Every decision to act is an intuitive one. The challenge is to migrate from hoping it's the right choice to trusting it's the right choice.
Three Models for Making Action Choices
Let's assume for a moment that you're not resisting any of your "stuff" out of insecurity or procrastination. There will always be a large list of actions that you are not doing at any given moment. So how will you decide what to do and what not to do, and feel good about both?
The answer is, by trusting your intuition. If you have collected, processed, organized, and reviewed all your current commitments, you can galvanize your intuitive judgment with some intelligent and practical thinking about your work and values.
You have more to do than you can possibly do. You just need to feel good about your choices.
I have developed three models that will be helpful for you to incorporate in your decision-making about what to do. They won't tell you answers— whether you call Frederick, e-mail your son at school, or just go have an informal "how are you?" conversation with your secretary — but they will assist you in framing your options more intelligently. And that's something that the simple time- and priority-management panaceas can't do.
1. The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment
At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? There are four criteria you can apply, in this order:
1 Context
2 Time available
3 Energy available
4 Priority
Context A few actions can be done anywhere (like drafting ideas about a project with pen and paper), but most require a specific location (at home, at your office) or having some productivity tool at hand, such as a phone or a computer. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment.
Time Available When do you have to do something else} Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing many actions that require more time.
Energy Available How much energy do you have? Some actions you have to do require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy. Others need more physical horsepower. Some need very little of either.
Priority Given your context, time, and energy available, what action will give you the highest payoff? You have an hour, you're in your office with a phone and a computer, and your energy is 7.3 on a scale of 10. Should you call the client back, work on the proposal, process your voice-mails and e-mails, or check in with your spouse to see how his or her day is going?
This is where you need to access your intuition and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment. To explore that concept further, let's examine two more models for deciding what's "most important" for you to be doing.
2. The Three fold Model for Evaluating Daily Work
When you're getting things done, or "working" in the universal sense, there are three different kinds of activities you can been gaged in:
• Doing predefined work
• Doing work as it shows up
• Defining your work
Doing Predefined Work When you're doing predefined work, you're working off your "Next Actions" lists — completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, managing your workflow. You're making the calls you need to make, drafting ideas you want to brainstorm, or preparing a list of things to talk to your attorney about.
Doing Work as It Shows Up Often things come up ad hoc— unsuspected, unforeseen — that you either have to or choose to respond to as they occur. For example, your partner walks into your office and wants to have a conversation about the new product launch, so you talk to her instead of doing all the other things you could be doing. Every day brings surprises — unplanned-for things that just show up, and you'll need to expend at least some time and energy on many of them. When you follow these leads, you're deciding by default that these things are more important than anything else you have to do.
Defining Your Work Defining your work entails clearing up your in-basket, your e-mail, your voice-mail, and your meeting notes and breaking down new projects into actionable steps. As you process your inputs, you'll no doubt be taking care of some less-than-two-minute actions and tossing and filing numerous things (another version of doing work as it shows up). A good portion of this activity will consist of identifying things that need to get done sometime, but not right away. You'll be adding to all of your lists as you go along.
Once you have defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete. And your context, time, and energy available still allow you the option of more than one thing to do. The final thing to consider is the nature of your work, and its goals and standards.
3. The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work
Priorities should drive your choices, but most models for deter-mining them are not reliable tools for much of our real work activity. In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is. And there are at least six different perspectives from which to define that. To use an aerospace analogy,the conversation has a lot to do with the altitude.
• 50,000+ feet: Life
• 40,000 feet: Three-to five-year vision
• 30,000 feet: One-to two-year goals
• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
• 10,000 feet: Current projects
• Runway: Current actions
Let's start from the bottom up:
Runway: Current Actions This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take — all the phone calls you have to make, the e-mails you have to respond to, the errands you've got to run, and the agendas you want to communicate to your boss and your spouse. You'd probably have three hundred to five hundred hours' worth of these things to do if you stopped the world right now and got no more input from yourself or anyone else.
10,000 Feet: Current Projects Creating many of the actions that you currently have in front of you are the thirty to one hundred projects on your plate. These are the relatively short-term out-comes you want to achieve, such as setting up a home computer, organizing a sales conference, moving to a new headquarters, and getting a dentist.
20,000 Feet: Areas of Responsibility You create or accept most of your projects because of your responsibilities, which for most people can be defined in ten to fifteen categories. These are the key areas within which you want to achieve results and maintain standards. Your job may entail at least implicit commitments for things like strategic planning, administrative support, staff development, market research, customer service, or asset management. And your personal life has an equal number of such focus arenas: health, family, finances, home environment, spirituality, recreation, etc. Listing and reviewing these responsibilities gives a more comprehensive framework for evaluating your inventory of projects.
30,000 Feet: One-to Two-Year Goals What you want to be experiencing in the various areas of your life and work one to two years from now will add another dimension to defining your work. Often meeting the goals and objectives of your job will require a shift in emphasis of your job focus, with new areas of responsibility emerging. At this horizon personally, too, there probably are things you'd like to accomplish or have in place, which could add importance to certain aspects of your life and diminish others.