(1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do.

Collect, process, organize & review what has your attention, so you can stop half-trying to be doing all that, constantly.

to frame the decision, asking questions about the data and the methodology, working to understand the results, and using them to improve outcomes for your organization.

Once you had generated a sufficient number of ideas and details, you couldn’t help but start to organize them. You may have thought or said, “First we need to find out if the restaurant is open,” or “Let’s call the Andersons and see if they’d like to go out with us.” Once you’ve generated various thoughts relevant to the outcome, your mind will automatically begin to sort them by components (subprojects), priorities, and/ or sequences of events.

The methodology for what I was going to do: ask some questions, get some replies, organize result, choose the best things to do.

We need to transform all the “stuff” we’ve attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

We think about what to do, and muster considerations and arguments in favor of one course or another. How are we to think about that?

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

The key, of course, is to define our goals, our results, in a way that is simple enough to grasp easily, and specific enough to be actionable.

The first was never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment and prejudice; and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them. The third, to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those objects that are simplest and easiest to know, in order to ascend little by little, as by degrees, to the knowledge of the most composite things, and by supposing an order even among those things that do not [19] naturally precede one another. And the last, everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I was assured of having omitted nothing.

In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The things we do first reflect clearly the elements that are most significant in our picture of ourselves.

This is composition; knowing what to select, how to arrange, what to emphasize or eliminate and how to do it...