Assess Your Progress

All of these to-do lists, organization tools, and routines aren’t worth the effort if they aren’t helping to make you more efficient. Take the time every few months—or at least once a year—to ask yourself whether they are working and whether you’ve come closer to achieving the personal and professional goals you set earlier in the book.

Reflect and adjust

During this period of review, revisit the goals you outlined in the beginning of “Identify What Needs to Get Done” and ask yourself if you’re now on track to meet them. If there’s still room for improvement, examine which tools are contributing to your productivity and which aren’t.

Are you using your to-do lists, or do you only look at the tasks that you’ve entered into your online calendar? Are you missing important, urgent communication with your teammates because you’re checking e-mail too infrequently? If you’re finding that a particular tool or routine isn’t useful, modify or jettison it. You aren’t committed to the approaches you try; the point is to find what works for you.

Things also get messy even after they’ve been organized. Make time—every four to six months—to reset. Go through your filing system, your e-mails, and your to-do lists, and make sure everything is still getting sorted according to the method you devised at the outset. It feels good to clean things up regularly and give yourself a fresh start.

Look at the small successes you’ve had, even if they don’t appear on a financial chart. These indicate that some change you’ve made to your way of working has improved your productivity. For example, it’s OK if your inbox now has a dozen messages in it, instead of the zero it had when you first set up your folders and filters. Remember four months ago when you had over two hundred messages? This is real progress! Identify where your organizational system is working, and if you need to make small adjustments, allow yourself some variance.

Finally, anticipate obsolescence. Productivity tools and systems will come and go, especially the digital ones. And just as technology changes, so too might your preferences. Understand and prepare for this by using software tools that allow you to export your data so that you’re not stuck in any one platform. Or know that you might migrate from a paper to-do list to an online list, or vice versa. These kinds of changes are fine, as long as they are helping you get work done.

Remember, this is not a one-size-fits-all process. Apply your own creativity and make sure your system works for you. Embrace the fact that you operate in a certain way, and that certain things work for you that may not work for others. Perhaps you like to review your organizational plan as part of “spring cleaning,” or maybe you like to reorganize every January 1 because it recharges you. Whatever system works for you is fine; the important thing is to have a system and review it over time.

Taking the time to step back and reconfigure how you work is critical to improving your productivity. But it’s not a one-time process: Being prepared for challenges to your focus and to the positive habits you’ve begun to build will keep you productive—and improve your work and that of the colleagues with whom you collaborate. Establishing processes for identifying and scheduling your most important tasks and implementing changes that result in greater focus and efficiency are just the first steps. By checking in on these processes and adjusting them frequently, you will enjoy not only a more effective way to get work done, but ideally a more productive way to live.