Tips from a GTD Coach on managing reading materials
January 28th, 2010 GTD Times Team - Staff ContributorsCategories | Best Practices of GTD | Getting Started | Implementation
One of the features of our GTD Connect program is “Ask the Coaches,” which gives members a chance submit email questions to our Coaches on anything challenging to them in learning or implementing GTD. Here’s an example of one that came in from a member about how to deal with voluminous and relevant reading input. We get this question so often that we wanted to share it with the whole GTD community.
Dear Coaches at GTD Connect,
I am struggling with how to incorporate the GTD methodology into a specific, but important, part of my job.
Surely I am not the first GTD Connect member with this challenge. I am a Portfolio Manager and Investment Analyst for a wealth and investment management firm. Daily, I receive about 100 emails containing research reports from various Wall Street and independent research firms. In addition, there are a few investment-related research websites that I should check on a daily basis to read what reports and analyses have recently been published by those firms. Technically, no one would ever know if I did not get all of this reading done every single day—however, I would not be as informed about the financial markets or as productive in terms of generating new investment ideas. It would also mean being behind my colleagues in terms of digesting research reading materials (although I recognize that they do not get around to reading everything they want to either). I might also miss an important piece of news that would otherwise affect how I manage and analyze client portfolios. Or, I may not be up to speed when a client calls with questions about a particular stock holding. Additionally, truth be told on a fundamental basis, I really like reading all this stuff! I love the analytical part of my job, reading lots of research reports and using all those disparate pieces of information to draw conclusions and make judgments regarding how to manage client portfolios.
My challenge is simply the fire hose of research reading that gets thrown at me every day and the research websites that contain other pieces that I think I should be familiar with. I guess the conclusion I’m slowly coming to is that there is no way that I can read everything that hits my email inbox. Fair enough. But then I struggle with how to organize this material into a next action or something that I am not repelled by. For example, I empty my email inbox regularly during the day by filing everything into @Actions (to then be further distributed to my Actions/Task list or delegated) and @Research. That research file currently has 909 unread research pieces in it. If I glanced at the summary of a particular report, I could probably tell quickly how directly related it is to my current investments. On the other hand, research that might not look important on the surface may actually contain very worthwhile nuggets of information—but I won’t know that until I read, or at a minimum, scan the whole report.
In conclusion, I feel like I have hit a road block in my quest to improve my GTD system. Please, what advice or suggestions do you have?
Senior Coach Michael Dolan offered these tips:
Since information is often the key to competitive advantage, filtering and targeting the RIGHT information tends to be the key. I guess the silver lining here is that you actually DO like all of this reading. This is more about getting a higher level of control and perspective about that reading. Here are some strategies to consider:
Target the inflow
Are you sure that all of the email reports, newsletters, and other reading sources that are currently landing in your inbox really should still be coming to you? Be rigorous with eliminating any of this inflow that really doesn’t belong and you’ll be better able to sort through what does.
Use the two-minute rule
You may already be doing this, but it’s worth mentioning. I’ve seen many clients with a heavy load of reading that have developed a bad habit of reflexively dumping new things into the “pile” of reading materials without at least spending a minimal amount of time to assess if it really needs to go there, and just how important or interesting it really is.
If you consistently give yourself about two minutes to scan and assess every new piece of reading material you get, you might be surprised with a) how much you can actually “get” in two minutes, and b) how easy it is to toss a great deal of reading once you’re clearer that you don’t really need it. This time will also enable you to do a bit of triage of the reading you choose to defer till later.
Organize your reading by level of urgency / potential usefulness
Many of our clients find that they really need up to three different ways to organize the various reading materials they want to read:
Critical Reading
These reading materials would go right to your task list, potentially with a due date indicated. The thought would be that these reading tasks would be just as important as the other critical next actions in your system. If the reading is in paper form, the task would still go on your main task list, and right in the subject line of the task you could give yourself a note to indicate where the pages are being kept until you can read them. Some use a general “Action Support” folder for this purpose.
Read/Review
This category would be for reading that is not necessarily critical, but that you’d like to get to relatively soon. Some GTD’ers will just use a folder (either email or physical) called something like “Read & Review” for this. The idea is that you’d probably focus on the critical reading first, before opening this folder.
Read FYI
I wonder how much of those 909 research pieces you mention would actually have even made it into this category of reading. Your agreement read FYI would literally be, if I get to it, great. If not, that’s fine too. Think about it like a someday/maybe list for your reading. Many GTD’ers will use a paper tray labeled “Read FYI” or something like that for the paper reading. And an email folder will do on the digital side.
As with all things GTD, it will always help if you keep these reading lists / folders up-to-date and current. The weekly review should be a regular time for you to cull certain
folders / areas to keep the lists or piles to an appropriate level so that you keep trusting those places. Remember that renegotiating your agreements is an important element of practicing GTD. In your case, what that means when it comes to your reading materials, is that you might want to regularly let yourself off the hook for reading things that you once thought were important, but now are out-of-date or less interesting.
I hope these ideas help add some control and perspective to your reading agreements.
Michael Dolan is a senior coach with the David Allen Company.
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Brilliant article. I can see adopting this methodology of three-fold categorization, despite the fact that I suffer from the inverse problem: reading of written material is something that is not a big part of my job.
Because I don’t do a lot of article or document reading, it is not well-integrated with my workflow, and so my current one folder “Read/Review” system simply piles up over time, with me completely losing sight of which of the articles or documents is best to hit first when I do get around to offline reading.
In a sense, almost all my material would hit the “Read FYI” bin, but the system described in this article would give me the opportunity to prioritize better and avoid losing that thing that I really should review in the sea of a one-dimensional approach.
Don’t forget about another option – Reference.
I’m in a similar situation and these distinctions help manage the flood as well as the periodic purging.
A lot of market-related email stories get old fast or can be accessed online so having the Read – FYI distinction helps with both the reading flood as well as regular “pruning”.
I also use Reference to maintain emails on specific topics might want to review later – e.g. Active v. Passive Management, Commodities, Taxation, etc. so some emails start off in Read – FYI but migrate to reference instead of trash.
If you have to read that much all day, it might be interesting to look into speed-reading. Meta guiding seems to be the best way to me. With meta guiding you guide your eyes with a pen to make your eyes move faster and more fluently across the text while retaining close to 100% text understanding. It will take some time to get used to it, but in time you will be able to read more text in 2 minutes and then it will become easier to read all your mails.
It sounds like the information you are reading is time sensitive, so it might be good to somehow mark them with a “freshness date” or something so that you can throw them away if you don’t get to them by 1 week or 1 month. That would cause them to not pile up and create stress over items that are too old to be of value to you.
@Mike – Brilliant, I had never even considered that, but yes, we often have weekly/bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly reporting roll-ups that will “expire” (or at least be deprecated) based on more recently received material. Having content that can be automatically culled from the pile would greatly assist in relieving some anxiety of stuff left unreviewed.
I’m also an investment analyst and suffer from a firehose of daily email. I use an extensive list of reference folders to keep useful research (mine and external) organized by company, sector or other topics like new ideas. This works well in general, but I tend to allow my Inbox to become the Read/Review file, which just gets cluttered given the high volume of email. I suppose the answer is to add a Read Today folder to my Action Support and Save For Later folders. I’m reluctant to spend more time moving messages but the empty Inbox might help clear my mind.
Equally useful for the retired, with our newspapers and magazines — they pile up more than e-mails! Besides the relevant ‘classify’, and the 2-minute read tips, I also cut/tear out and classify items of interest (action, travel, reference, interest etc.) and weed out those files regularly.
Asa regards the storm of mail coming in, I wondered if you could increase selectivity by tracking (roughly) how often each particular source provides anything useful and dumping or down-rating the low scorers?
As someone who also enjoys reading about my field, I think one has to control this “need to know everything” mentality.
Recognize that this need comes from a fear of not knowing the answer when questioned by an authority figure: client, boss, co-worker/competitor.
Deal with the fear and anxiety about performance. Next, determine how many hours a day you will devote to reading and be ruthless with the clock. Quantify how many publications you will allow yourself to commit to and rank-order them in some way as to degree of importance.
Having then, some way to “view” the sea of your reading for the week, schedule the days, dates, and hours of the day you will read. Stick to the schedule.
Next, talk to your colleagues about this and form a group that meets once or twice a week to update each other on publications you all want to read. Assign the publication to one person and he or she summarizes either the article or the whole publication, depending on time. That way you are all informed of the salient points in a short amount of time. You’ll then know if you need to read the whole article yourself for better understanding, or you can just move on. This way your competitors become part of your team and you reduce your anxiety about these potential “threats”.
With respect to clients, realize that, to them, YOU are the authority figure, and that when they question you they are coming from a place or greed or fear. If it’s greed, you can answer based on recommendations you have already sent them or you can get back to them with further reasearch.
If the client is truly wanting reassurance from you then recognize that YOU ned to be asking the client questions so you can understand what they really want from you. The question about their portfolio may be a smokescreen for something they really are asking, i.e. “Can you make me feel better about my money”?
In short, get at the reasons for why you are holding yourself to these near-impossible standards and then deal with the real issues. Be comfortable with saying “I don’t know the answer to that at the moment and let me call you back.”
Good luck with this. As you begin to work with clients, set the stage as to how much information they require and tell them how you will work to give them good advice.
Let’s face it, guiding principles govern much of what we do and if you need late-breaking news, you probably have access to that now.
As a support staff person, I think the above ideas are great, but they don’t work for all levels of personnel. First, support people (Admin or Executive Assistants, etc.) can’t spend much of their day reading, and certainly can’t pick the time; they are subject to their boss’s demands and schedule); so fitting in reading is difficult.
More to the point, publications received by one’s company are usually circulated among the staff, or at least senior/executive staff. They aren’t supposed to hang onto the publications for long, becuase others need to see them, and before they get too old. Some folks make copies; others wind up losing the pubs in their Inboxes or on their desks, and the person in charge of routing them (such as I) have to track them down. Any thoughts on a situation like this?
(response to Marianne Rankin’s post)
Marianne,
That issue of routed reading is a tough one to answer without knowing the read issues going on. For instance, are there a few repeat offenders here or is everyone guilty?
Depending on the real situation, here are a few ideas to consider:
- Any possibility to make this a digital process? Perhaps the reading can be scanned and distributed, leaving out the pass-along problems
- Copying the reading and distributing to all would be another straight forward (if not labor intensive) solution, as you mentioned.
- I’ve sometimes seen groups create a reading library approach, where the shared documents/publications are put out in a shared space and each team member is allowed to “borrow” it for some time and return it. Of course, there are drawbacks, but in some situations this works well.
Short of knowing more, what this really comes down to is having clear agreements with all involved about what the process is and what is expected of them.
I hope that adds at least a bit of value here.
Michael