Zero Inventory is about more than just saving money on holding stock.

The ideal batch size is one.

When you order one shiny new blue automatic Toyota Corolla with air-conditioning and power windows (but without the sports bumpers or tinted windows) precisely one order for a blue automatic Toyota Corolla with air-conditioning and power windows (but without the sports bumpers or tinted windows) enters the factory.

In a perfect pull system this means:
- one more engine block gets poured
- one more automatic transmission sub-assembly is delivered to the final assembly line.
- precisely 875 M5 screws are delivered (ok I made up that number)
- when the blue car body goes barrelling down the assembly line, an air-conditioning unit is manufactured to arrive at the assembly line at just the right time.

To achieve anything approaching this level of synchronicity is a special kind of magic. But I want to talk about WHY you'd do it. Why not just make make 500 engines, 500 air-conditioners, 500 transmissions and sit back and wait for the orders to pour in.

Why go to all the trouble?

When you don't buy more from suppliers than you can manufacture you don't have to waste money to have stock lying around gathering dust. When you don't manufacture more products than you can sell you're not wasting your time making the wrong thing. That's easy, anyone can see that.

The Lean Manufacturer takes it further than that: they look at the process involved in getting there. They recognise that while taking ANY forwards action is commendable, true perfection is unattainable; and that this fact should be seen as a motivator to remain constantly vigilant in the face of recent success.

A Lean Manufacturer is agile, able to change pace or direction at the drop of the hat. At all levels, from corporate direction and new model design through to deciding how many car-seats are to be delivered this hour, plans are worked and reworked right up until the last moment. The LM'er is able to respond to market demand.

While there is very little room for error in the Lean factory these things do happen: when a fault occurs at one station the ENTIRE line stops and EVERYONE rushes to that spot to fix the problem immediately. By committing themselves to the Lean path the weak links are quickly rooted out and strengthened.

When a factory operates according to a true pull-system everyone can be confident that their effort is valuable. People won't bust their guts for 3 weeks straight cranking widgets that are just going to sit in some warehouse somewhere, those widgets are going to be in the customer's hand by the end of the week: guaranteed.

How does this relate back to GTD?

So, you've got a ToDo list. Well done. When you organised you don't waste time doing things that don't need to be done. Ok. That's the easy part.

When you take it further and start applying GTD you learn WHY you have that list, and how it makes your life easier:

• your life will never be perfect, but the closer you get the more serene you will be. Every step in the right direction is great. Seriously, well done. Now you know that you can take that step: go take the next.
  
• when you have all your Stuff totally zipped up and captured you're able to change projects instantly. You can finish what you're doing and go play with the kids, safe in the knowledge that you aren't leaving some vital unclosed loop unrecorded.
• because you concentrate more on what needs to be done immediately you have more feedback on the doability of your commitments. What can look like an easy week's work on a ToDo list suddenly becomes 90 hours of cumulative Next-Actions! That's good information to have at the START of the week BEFORE it becomes a problem.
• When you use GTD you know that you're putting your efforts in the places you want your efforts to be. You're only ever bothering to do the stuff that leads you towards your goal.
  

Getting things DONE

When I was first trying to make heads or tails of GTD one of the biggest barriers was that I couldn't quite make sense of how it all related to ME: how my job could be defined by David Allen's gospel.

It all seemed so useful - so revelatory - and yet it was almost completely useless to me. It didn't make sense to put all my projects into one big basket and pretend that they could be managed that way. GTD's defintion of 'project' is anything that has more than one outstanding action. That included all my Projects, as well as all the subprojects that were born from the Projects, as well as every little deliverable or job or whatever.

My problem was that I didn't quite understand the question. What was I trying to achieve with all this nonsense? At the time, my time-management system consisted of a single todo list. That list was also my project management. It was also mainly completely ignored as I barrelled from one disaster that I didn't understand to another. What part of my life would time-management be repairing?

My GTD lists aren't my entire life. They aren't my entire job either.

At the end of the day the answer was in the question: It didn't make sense to put all my projects into one big basket and pretend that they could be managed that way. So I seperated out the Projects and tried to track those as a seperate bucket.

I'd have this list of named Projects that I was assigned to, and then a list of projects that I was working on, then a list of actions on those projects. The idea was that my daily review would consist of confirming that my actions were the right actions to take on the right projects that got my Projects completed properly.

The problem with all this was that it became unweildy. Things would come into my life, but not make it into my deck of cards system. My system became too precious to allow it to be easily or gracefully torn to shreds. I had too much non-basic stuff piled on top of the system. Too much architecture, not enough walls.

I ditched Projects eventually. They were written on my white board ferchrissakes. My KPIs were based on them. That's what project planning is for. Those project folders sitting on the bookshelf. That's where you track which Projects you're working on.

Now I just had projects, next-actions, someday/maybe and waiting for. There was a clear part of the system missing.

This is why I inserted goals at the top. I know. I know I wrote just a few sentences ago that you don't need to be trawling through all that higher altitude stuff every morning just to work out what you need to get done this morning. But a goal is different to a Project. A Project is something you live in. It's something you inhabit for the unforeseeable future. A goal is a place, a state. You don't need reminding what you're Projects are, but you do need reminding of what the goals are.

Every vector needs to know which direction to face and where it is right now.

Every knowledge worker needs to know what must achieve at the end of the day and what is achievable immediately.

The only way to get things DONE is to focus on what needs to be done. State your Projects as a finished proposition, then check that proposition every morning.

Contexts

Where are the contexts, you ask? Where are all my @ signs? I will tell you now. I invite you to reach deep within your soul and examine your life. Think of all the spheres that you influence - learn how far your grasp is.

Close your eyes, let your mind go blank, then let it focus on the details of your inner-child, then let it go blank, then focus again on your inner child then let it go blank.

When you open your eyes you will realise that you have two contexts: you're either at home or at work. There is no need to be maintaining such foolishness as @MyMum'sPlace or @VideoStore. Go and wash your brain out!

Keep It Simple Stupid.

[I know, I know. You're a volunteer at your church. You coach basketball for under 9's. You own and operate a ski-lodge on the side and spend every waking moment managing it by webcam and loudspeaker. Right. You can have another context. Personally, I've also got @shops.]

If you're like me you work with a PC on at all times, you have a phone on your desk and a mobile in your pocket. There's a fax/photocopier a few feet away and your PC is constantly connected to some variety of broadband intermanet. There's an intranet, for what it's worth, and the entire company network is available to you.

There's no POINT to having contexts called @computer, @phone, @fax, @email. Those things are always available to you. An action called "call Scumbags R Us to follow up on rivet delays" isn't WAITING for the moment when the phone is available to you. The phone is right there. Any time that you're at work you could pick up that phone and call.

You could also be writing that email. You could be reading [this] blog. You could be sending a fax to a supplier or working on your CAD. All things are possible.

The point is that you must not let your contexts overlap. That's wastage. David Allen can be forgiven for having the contexts @computer and @internet, because he frequently travels and spends time at his laptop unconnected from the outside world. The rule is that a context is defined by the tools that are available at that moment in time.

If you're sitting at your desk at 9am wondering what context you are in - I'll tell you. You are in @computer, @internet, @CAD, @fax, @phone, @boss, @email... all at the same time.

Now. I'm not telling you what MODE you're in. Maybe you enjoy emailing first thing. Maybe you love Dilbert. But your CONTEXT is firmly @work. You have all your @work tools available.

Buckets

I'm going to try to break out some of the ideas in my lengthy intro into some more chapterised essays.

My Blinding Flash of the Obvious is the content of this first post: what buckets do you choose to make sure you catch all your Stuff?

Friends, I'll give you the straight answer here. You'll read guff and stuff out there in the Wide Wide World of Web about what you need, and it will be very confusing. It will be written by highly caffeinated geeks who think that spitting out concepts is the same as spitting out information. These are the five buckets you need:

• goals
• projects
• next-actions
• someday/maybe
• waiting for

That's it. That's the entire kaboodle, kit included.

goals
What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to do THIS YEAR with your life? What do you need to get done to meet your commitments? Why get out of bed in the morning? What will be the proof that you've been worth your salary? It's not enough to be working on projects - you have to know WHY you're working on those projects and not something else. This can be short: 5 items. Any more and you'll be unable to commit to the right project that will satisfy your goals.

projects
Ok. So what are you working on? What are your open loops? We don't need to know what Projects you're assigned to; that's what your KPIs are for. Just write down the projects. You're a natural born planner - you know what's involved in your Project; you need to do your CAPEX, you need to get the concept design done, you need to find a supplier for those components, you need to you need to you need to you need to. What ducks do you need to get in a row? What blind alleys do you need to go shooting down? What processes do you need to follow? What conversations do you need to have?

next-actions
Ok, this ought to be obvious. Go through your projects and write down the very next-action that needs doing on each project. If there are two seperate actions that could be taken, don't choose between them just write them down. But don't write down the second and third steps - that stuff is doomed to live in your project planning. Face it, the future doesn't happen according to your plan. All you can do is manage yourself, now.

someday/maybe
I have to be honest and say that I don't think this list is particularly useful for me. As I said above, I'm uncomfortable trying to second-guess future realities by populating the Someday list with Step 3 through Step 43 that I'll be able to start as soon as I've done A and B. It doesn't work like that. And I've got far too much work on my plate for such a thing as Maybe. I either decide to do something or decide not to do something - there's never going to come a quiet lull in the activity where it becomes appropriate to discuss getting a new CAM software that integrates directly with SolidWorks. I either need to do it at an inappropriate time or toss the idea. I'm comfortable with both approaches.

But I keep the list because without it there would be a functional hole for actions and projects that are worth taking but can be cheaply deferred for the present.

waiting for
This is perhaps the keystone for me. I was amazed the other week when I went through my waiting for list and shot a followup email to the interstate sales manager asking where my competitor sample castors had gone. He'd sent out the request to all the branch managers then forgotten about it altogether. So had they! Weeks had gone past where I thought they were all diligently beavering away for me using their contacts to generate samples I needed to validate the design for the castor THEY'RE hassling ME to hurry up and design. They'd forgotten about it!

The thing that really got to me wasn't that the branch managers had forgotten the commitment. These things happen. That's what communication is for. That's why engineers spend 3/4 of their waking life chasing things up. What got to me was that the National Sales Manager had no record or reminder or popup or note of the deliverable that his staff had promised. He hadn't added this to his waiting for list. He had no live document of what future events had to take place before his promise to me was fulfilled.

The most profitable thing I've ever done for my company is to develop the skill of never losing a thread. Where's the quote on that widget? Coming next week. What's the latest scope? I'm waiting for the Production Manager to submit his comments. What's the state of the tooling? Tooling design is sitting with the toolmaker.

I prefer those answers to: which widget? I was supposed to get quotes for that too? Scope? Did you not want me to show that to the Managing Director yet? Tooling? I dunno. I guess they're working as fast as they can.

Competitor samples that you need to benchmark the design? I dunno what happened to that.