[3-1-3] Full Capture

Hey 🙂

I just got back from a week off with the kids and the family, and if you’ve ever come back from time off, you know the feeling — you’ve got to deliberately shift gears back into work mode. It doesn’t just happen automatically.

So the first thing I did this week was a full capture. If you’ve not come across this before, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done — I’m not going to teach you the the whole methodology, but this one tool is massively useful. It’s a case of getting everything that’s rolling around your head out. All of it. I jumped into Claude on Monday and basically talked out loud — “here’s everything on my mind” — and then got the outcome organised onto my reMarkable. I looked at that list every single day this week to get my head back in the game.

Honestly, it’s a bit like a therapy session for your work. My wife Cara does hers with post-it notes — brain dumps everything onto single post-its, then physically moves the notes around to organise and prioritise. Whatever the method, the point’s the same: get it out of your head so you can actually see it.

And here’s the thing — I did a full capture again today, to plan for next week. Once it’s all out in front of you, the priority tends to float to the top pretty naturally. That’s the real value of it — it’s a great precursor to your 3-1-3, because once you can see everything, you can start asking: out of all this, what’s the 80/20? What’s the one or two things that are actually going to move the needle, versus everything else that just feels busy?

If you’re feeling like things are chasing you rather than the other way round, do a full capture this week. Get ahead of it. Get in control.

Your 3-1-3 for this week:

1. Three things that felt like progress this week. Wins, achievements — whatever felt like a step forward. This isn’t about the stuff that didn’t get done (there’s always stuff that didn’t get done — you’ll die with things on your to-do list). It’s about actually recognising what did move forward.
2. One thing that’s the most important focus for next week. Your full capture will help you here. What’s the single objective that, if you nail it, makes everything else easier or unnecessary? Where do you want to put 20% of your effort to get 80% of the result?
3. Three tasks that will move you toward that one thing. Get specific. Look at your calendar, look at your one big objective, and pin down the actual jobs you need to do next week to make progress on it, and plan them into your calendar.

That’s it. Ten minutes, and you’ll head into Monday with a plan already made, instead of playing catch-up.

As always, you can email me at chris@chrismarr.co.uk or drop your 3-1-3 in the comments. I’d love to see what you’re working on this week.

Have a great weekend.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.