What Do You Call Yours?

Some things come with a name that you adopt. My house for example already had a name when we bought it, which I liked straight away, learnt about its meaning to the person who built the house more than a century ago, and have grown to love it to the point where I sometimes forget that I didn’t come up with it myself.

Other things we get the opportunity to name ourselves, and this makes them instantly our own in a very special and deep way. Our children and pets are the obvious examples, although people also sometimes name their cars, bicycles, laptops and even handbags, which make them somehow more personal and more indispensable.

When we all started GTD® and learnt about the idea of dividing reminders of ‘as-soon-as-possible actions’ by context, we likely first tried the lists suggested: Calls; At Computer; Errands; At Office (miscellaneous); At Home; Anywhere; Agendas (for people and meetings); Read/Review, as well as having separate lists for Projects, Waiting fors and things we may do Someday / Maybe.

You may have learnt to love these suggestions from David Allen as your own, as I have with my house name, or you may struggle with some of them and find you only use one or two of these as your own and the others feel less useful.

David later in “Getting Things Done”, when discussing the ‘The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment’ talks about his own use of a ‘Before Trip’ list and a ‘Creative Writing’ list, as well as other lists people he has worked with find useful. He also includes a warning question of ‘How much structure is too much, for the potential value of it?”. I won’t reiterate the whole book here, although if you haven’t had a re-read recently, I would recommend doing so at some point – which list will you put that on?

Importantly, you don’t need to use all the lists that David recommends; if a list means nothing to you, don’t use it. You may have set up one of his lists and then find you never look at it; that’s a good indicator that this list isn’t right for you. My own experience of this was the ‘Anywhere’ list, I liked the idea of it but found that I didn’t look at it, I assume because I was never ‘at’ Anywhere. Other people I work with love it and use it for brainstorming or listening to podcasts, etc. I would prefer to have lists called ‘Brainstorm’ and ‘Podcasts’, so everything is absolutely where the location matches the meaning.

Rather than considering David’s list and then seeing how they can fit into your life, why not take a short time and write down everywhere you work and the different types of work you do and then come up with a completely personal set of places to put your action reminders?

Or, if you don’t want to start from scratch, how about noticing from now on whenever you are somewhere that you want to see appropriate action options available to you and judging if you have the right list for that. So, if you are about to start exercising and you’re struggling to find a suitable podcast or some new music, would a new list help next time? If someone tells you they are going to be 15 minutes late to the next meeting and you feel that isn’t enough time to find something on your long ‘Computer’ list, would a new list of ‘Quick Wins’ help next time?

Examples of how some people have renamed the classic lists:

• Agendas: People; To Discuss; Meetings; Face-to-face; Talk to
• Anywhere: Brainstorm; Read; iPhone; Laptop; Pen and Paper
• Calls: Phone (to include WhatsApps, etc); Communications (to include MS Teams, Zoom, Slack, etc)
• Computer: Apple; Mac; Computer Work; Computer Personal; Computer Home. Also, as so much of our work can be on our Computer, perhaps sub-dividing this into types of work: Finance; Sales; Reports; Reading; Excel; Creative Writing; Marketing
• At Home: Home Office (very popular these days); DIY; Garden; 2^nd-Home-Name (for those lucky few); Yacht-Name (for those really lucky few!)
• At Office: Some may feel this is ‘out of date’ since our increase in working from home, although many find this useful for their less frequent trips to the office (use printer, pick up items, drop off documents, etc). If you have two regional offices, have two, named by location – e.g. “Canary Wharf” and “Manchester”.
• Errands: Out and About; Buy; Town-Centre-Name
• Read/Review: ‘Must Read’ and ‘Nice to Read’; Read and Respond

Other lists I’ve seen people use:

• Quick wins – similar to David’s mention of ‘Less than 5-minute’
• Short and Sharp
• Hour plus
• Deep thinking
• Defining my future
• Toast – similar to David’s mention of ‘Brain Gone’
• Sales development
• Client relations
• Podcasts
• Good to me
• Things I need money for
• Fun

Please do put your favourite adaptions/additions in the comments below.

I’ll return to David’s own words to end this: “There is no “right” way to structure your Next Actions lists – only what works best for you, and that part of your system will likely change as your life does.”.