Productivity Systems

Managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors:

• 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, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.
• You must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to fulfill it.
• 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.

• You haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcome is.
• You haven't decided what the very next physical action step is.
• You haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.

Until those thoughts have been clarified and those decisions made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will think about as often as you need to, your brain can't give up the job.

Stuff" means anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

The reason most organizing systems haven't worked for most people is that they haven't yet transformed all the "stuff" they're trying to organize. "Stuff" means these things are not controllable.