Willpower

be either thrown out or filed away for future reference. Stuff requiring action that was part of a multistep project, like Carey’s preparations to emcee a charity benefit dinner honoring Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had to be grouped together in a project list or in a folder on the computer or in a file cabinet. By going through all the paperwork, all the unanswered e-mails, all the other unfinished tasks in his computer or on his mind, Carey identified dozens of personal and business projects, which was typical. Allen’s clients usually have between thirty and one hundred projects, each with at least a couple of tasks, and they spend a full day or two to complete the great initial purging and sorting and processing. After Carey identified the projects, he had to single out the specific Next Action for each project. What was the very next thing to do for the charity dinner? As Carey worked through all the stuff, Allen sat in his office all day long.
    “He’d honestly sit there and watch me do my-emails,” Carey says. “Whenever I’d get stuck he’d say, ‘What’s going on?’ And I’d tell him, and he’d go, ‘Do this.’ And I would do it. He was very decisive about it. There would be only a few times when he’d say, ‘It could be a this or a that. What are you going to do with it?’” Allen taught him to set up separate folders for phone calls and e-mails, to put vague projects in a “Someday/Maybe” folder, and to follow the Two-Minute Rule: If something will take less than two minutes, don’t put it on a list. Get it out of the way immediately.
    “Before, I’d see a pile of papers and wouldn’t know what the hell was in them and just be like, Oh, my God, ” Carey says. “The day I got to zero, which is GTD talk for having nothing in your in-box—no phone messages, no e-mails, nothing, not a piece of paper—when I got to that point, I felt like the world got lifted off my shoulders. I felt like I had just come out of meditating in the desert, not a care in the world. I just felt euphoric.”
    Since that day, with the help of monthly visits from Allen, Carey says he has kept fairly close to zero. He falters sometimes, and if he’s been traveling, stuff will build up, but at least he knows what’s there and feels sure he’ll get to it. He can read a book or take a yoga class without feeling guilty. With the mundane out of the way, he can focus on the important stuff, like writing comedy. “There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write when you’ve got a blinking phone and a pile of letters and a ton of e-mails in your face,” Carey says. “You’re not going to do your very best work. But if you know the other stuff is taken care of, you can concentrate on your writing. You can be more creative.” Ultimately, that’s the selling point of GTD in corporate offices and far beyond. That’s the reason that comedians and artists and rock musicians rhapsodize about Allen’s lists and folders.
    “Whether you’re trying to garden or take a picture or write a book,” Allen says, “your ability to make a creative mess is your most productive state. You want to be able to throw ideas all over the place, but you need to be able to start with a clear deck. One mess at a time is all you can handle. Two messes at a time, you’re screwed. You may want to find God, but if you’re running low on cat food, you damn well better make a plan for dealing with it. Otherwise the cat food is going to take a whole lot more attention and keep you from finding God.”
    But why is it so hard to put cat food on a list? Why, even after paying Allen’s twenty-thousand-dollars-a-day fee to sit by their side, do his corporate clients still look for any excuse to flee from the stuff on their desks? He sometimes has to hunt them down in the men’s room and drag them back. After watching so many clients agonize over the most trivial decisions and Next Actions, Allen has come to appreciate why decide has the same etymological root as homicide: the Latin word caedere, meaning “to cut down” or “to kill.”
    “When we’re trying to decide what to do with our stuff or what movie to see,” Allen says, “we don’t think to ourselves, Look at all these cool choices. There’s a powerful thing inside that says, If I decide to do that movie, I kill all the other movies. You can pretend all the way up to that point that you know the right thing to do, but once you’re faced with a choice, you have to deal