Master Your Workday Now: Proven Strategi

It is not a prioritization system based on importance, but it does prioritize the urgency of your work.

Defer-to-Do tasks are tasks that you defer to a specific day on which you really intend to do them. On that future day, a Defer-to-Do task most likely becomes a Critical Now task, one you must do. Or it might become an Opportunity Now task that you very much want to do that day. (If you are using the optional Target Now tasks, it becomes one of tho

“What is the very next physical action I need to do to accomplish this task?” The goal is to identify the most discrete and significant next action possible, and write that down on the task list.

create the equivalent of a TV commercial, but one for your goal instead of a product. I then asked you to “watch” it repeatedly. In this case it was not a video; rather, it was your written Now Goal statement, enhanced as much as possible to make it colorful, positive, and emotive.

Again, I want to mention and emphasize that this is an urgency-based management system, not an importance-based one. It’s not that importance is not important; it’s just that attempting to use importance as your primary decision tool in an urgency-based office environment usually leads to failure.

That does not mean you should not apply a true deadline to those tasks that really have them, particularly those imposed from the outside (from your client or boss, for example); there are appropriate times to set true deadlines. And for those, use the technique I showed in the Quick Start: place the date right in the task name like this: DUE Aug 4

them all to do at the end of the day to be a workday best practice.

The Two Most Important System Rules • First, only place items in the Critical Now list if they pass the going-home test: Would you work late into the night to complete these if they were not done? If no, do not put the item on the list. This stringent test will reduce that list to a very reasonable size—you will rarely have more than three to five

There are two kinds of Strategic Deferrals in the Workday Now task solution: Defer-to-Do and Defer-to-Review.

the Now Horizon we described above. It is not that no work exists beyond that horizon; it is just that work beyond that point is out of sight and therefore out of mind, and so the man is not anxious about it and probably does not think much about it.