Getting Things Done - GTD
Gaining Control Through the Engaging Step
AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez
"Strategy is important, but execution is everything. Incredibly successful people focus on executing incredibly well." ~ Jeff Haden
The last step to achieve total control and become actively involved with your world is to actually engage in doing things, that is, to act, to execute the actions that you have been accumulating in your system.
As you have been able to see, in order to finally getting things done you have to do a previous work that is fundamental, since it’s the one that will allow you to make decisions about what’s really important in your life at any given moment.
All the best practices and behaviors we have discussed in previous articles are designed to get you to this point. The stages of capturing, clarifying, organizing and reflecting, allow you to have an inventory of actions to take according to your reality. And the evaluation of the different levels of perspective provide you with a clear vision of your priorities over all these options.
Many people try to avoid this preliminary work (usually excusing themselves that they don’t have time for it) and do the things they think are important, as they come. This is a big mistake: you can’t make good decisions about what to do if you don’t really know what your relationship is with the different aspects that make up your world, at its different levels.
It seems incredible to me that the importance of choosing well what action we’re going to do next is not sufficiently appreciated. We seem to forget this truism: we cannot do more than one thing at a time (at least, with full attention).
What does being in control mean?
Ultimately, being in control is simply a result of how you feel about the decisions you make about what actions to take. If you feel completely aligned with your decisions, you will feel in control.
Being in control has nothing to do with the nature of the action you carry out, but its relationship with the rest of the tasks in your inventory, or in other words, with your relationship with the world.
If you are abandoning a task to go see your daughter, who has called you because she has an important problem, and you think it’s the best thing you can be doing at this very moment, then you are in control even though it may seem like you are losing control. If you’re working on a certain task because you’re avoiding working on another task that is less appealing but more important, and you know you’re not doing what you should be doing, or at least you’re not sure you’re doing your best, then you’re somewhat out of control.
You’re in control when you feel that you’re doing the best you can do and that you’re putting your attention on the right thing at the right time.
And when this happens you don’t feel stress or anxiety but total self-confidence. There is no time or distractions. There is no difference between your work and your personal life. You simply do what you have to do.
What does “engage” mean?
The last stage of the GTD methodology was previously called “do”. This generated some confusion, because it seemed that this stage was only about sequentially executing the tasks we have pending. The verb “engage” is currently used to expand that meaning, but it is still somewhat confusing.
Actually, this stage is more identified with the verb “to choose” than with any other:
The Engage step it’s about choosing at each moment the best action you could be taking.
In order to make this choice you’ve had to define in advance in a clear way what each issue that has fallen into your hands means and you’ve had to decide what you’re going to do with each of them. You also had to put each action in the appropriate list, so that all relevant options are visible when you are in a certain context.
If your lists are full of tasks expressed in a vague and ambiguous way, they’ll be of little value. Without realizing it, you will avoid any action whose meaning is unclear.
Therefore, the previous phases of the GTD workflow (clarifying things well, organizing them in the right place, and reviewing them regularly to keep them up to date) are fundamental to engage correctly. As Peter Drucker said, “there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
At this stage the question you have to answer is “What is the next action?” And to do that you will have to weigh a number of factors, which I will talk about in the next article.
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