Having captured and clarified these things, assuming they haven’t been immediately completed using the 2-minute rule, they will need to be organised into a system.

The system is typically made up of:

1) Calendar

This is usually the stronger part of the system; most trust their calendar, remembering their appointments and meetings.  We will further optimise the calendar in the Do It section of the course as we review features of the Outlook calendar, Google calendar and paper-based diaries.

A couple of basic points for any calendar: check it at least daily.  Don’t litter all of your tasks onto the calendar.  The calendar should be used to map the ‘hard landscape’ of the day; meetings, appointments and events.  It is still good practice however, to block time in the calendar for the day’s key tasks, as long as they are now viewed as a meeting (with yourself).

In addition, remember to build time between meetings to allow for over-run, move from one location to another, to review meeting actions, and to reframe and refresh.  Google and Microsoft both offer an option to reduce meeting allocations; the default is 5 minutes per 30 minute of meeting time.

2) Next Actions

This can be the weaker part of the system.  To do lists become busy, longer and even depressing.  As a result, some participants comment that they have given up on to do lists.  They can work very effectively as long as we create some (but not too much) structure.  My recommendation is to use a system that can link a task to:

• a project
• a context
• a due date
• an importance