You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media ("Email is just a series of tubes," Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say). While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people's results change over time. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you're doing gets looked at once a week without fail. Knowing that you don't need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion. Or as I like to put it, "How will I know when I'm done with this?" Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here's how I'd summarize each: We started talking about which parts of David Allen's GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.
The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team.