The Waiting List
October 11, 2004 – 8:53 amSo, to continue with the Greatest Hits of GTD series (earlier, we talked about context-specified lists - today I’m looking at the Waiting List.
When you’re following the GTD system, there’s a limited set of decisions you can take for any item that enters your system. You can trash it, you can file it as reference, you can take immediate action on it, you can defer it for later action - or you can delegate it to someone else. Delegation is one of the black holes of productivity, however; all too often, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mantra holds too true, and something delegated just never seems to get done.
The GTD system deals with this by encouraging the creation of a Waiting For list. Every time you delegate something, you add it to the Waiting list. That way, you’ve always got a reminder that there’s something out in the world that you have at least some interest in and responsibility for. You review the list at regular intervals (I’ll talk about the weekly review in a later post), and if anything’s been on it for an excessive amount of time, you follow-up. Voila - no more black hole.
All too often, people use delegation as a way to get things off their plate and off their minds; GTD is all about getting things off your mind (and onto your lists!), but unlike the simple delegate-and-forget method, the GTD system ensures that things still get done.
