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Best Practices in Dealing Effectively With Any Information - The 4D Process

Written by: Alex Revai

Article Overview: This process is considered best practice in the organizing, time and task management fields. These 4 steps enable you to deal effectively with any document or information, be it paper or electronic. Utilizing this process will go a long way in making your work more productive and less stressful.

Best Practices in Dealing Effectively With Any Information - The 4D Process

Email, voicemail, faxes, paper mail, memos, reports, manuals, bills and all sorts of electronic files keep flooding your in-boxes. If not managed effectively, paper piles overtake your desk and all conceivable horizontal surfaces in your office. Cluttered offices are the rule, not the exception these days.

Similarly, your email in-box is overflowing with read, half-read and un-read messages. It's not uncommon to find thousands of email in people's email in-boxes. Unfortunately, for many people, the in-box is the filing location for most of their messages.

The results, in both cases (paper and email), are forgotten tasks, lost information, missed deadlines and the inevitable stress and frustration. Without citing statistics here, which quantify lost productivity due to email and paper/document mismanagement, let's get done to business and learn the 4D process.

Just one more thing... a definition:

Clutter or, in general, any accumulated "stuff" (in our case email and paper piles) reflects all those decisions we DID NOT make at the time we first handled the information. As we shall see, the 4D process is about decision making.

The goal is an empty in-box at the end of each day. No less!

Let's start processing our email/paper pile:

1. Start at the top, open the first item and read it. Yes, do take the time to actually read it and understand what it's about and whether it requires any action.
2. If it requires action, consider whether it will take more or less than 2 minutes.
3. If it takes < 2 minutes, DO it. Right now. That's our 1^st D.
4. If it will take > 2 minutes, DEFER it. Right now you are processing information and not about to be distracted by anything. OK? So that's our 2^nd D.
5. You will agree, and statistics prove it, that a large percentage of our email/mail is totally useless or doesn't concern us. DELETE them. Or, in the case of paper, toss them. This step is very hard fro many people. Refer to part 2 of my series regarding questions to ask yourself in order to help you make the decision.
6. Some people, fortunately for them, are able to DELEGATE a task. If you can, do it. That's our 4^th D. (In a separate article, I will provide best practices for effective delegation.)

In a nutshell, these are the basics of the 4D process.

What if an item doesn't require any action, but you want to keep it? You file it for reference. In case of email, drag and drop it into its meaningfully named folder. In case of paper, if it takes < 2 minutes, file it now. If it takes > 2 minutes, DEFER filing it by putting it into your "To-be Filed" action folder.

How do you defer an email item, when it requires action? You move/copy it directly into your calendar (when you know the date/time you want to deal with it) or move/copy it into your Task Pad, when you don't yet know when to deal with it.

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Article Tags: 4 d process, delete do delegate defer, empty email inbox, managing information, processing email



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