the myriad things that you need or want to deal with sometime anyway.

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors: First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through. Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. You must use your mind to get things off your mind. Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

Because of the way the mind developed, it is brilliant at recognition, but terrible at recall. You can glance at today's calendar and in the course of a few seconds get a coherent sense of the day and its contents and contexts. But you'd have a terrible time trying to recall the contents of the next fourteen days on your calendar merely from memory.

The methods I present here are all based on three key objectives: (1) capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you--now, later, someday, big, little, or in between--in a logical and trusted system outside your head and off your mind; (2) directing yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the "inputs" you let into your life so that you will always have a workable inventory of "next actions" that you can implement or renegotiate in the moment; and (3) curating and coordinating all of that content, utilizing the recognition of the multiple levels of commitments with yourself and others you will have at play, at any point in time.

Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory - until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik's follow-up research, we also know that we don't actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That's right: The brain doesn't distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

Writing them down gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop to let them go, to relax its neural circuits so that we can focus on something else. "If an obligation remained recorded only mentally," Allen says, "some part of me constantly kept thinking that it should be attended to, creating a situation that was inherently stressful and unproductive."

his sensible insistence on developing a "capture" habit, so that you are sure to write down or otherwise record every commitment you make or obligation you accept rather than torture yourself trying to remember them all,

The short-term-memory part of your mind--the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized stuff--functions much like RAM (random-access memory) on a computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there's limited capacity; there's only so much stuff you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They're constantly distracted, their focus disturbed and performance diminished by their own internal mental overload. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has now validated this conclusion. Studies have demonstrated that our mental processes are hampered by the burden put on the mind to keep track of things we're committed to finish, without a trusted plan or system in place to handle them.*

THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to be free to experience more elegant, productive, and creative activity.

A task left undone remains undone in two places--at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. --Brahma Kumaris

Use tools to collect data and process it into conclusions and actions.

care of in one place and process it in a standardised way. This doesn't necessarily mean that we actually do everything we once intended to do, but it forces us to make clear choices and regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture. Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in front of us. Only if nothing else is lingering in our working memory and taking up valuable mental resources can we experience what Allen calls a "mind like water" - the state where we can focus on the work right in front of us without getting distracted by competing thoughts.