The 4 D’s that changed my life forever.
“Getting things done” — A few tips for email and task management.
It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?
— Henry David Thoreau
Do. Delegate. Defer. Delete. Archive.
Whenever I encounter anything in work and life I always shove it straight into one of these four categories. I manage these four categories in a single system. Asana.
This is straight from Getting things Done. A great book by David Allen.
A couple of rules first:
- Don’t leave your email open. Check it once or twice per day.
- Every day your email inbox should be empty.
Understanding these two rules we can get into these four principles:
Do.
If something is going to take less than 3 minutes just stop and do it. That customer needs an invoice sent over, just grab the PDF and send it, the college has a question that needs a yes or no answer, just answer! If anything is going to take longer than 3 minutes I move to the next “D”.
Delegate.
Is this something I should be working on? Or, is this something I should delegate to someone on my team or back to my client? Ideally I don’t even need to do the work to close the loop. Don’t fall into the circle where things just keep getting passed along to the next person. Delegate when you are truly not the right or the best person for a job. Have the humility to admit that you may not be the right person.
Defer.
Schedule a day / time of when you will do the work needed to close the loop. Be sure you have a clear system to manage this. For me this is forwarding emails into Asana and scheduling accordingly. Like I mentioned before, Here are some other systems that might be good for you:
Things, Producteev, Flow, Trello, Todoist, Wanderlist.
Delete.
This is my favorite of the four D’s. If you aren’t going to do, delegate or defer something and you don’t need it for reference. Delete it. Be honest about wether or not you are actually going to do this, separate yourself from your desire to reply to every email and live in reality. Don’t let that email sit in your inbox or clog your management system. Just delete it.
Archive.
Lastly, for items you need to retain for reference or to cover your ass simply hit the “archive” button in gmail, or if you want to get tricky you can forward them into Evernote. I like that the search is instant and I find I have refference materials better on hand. As long as the place is secure and easily searcahable you are fine. For most the gmail archive is great.
These are just a few of my most revered principles. I have learned a lot from David Allen, and Stever Robbins you can get hundreds of great tips right over on his blog.
