five working stages
We have talked about how to get ourselves to be motivative and start to work, but we didn’t talk about what is our work really. In most people’s understanding, including me, the work is simply just school work or work from the job field. In fact, all those small things you have to do such as buying grocery, throwing trash or message your friend are count as work too. In the book, Getting Things Down, David Allen has a principle called Five Stages of Mastering Workflow that can help us to learn how to get all the work done.
Collect
The first stage is to collect, collect everything we have to do, even a small thing. In order to trace back, we should write it down either on actual paper or on our phone. When we write it down, everything will be clear and we can do all the small thing during the gap and keep the major project later. Trying to complete all those small things while doing your major assignment at the same time can slow down the spend and confuse us.
Process
This stage is where you decide if everything on the list are actionable or is it worth the time to do it, does it required an immediate action or it can wait. The author, David, use a graph to show us that is simple and clear.
Organize
Organize is the stage that we add the task to our schedules. In the previous stage, we separate all the task, now we add those task to daily life and try to complete it on time.
Review
In order to be productive, we can’t miss this stage. The review is where we are going back to our calendar and check what we need to do for every week, or every day. This process gives us the landscape of the day. In the book, the author has more detailed models to guide the review process.
Do
Since we are clear with the task we have to do on the daily basis, the last stage is “do it”.
Reference:
Allen, D. (2001). Getting things done. New York, NY: Penguin Group.
Allen, D. (2001). Getting things done. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 120.
