Willpower

to reach them, Allen tried to help his clients deal with the immediate mess on their desks. He could see the impracticality of traditional bits of organizational advice, like the old rule about never touching a piece of paper more than once—fine in theory, impossible in practice. What were you supposed to do with a memo about a meeting next week? Allen remembered a tool from his travel-agent days, the tickler file. The meeting memo, like an airplane ticket, could be filed in a folder for the day it was needed. That way the desk would remain uncluttered, and the memo wouldn’t distract you until the day it was needed. Allen’s tickler file—thirty-one folders for each day of the current month, twelve folders for each of the months—would become so widely copied that his followers used it for the name of a popular lifehacker Web site: 43folders.com .
    Besides getting paperwork off the desk, the tickler file also removed a source of worry: Once something was filed there, you knew you’d be reminded to deal with it on the appropriate day. You weren’t nagged by the fear that you’d lose it or forget about it. Allen looked for other ways to eliminate that mental nagging by closing the “open loops” in the mind. “One piece I took from the personal-growth world was the importance of the agreements you make with yourself,” he recalls. “When you make an agreement and you don’t keep it, you undermine your own self-trust. You can fool everybody but yourself, and you’re going to pay for that, so you should be aware of the agreements you make. We developed a workshop for writing down those agreements.”
    There was, of course, nothing revolutionary about the strategy of listing one’s commitments and goals. The make-a-list strategy had been in every self-help program since Noah’s Ark and the Ten Commandments. But Allen made refinements with the help of a veteran management consultant named Dean Acheson (not the former secretary of state). To help his clients eliminate distractions, Acheson started off by having them write down everything that had their attention, large and small, professional and personal, distal and proximal, fuzzy and fussy. They didn’t have to analyze or organize or schedule anything, but in each case they did have to identify the specific next action to be taken.
    “Dean sat me down and had me empty my head,” Allen says. “I’d done a lot of meditating and considered myself highly organized, so I thought I already had my shit together. But I was blown away by the results. I thought, Look at what this does! ” As Allen went on to work with his own clients, he preached the importance of the Next Action, or NA, as GTDers call it. The to-do list was not supposed to have items like “Birthday gift for Mom” or “Do taxes.” It had to specify the very next action, like “Drive to jewelry store” or “Call accountant.”
    “If your list has ‘Write thank-you notes,’ that’s a fine Next Action, as long as you have a pen and cards,” Allen says. “But if you don’t have the cards, you’ll know subliminally that you can’t write the notes, so you’ll avoid the list and procrastinate.” That distinction might sound easy enough to learn, but people get it wrong all the time. When Allen hears that John Tierney has been inspired by the book to install a GTD organizer on his smartphone, Allen promptly offers to bet that most of the items on the Next Action list won’t be immediately doable. Sure enough, he finds the list dominated by imperatives like “Contact mint.com researchers” or “Consult Esther Dyson about self-control”—much too vague for GTD standards.
    “How are you going to contact or consult them?” Allen asks. “Do you already have the phone number or e-mail address? Have you decided whether to call or e-mail? That dumb little distinction matters. Everything on that list is either attracting or repulsing you. If you say ‘Consult Esther’ because you haven’t finished thinking exactly what you’re going to do next, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to look at the list. You’re walking around with this subliminal anxiety. But if you put down “E-mail Esther,’ you think, Oh, I can do that, and you move forward and feel you’ve finished something.”
    A few years ago, when the technology writer Danny O’Brien sent a questionnaire asking seventy of the most “sickeningly overprolific” people he knew for their organizational