Ep. 312: David Allen Talks With Marcus Baur  ## Metadata - Author: [[Getting Things Done]] - Full Title: Ep. 312: David Allen Talks With Marcus Baur - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/5318d968-7a98-4bd5-8e32-0746767246a6 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Marcus Baur's GTD Olympic Journey** - Marcus Baur shared his journey inspired by David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book during his Olympic sailing preparation. - He combined GTD with his own management style to qualify for the Olympics and build a career in software and project tools. Transcript: David Allen So, Marcus, tell me and anybody who might be watching or listening to this who you are, why we may be talking. Marcus Baur Yeah. Yeah, I'm Marcus Bauer. I live in Germany. I grew up here and I studied architecture. I'm a trained architect and I was a sailor as a kid. And at some point I caught the Olympic bug and wanted to go to the Olympics. And I was always a sort of hyperactive type. And it's a real honor to speak to you today because I vividly remember how I had your book in my hand. And I left my apartment and I was sitting on a bench and I said, all these things I want to do. How are you ever going to manage that? What do you do to, you know, get out of this hyperactivity loop? And then I read your book and you talk about mind like water. And I was into Buddhism and meditation back then. And I thought, that's it. That's the method I need. And yeah, I loved it. I loved getting things done. I eventually qualified for the Olympics by having a sort of planful approach, developed a little bit of my own sort of management style along with it, but it was always heavily influenced By GTD. And then after my sailing career, I didn't go into architecture. I'm still in love with the feel, but it's an interesting project management challenge, in itself. It has huge challenge in our times. But for various reasons, I didn't go into the field. I went into software development, worked for years with SAP, the big German software company. I have my own software company that develops a project management tool. And here I am. My kids are now grown up. I'm sort of back into startup mode, if you like. I always had my software company on the side next to my consulting business. That gave me a lot of insight into larger corporations. But now I'm back sort of in startup mode, running my own software business. And with great pleasure, I read your new book, Teams, Getting Things Done With Others, what you wrote with Edward Lamont. I really enjoyed that. And here I am. How do you foster productivity, joyful productivity, people falling in love with their work, really enjoying what we do, and at the same time solving the immense problems we have in The world, the challenges we have had. ([Time 0:00:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4b0fb1e9-c76d-4b63-9e09-7ef95d9fc53f)) - **Goalscape Visualizes Priorities** - Goalscape visualizes goals as nested circles highlighting priority because life and time are finite. - Giving some goals larger weight visually forces prioritization, preventing trying to do everything equally. Transcript: Marcus Baur It's a goal visualization tool. It's really simple. We don't plot the goals in a mind map, but we plot it into a finite space because our love, our love maybe as well, but our life is finite. We've got all, I have 24 hours a day and whatever we want to do, we need to fit into that finite space, whether we work by ourselves or as a team. So I always thought the circle was a better model to plot what I want to do. Initially, I was mind mapping, and it's good for brainstorming, but at some point, you need to converge, you need to condense what you want to do, and you need to make hard choices. And that's why we chose the circle to build a structure of goals and sub-goals and further sub-goals and break it down to a level of detail that feels comfortable. And working with this finite space of the circle, the multi-level pie chart, if you like, we call it a goalscape, fosters meaningful discussions we see happening in teams. One of the reasons I did it was because I was plotting all the things that I had to do to become an Olympian. And I realized I'm never going to be able to do all of that. My aspiration was I want to be the best in the world or among the best in the world. But then I plotted everything I needed to do. I said, it's going to be impossible to be the best in the world in all of this thing. The best at what? Ah, sorry. I was a sailor and I wanted to go to the Olympics. The first Olympics I attended were in Sydney and that was the big goal. I wanted to qualify for the Olympics in Sydney as a sailor. And sailing is a fairly complex sport. It's not just about being faster. You need to be strategically and tactically fit. You need to have really good gear logistically. It's quite challenging. And there were so many things that were overwhelming. GTD helped me a lot in bringing these in order. But yet, I wanted to have a big picture view onto all the goals that I had and how I had evolved in each area. So basically my benchmark was I want to be among the best in the world in all of these areas, but I knew I couldn't do it all. So I wanted to see where are the priorities. And in a pie chart, you can make things bigger and smaller. You can give something more weight. But if you do it inside a circle, if you give one thing more weight, all the rest gets less weight. That's sort of automatic. You can't give everything a priority of one. That's impossible. Then you have no priorities. And by the way, sometimes this may be the case that everything is equal priority. Then you can see that. But very often you see that thing is probably going to give me the best bang for the buck, the best bang for the investment of my time at this point in time. So I give it more weight. I make it bigger. And then if I see, according to my benchmark, in sports it's relatively easy because you just compare yourself to the top competitors. You can do that in business as well, I suppose. But then you can see how have you evolved? How far have you come along your growth path? And then you see the white spots. Basically, in a goalscape, you can see the undeveloped areas really well. And initially, it was just a thought model. It was the way I was thinking about the challenge. But then I thought it would be good to have that in a sort of dynamic mapping software where you can have a dialogue with a team. And what we love about it is that you put your goals at the center of attention. Like it's instead of having all your goals in some abstract document, we like to map it out. And yeah, there's a community of people who love that as well. And I think of it a little bit as Kanban boarding, the next level of Kanban boarding, where a Kanban board can just blow up and grow in all directions and become huge and out of control. And you don't see the golden nuggets of the valuable things in there. In a goalscape, you can see the things where you think that carries more weight. This is potentially a game changer. You may be wrong about that, but at least you've documented that you believe that that's the case and the team can discuss it and disagree and readjust. ([Time 0:02:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a521b422-424b-4c60-b79a-98acb016c0c6)) - **Create Nested Goal Hierarchies** - Put your main goal in the center and break it down into nested sub-goals to create a clear hierarchy. - Adjust goal size by priority and update progress visually to spot gaps and refine goals efficiently. Transcript: Marcus Baur Goalscape is, the idea is really simple. You put your goal in the center, basically in the bullseye, and then you place your sub goals around it. Think of a simple pie chart, but that pie chart can now have multiple levels and it has a center. It has a heart. You can call that the North Star or your central goal. Maybe it's just a project goal. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. The nomenclature, the names don't matter. It's just you want to achieve something. You want to bring some change into the world. Maybe a process goal or a final establishable end goal. And you put that in the center, break it down into the sub goals, and then you can break those sub goals down further. And every goal can theoretically be put in the center by double clicking on it. But it lives in the overall structure of the goals and sub goals. And this way, you have a nested structure of goals, you have a the perfect visualization of a goal hierarchy, if you like. And once you've established that structure, you can give individual goals more weight by making them bigger or smaller, simply by dragging and dropping them. And you can mark your progress. And that is marked by shading from the outside in. And when you do that, you can immediately see, oh, here's the white spots. This is where we have not made progress. And that can help you to iterate about priorities and about a goal structure again. Because a goal structure may be overloaded or it may be too simple. I've experienced often that we simply forgot about certain goals. And if you forget about a goal, you're not going to make any. I hated capsizing so much in my sailing career that I didn't want to think about it and I didn't have it on the training plan. And that cost us dearly at a world championship because, you know, the future world champion was sailing by, capsized. We capsized as well. He had the boat up in 20 seconds because he had practiced that and for us it took two minutes and off he went you know it's that kind of you you you want to make sure your goal structure is complete Not too complicated but not too simple and that's a lot of work and here you have it documented in a very visual way. ([Time 0:07:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6cee1be8-6ed3-4936-b62c-8902cadcc54e)) - **Leverage Visual Tools & Marketing** - Consistent marketing and development revive promising tools like Goalscape. - Visual goal mapping helps people stay focused and clearly see priorities and progress. Transcript: Marcus Baur Well, I always had it as a sort of side project. I filed it for a patent when my second child was born. Then it was patented in 2015. But I never really pushed the company as such because I was busy with my consulting work with SAP. I had a family to support and that was all great. But in 2020, we had to decide whether we shut it down. We always used it for ourselves and we even had customers like Volkswagen. They had been using it for years, but we never marketed it. And you know that without marketing, nothing much happens. It was always a community of people who used it and who loved it. But then in 2020, I had to decide whether I fold it or do it properly. And we decided to build a new version that came out early 23. And since then, we're finally promoting it. So we're only now getting into, you know, web marketing. Before, we were just working with our existing customers. Volkswagen is still one of our customers. And there's a wide variety of people who use it. We have about 1,500 customers who use it in all sorts of fields. Lots of sports in it, but by far not all of it. The probably most successful Olympic sailing coach is using it in his work, but also businesses use it. And a lot of people who get into it really honestly love it. I mean, last week we got a comment on YouTube where somebody wrote, this is changing my life. So that's nice. We love it. In the end, you know, it's just a tool. And a fool with a tool is still a fool, right? It's not like, in the end, people bring about change, not tools. But for visual people, and I think that's the majority, not everyone, some people are really good at thinking in abstract ways. I think we've evolved in a world of things, not in a world of ideas and abstractions. And so if you have a map, it's always really helpful for a lot of people because things get a location. It's kind of the success of the Kanban board. I attribute to the fact that you have these little cards that you move around. People like that. And it's similar in a goalscape where your goal has a location, it has a weight, it has an evolution status simply by the shading that marks the progress. So, yeah, that's goalscape. ([Time 0:10:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd85ea05-9b25-43ac-9d59-7247dd8183d5)) - **GTD Mastery Is Cyclical Process** - GTD users cycle through phases of discovery, mastery, and sharing expertise. - Revisiting GTD resources often reveals new insights, akin to discovering hidden features in software manuals. Transcript: David Allen I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTD Connect for a while. And sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. You know, I still go through cycles myself. Initially, there's kind of the inspiration and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with. And so people oftentimes, when they first come on to Connect, are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is. In a way, it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view. And so understood that it's like walking into a library. Oh, gee, where do I start? So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this. And many people, after a year or two, you know, probably get on some level or some plateau where they go, well, I kind of got it now. I've got my system set up and everything's fine. And I'm fine tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me, you know, people asking me for assistance And help in this. And we've seen in the forums, a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this. And you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual, remember when I read when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with for instance I read the manual like wow this is really Cool and I started to use the tool and didn't need the manual anymore as a matter of fact a good example of that right here the manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now Initially I read this got it all set up that's really cool and that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was under cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. And then of course as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing, I go, ah, how do I do that? Went back to the manual, I go, oh god, I didn't realize I could do that, I didn't realize I could do that. I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that as opposed to just all online, and realizing, oh my God, I didn't realize that, oh I could do that now, I could do that now. And I think that's what you might find with Connect too, is that it's a goldmine of stuff. Well, many people have read Getting Things Done, you know, more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way, and probably even easier, because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest To you. ([Time 0:14:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ac57f9a-e326-4b65-a5c2-b26d6be7ad6d))