As the first post of this series, I will explain how I manage, a la GTD, the articles and news I want to read, without interrupting my work.

Highly efficient people know when they have to start a task and when they have to wait. To be a great performer you need to learn to listen to that inner voice that tells you “wait”.

There are 3 basic rules you should follow if you want that the Processing Stage fulfills its mission properly:

1. The first item first. Even if the first item is a nonsense and the second is something really important, all stuff should be processed equally. If you go jumping to what you feel like processing, you will get used to avoid dealing with certain things, and the system will not work.
2. One item at a time. When you are processing an item, you should be totally focused on it. Resist the temptation to look at other items or anything else that looks more attractive. You need to pay full attention to each item to make the right decision, and thus leave all the Inbox items well processed.
3. Nothing goes back to the Inbox. This rule reinforces the other two. If you fall into the habit of returning things to the Inbox for processing them again, you will never strive to process stuff properly, what for? And making decisions will not be so important.

Process one thing after another, pay due attention to each one and do not return any of them to the initial situation. Process like a champ.

There are people who live in an eternal pursuit of productivity. They read books and articles related to the topic to learn new methods and techniques, know concrete use cases and discover what is the latest fashion technology in this field. They research into how to get that their boss, their colleagues or their partner do not hinder their productivity. They check out every single application that promises to solve their life.

I am afraid the Someday/Maybe list is doomed to become a bottomless pit where we accumulate our creativity and pending projects. All the stuff that we cannot process right now, are immediately set as something that we will do someday, so this list becomes a huge queue of wishes. It is for this reason that the Someday/Maybe list cannot be treated as a manageable foreground list, like Next Actions, but we should work to structure it so as not to lose confidence on it and avoid turning it into a storeroom for our activity.

I am absolutely convinced that the main reason why many people are not well organized and live burdened by the pressure of their work and personal tasks, is that they fail to establish the necessary habits to have everything under control, calmly.

The phrase falling off the wagon is commonly used when we want to say that, despite our good intentions to acquire a certain habit, we have not been able to. We ended up leaving. We screwed up.