I was talking to this guy, John. He works for an agency and serves as a liaison between clients and attorneys in 50 states. His life was nuts. His desk was overflowing. His email was neglected while he returned phone calls, his voice mail was neglected while he returned emails. The stress of keeping all these balls in the air at once, of keeping his bosses happy, his co-workers happy, his clients happy and the attorneys happy was killing him. John would go home tired and go back to work tired in the morning.

John’s life was depressing. Work wasn’t fun. At home all he thought about was work. So home wasn’t any fun either.

Then he got the MasterList with the multi-blaster and color prioritizer. John had to do a little bit of work to input his complicated work reality into the MasterList, but he did it incrementally, kaizen-like, a little at a time in bits and pieces as things “came up”. He decided what projects to create that would help him. He created 50 State projects as well. He created client projects. And he started to put to-do’s into the MasterList instead of trying to do everything at once, or remembering everything or letting his desk and his inbox be his guide.

He had lots of daily email to respond to and some of it was quite complicated. He found that with The MasterList he could drag it right out of his inbox into an associated project in The MasterList, create a follow-up task to get back to it, then yellow highlight the task to signify it was related to an email at the project. When he ran his My Day Report he could easily see which tasks were associated with emails (yellow). He chose blue highlighting to associate tasks with specific documents piled on his desk, so he could study then in the My Day Report or at the project level in The MasterList without having to constantly shuffle through the pile on his desk. He used Red to signify the “almost highest priority” and a lighter brick red to signify a lower priority. Other colors could and did signify other kinds of priorities. Purple became the highest priority and he was jealous about according that status to any task. He would not allow more than 3 of those on his list in any one day.

Little by little, John let The MasterList become his guide to clearing his desk, his inbox, and his head. As his desk and inbox became clear, his MasterList filled up and his mind cleared. Because it was so easy to see all that chaos organized in a single list by date, by task code, and with color prioritization to help set things apart, John could now literally triage all the chaos of his work life, maybe 40 to 50 outstanding tasks at a time, in minutes. This job used to take him hours, just to get started, and more often than not resulted in a futile attempt to “just do it” in a bull’s rush at his workload, with great prejudice to his priorities.

The pile on his desk was just a storage depository now. No pressure, emotion, or anxiety associated with it whatsoever. Didn’t even matter what was in it. If it wasn’t one of the 8 or 10 priorities he had isolated to work on that day, John knew he was safe and didn’t have to pour thru the pile anymore to see what was there. As for his email Inbox, it was now just that – an inbox. If he couldn’t work on an email right away, he could store it in The MasterList and associate a task with it, to get back to it later. Again, no worry.

Suddenly, John had a clear desk, a clear inbox, and a clear mind. Just the kind of result necessary to reduce all the internal stress of having to keep a sort of mental picture of where he’d last stashed something or seen something, or thought maybe there was something bothering him that needed to be done – but what was it and where was it?! It was as if his entire chaotic workload had become as still as a still life painting and he was holding the brush, totally in control of the next move.

Now at least, even if he had 50 things to do, he didn’t feel bad about the 42 he couldn’t get to. He knew all about his “lesser priorities”. He knew that just a click away he had complete control over a set of knowledge about every undone thing. And, he refused to allow himself to be threatened by lesser tasks, well within his control, when he had clearly defined greater priorities to achieve. The key was seeing it and knowing it deep in his soul, because The MasterList made that kind of deep soulful knowledge about “what was what” amazingly easy.

More importantly, he was grinding through his priorities with almost perfect precision, getting better and better results because he now had a basis for faith in his ability to make accurate priority decisions. Chaos was banished from his mind.

Oh! The Joy was back. There was nothing that John and the MasterList couldn’t handle.

As John tells me, he is happier at work and happier when work is done, because his mind isn’t whirling with all the things that could have been done, or should be done, or hadn’t been done. The mornings are brighter, because getting started is more like a game, a game in which John wins each time by reducing 50 confusing complexities, in minutes, to 10 sure priorities, which are easy to focus on without all the rest clamoring for attention. And, although he is still overscheduled, overbooked, and overtaxed with his workload, he’s not worried. How can you go wrong if you isolate the priorities and put all the rest in perspective. Nobody can do it all, so the trick has to be doing what you can in the best order possible.

John still has as many balls to juggle as before. But instead of trying to keep them all in the air at once, and giving short shrift to each one, John simply takes each ball and parks it on a shelf. He can see it, it’s not going away, and it’s easy to get back to when it needs to be handled, not earlier, and not to the detriment of any more important thing.

John said to me “I’m as happy right now as I’ve ever been in my life. The MasterList is truly amazing.”

Jo-Anne Szoke
The MasterList