The map, not the territory

The exercise

1. Open the folder from unit 2 and read one week of your Inbox file. Every time a line points somewhere (a client, a project, a bill, the house, your health, a person) write that place down. Those are your lanes. Most people find five to nine. If you found twenty, some of them are one lane wearing different clothes.
2. Make one folder per lane, next to the Inbox file, named the way you say it out loud. Move nothing into them yet. An empty lane is still a lane; the map goes first and the filing follows it.
3. Make one file at the top called INDEX.md. One line per lane: the name, what lives there, and where. Under twenty lines total. If a line needs a second sentence, it is describing the territory, not the map. Cut it.
4. Put the rule at the top of the file in your own words. Ours reads: this file is a static map, the shape of the folder and nothing else. Nothing with a date in it. If reality and the map disagree, trust the files and fix the map. Read it before you ever edit the file.
5. Test it the only way that counts. Hand the folder to your assistant, or to a person, with one sentence: find where my [lane] lives using only the INDEX. Count the hops. One hop is a pass. More than one means the map is wrong, so fix the map, never the person.
6. Post the map in the room, in #courses, lane names blacked out if you like, with the hop count. That is the checkpoint. The lines you were tempted to add are the ones we talk about Friday at noon.

Do it with somebody

Pair up: hand each other your INDEX and one question, where would I find X. Count the hops out loud. Then each of you names one line in the other person's map that is a log line in a map's clothes: a date, a status, a thing that will be false next week. Those come out.

Back to the path