Agendas and the Leaky Roof Problem
“Why haven't you fixed the hole in your roof?” Bob asks his neighbor.
“Well,” Jim answers, “when it’s sunny I never remember to, and when it’s raining I can’t!”
Agent’s Agendas feature can help you avoid this conundrum.
In Getting Things Done,* David Allen diagnoses the paradox behind the leaky roof joke as a problem of context: When the problem can be acted on (the sun is out), the needed info (there’s a hole) is not available.
Don’t think this applies to you? How about when you forget that you need to buy toilet paper until you sit down next to the empty toilet paper roll? Or any time you look at your To-Do list and realize you can’t do a bunch of tasks because you are missing a necessary tool or piece of info.
The problem with To-Do lists
Too often we organize our To-Do lists by importance or urgency, when they would be better organized by context:
At my desk:
- sign travel claims
- submit expense report
On the phone:
- make doctor’s appointment
- ask Priya about the staff meeting
- call Mom
At home:
- change the bedroom lightbulb
- etc.
It’s a helpful insight, but it became a game-changer when I realized that people are also contexts. What can I accomplish when I'm . . .
- with my boss?
- with my staff?
- with my partner?
- with my kids?
- with my client?
- etc.
When I started building Agent, this feature—an agenda for every contact, separate from the notes field—was essential.
I have been keeping agendas, or “to discuss” lists, for the people in my professional and personal life for a long time, and it has mostly done away with the need for a task manager. (I still keep task lists, but now they are short and easily managed in my notebook.)
You always have your phone
When you’re caught in unexpected down time—waiting for an appointment or stuck in traffic—it’s natural but often frustrating to scan your To-Do list. Many tasks can’t be done because you’re away from your computer, for example, or don’t have a needed document.
But you always have your phone. Keeping agendas gives you a call list for these unproductive moments. Filter your address book for just the contacts with agenda items and you’ve got an up-to-date list of people to call.
Agent makes this easy with its “has agenda” button.
Click it to show all your contacts that have something in the agenda field, then email or call them straight from Agent.
Practical next steps
There is another, more subtle, benefit to thinking about tasks as agenda items. Another problem with most To-Do lists is that we write down what David Allen calls “projects” instead of actual tasks.
For example, “Change the oil in the car” is a goal, not a clear action. If you ask yourself, “What’s the first physical act I need to do to change the oil in my car?” the answer might be something like:
- Look up the last oil change in the maintenance log.
- (Or more likely) Find the car’s maintenance log.
- Call the garage to make an appointment.
- (Or) Ask Maria for the name of the mechanic she recommended.
A To-Do list of small, practical next steps like these is much easier to breeze through, and nine times out of ten, the first practical step is to pick up the phone and call or message someone.
Keeping agendas rather than To-Dos has made me less likely to add vague “projects” to my task lists. The result is that very satisfying feeling of being one step ahead.
In the Agent demo you can explore the Agendas feature and others. Try it out, and if you think Agent might be useful, feel free to ask me for a beta account.
Comments and feedback are welcome at info@scribbleindustries.com.
* Getting Things Done by David Allen is available at Amazon. There’s also an entire lifestyle: gettingthingsdone.com.