When you adopt the Effectiveness Habits, you end up with a set of interrelated lists that forms your task system. Here are the most important lists.
| Hopper | One list or at most a few lists where you record actual and potential to-dos throughout your day. Can include your email inbox. MODding the items in your hoppers converts them to items on other lists such as doables and outcomes. |
| Outcomes | A list of things you are committed to get done and that take more than one step to complete. Includes a description of the outcome your seek and/or how you know you’ve achieved it. |
| Doables | A list of concrete, discrete things you can actually do. Examples: “Call Rebecca to schedule next off-site team meeting,” is doable. “Build next year’s budget,” is probably not doable; it probably is an outcome that will be completed in several steps. “Stimpson report” is also not a doable because it’s a not concrete, discrete: what do you want to do with or to the Stimpson report? Take it somewhere? Edit it? Review it?Doables can be sorted (even into separate lists) by what David Allen calls, contexts or the type of the activity. Examples contexts or ways to subset doables by type: email, call, file, read, computer, and errand. |
| Back Burner | A list of doables and outcomes that you want to remember and that you choose not to work on right now. |
| “Know why” | A list of your personal, family, and/or organizational vision, mission, and goals. Include a list of the key accountabilities for your main work role. See Habit #5: Know Why. |
Use this list to help you build your set of lists.