Ep. 320: GTD Live Pt. 1  ## Metadata - Author: [[Getting Things Done]] - Full Title: Ep. 320: GTD Live Pt. 1 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0dff1af4-1783-41b2-bdb3-caddb6962888 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Overcoming Work Overwhelm** - David Allen shares how his work began from dealing with overwhelmed people with open loops and distractions. - He realized tools were needed to help people regain focus and bring quiet space amidst work chaos. Transcript: David Allen This really doing that kind of work with people to help process and facilitate forward motion and direction. I got into this part of the game though because discovered with the consulting process there were a couple of weak suits. First of all, it was hard to get people's attention because their mind was so wrapped around so much stuff going on down on the runway, if you will. I mean, you might be able to tear them away and try to get them off site to stare at the navel and get the cup and get the T-shirt, but they got 3,000 emails piled up and in blowing up on them And stuff, you know, the hounds nipping at their feet in terms of all the stuff out there in terms of open loops. They couldn't get their attention, and you need your attention freed up to be able to focus at new and challenging horizons. We all do. So there was a lot of distraction from the ability to focus. Not only that, once they did focus, they come back with the bullet points on the easel pads. Any of you ever been off-site and you created bullet points on the easel pads? I can't tell you how many of those pages wrapped up and piled up underneath piles of crap in an executive's desk. I found weeks after the meeting, nothing happened to the bullet point. So there was a gap in terms of having the rubber hit the road in terms of getting things done. All of which is to say, I would love to say that back there I had some strategic vision that this was what we were going to do. I'd just been following my nose and looking for better jobs. That's how I got here. You could have sort of fooled me. It was not a big strategic plan that this is exactly what I would be doing. But it just turned out, for my own personal reasons, I was trying to explore and experiment with and develop my own tools and systems about how I could stay focused as I got more, because As I got more senior and sophisticated in terms of the work I was doing professionally, I found that it was highly distracting. And I have a reference point internally. I have a high value on sort of the quiet space inside for various reasons. But I discovered that the quiet space can get very disturbed while you're in the world. So then it's like, well, do I want rice bowl and cave? That's one way to shut up the world is just retreat from it. But a part of me said, yeah, there's stuff I like out here, and I want to play. But as I got out here to play, it disturbed the quiet space. So now I'm rocking a hard place. I like quiet space. I like the world. So how do we play sort of in this game, but not be of that game? So to me, that was fascinating to find, what are the tools so I can stay engaged, but learn how to get to quiet space rapidly or not have it be disturbed too much by what was going on. ([Time 0:00:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e64bd4e1-c22f-4f96-a7d1-bced761ee096)) - **Embrace Controlled Chaos** - Life regularly goes out of control due to expanding horizons and challenges. - Success lies in how quickly one regains control and coherence from chaos. Transcript: David Allen So, you know, I think that a lot of this game is really about not that you don't get out of control, but that you know how to get back on. It's not about chaos. It's about how quickly you can take chaos and make it coherent and a constant game about how that works. And, you know, that's what I meant. I mean, my life gets out of control regularly. ([Time 0:04:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b3093f3d-3e9b-4b36-9142-9b592f951d71)) - **Collect and Process Commitments** - Capture all open commitments by collecting reminders in a trusted system. - Process and clarify these commitments to avoid them lingering mentally and causing stress. Transcript: David Allen A lot of what we do, half of what we do is one-on coaching about this stuff. So this stuff, a lot of what we do, and we have staff right now, I believe, that are sitting with mostly mid- to senior-level professionals that bring us in to do this. But our coaching is an intensive two-day implementation of this, where we sit down with you where you work, where you think. We grab all the open loops and everything that represents that, pile it all up in front of you, and walk you through every one of those things, getting you to make the operational decisions About what you're committed to and what these things mean to you specifically, and then help you customize a system about how to park all that stuff in appropriate places so it doesn't Keep following you around like pigpen dust cloud. Most people, if I could see psychically, I can't, but if I could, most people would look like pig pen, you know, psychologically, with all that stuff spinning around them. They're taking one meeting into the next. They're taking home to work. By the way, any of you ever been at work at home or at home at work in your head? Yeah, it's because you didn't leave the other one appropriately, responsibly managed. So it's following you around until you do, and it won't leave you alone. So learning how to shut those monkeys up and put them in their cage, there is a way to do that. And so a lot of what we do, that's what we do, is a lot of one-on stuff with people. ([Time 0:06:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/87639907-a1f2-41cf-92db-ffb46162281e)) - **Master Workflow Stages** - Collect everything you’ve committed to and place it in a trusted, visible system. - Process each item quickly to define meaning and decide next actions to reduce mental burden. Transcript: David Allen And each one of these stages has its own best and worst practices. The first stage is you have to make sure you have collected and made sure that you have captured all the commitments that you've made, at least reminders of them. You need to make sure that you don't have any leaks out there. You know, a leak would be walking down the hall and say, hey, Michelle, I'll get back to you about that. Then you walk on. And then two minutes later, I see Abe and say, oh, yeah, Abe, oh, I'll get back to you about that. And that seems so self-evident when I'm talking to Abe. You know, Michelle is now prehistoric. Actually, that just fell through a crack. In other words, making some commitment with myself that I haven't finished the commitment, and it's the commitment still there, but I've lost conscious track of it. Major leak out there in terms of that stuff. So the best practice there is to make sure any commitments, little or big, you've made with anybody, they're all with yourself, but all of those things have been captured, at least some Crude placeholder for it, captured in some sort of seamless bucket that you trust you're going to rummage through and look at again sooner than later. Worst practice, file anything in your mind. Any of you yet to discover that psychic RAM has limited space and it's a crappy office? If any of you have anything just in your head right now, do you have anything just in your head in terms of remembering, reminding, you know, stuff like that, I guarantee you you're giving It inappropriate attention. It's either bothering you more than it should, or you're not giving it the objective, tactical attention it deserves if it's just in your head. Guaranteed. And though most people would rationally agree, yeah, your head's probably not the best office to remember, remind, and keep track and organize, most of you have over half your life In your head. So even though you may conceptually realize there is a better practice, most people have a huge, significant change of behavior to make sure nothing from now on gets leaked in terms Of nothing falls through a crack. And that could be a scrap of paper in a pocket that got cleaned and you forgot who the phone number belongs to, as well as a lot of other things. So we'll talk about what to collect in here, how to collect it, what are the great tools for doing it. Hopefully if you haven't agreed already, you will certainly agree by mid or late morning today that your head is the last place in the world you ever want to park anything, just mechanically. You know, it doesn't work very well. Now once you collect it, we'd be talking about gathering placeholders for these things on the list and into end baskets, but then you need to get your end baskets empty, you know, every 24 to 48 hours. Empty doesn't mean finish it. It just means process it. Decide what that end basket, what that thing means very specifically. See, I get a lot of executives, by the way, that say, David, what should I do with all my piles? They go, well, what's in your piles? They go, I don't know. They say, what's this? I don't know. What is this? Oh my God, I got to call Jose about that. They collected something, but they haven't processed it yet. Oh, come on. Honestly, how many of you have walked into your life right now? How many of you will I find notes on legal pads somewhere? Yeah, well, good for you. You've collected, but you haven't processed yet. Because the reason those notes are still on that legal pad is you have yet to decide what's trash, what's reference material just for later access, what's actionable out of that that You need to do, what are you waiting on that somebody else is now committed to based upon those notes, what projects have you committed to based upon that meeting. If you had and parked those in appropriate places, you don't need the notes still on the legal pad. So it's sitting there yelling at you. Every time you walk by it, it goes, process me, process me. You're going, shut up, shut up. So most people avoid the processing process, even if you've collected stuff. So we'll talk about, you know, best practice there called making sure you make those agreements with yourself nice and clear and clean. It's one thing to collect it, and then you need to sit down sooner than later and get a little more discreet. What exactly does this mean to me? Now, once you've done that, and it's a pretty simple algorithm, we'll go through that in a bit more detail. Once you then decide, if I pick this up and say, I need to call Jose about this, and I don't call Jose right then, what do I then need to do with that? That's then what phase three is. Organize. I now need to organize. That is, I need to park reminder to call Jose in some appropriate place. It's work I've defined to do that I didn't do right then. So if I want to be efficient and productive and effective, I need to keep some reminder of that work I need to do so I see it when I need to see it. Now, when would you need to see a reminder to call Jose? Try this, when you have phone and time. I know this is one of the duh moments here. Duh. What does organize mean? It means have what you need, where you need it, when you need it. Duh. Now, how many of you have a mobile phone with you today somewhere? Now, look, if you wanted to actually do any work that you've got to do in your life, you know, aside from maybe check voicemail, about the only work you could do when you're off site like This and have a cell phone with you is to make a call that you need to make. List of every single phone call you need to make, every single thing for which at a phone is where forward motion happens to fulfill any of your agreements, little or big, then you're Likely to not be as productive as you could be today. Because you may have eight minutes left on a break. You have energy of three on a scale of ten in terms of mental horsepower. So if you actually wanted to get any work done, the appropriate work to do would be something you could finish in less than eight minutes that didn't require a lot of mental horsepower. Call Marriott, change a reservation. That'd work real fine. But if you haven't collected something for which you then said the next step is to call Marriott to change the reservation and have that organized in some place where you can see when You could actually do the work, you've got a big improvement opportunity in terms of stress and reproductivity, because you just haven't collected, processed, and organized. Does that make sense? As I said, this seminar is radical common sense, folks. You know, but it's common sense that you don't see that commonly done. How many of you have a to-do list or something that looked like a to-do list? 99% of every to-do list I've ever seen when I sat down to coach somebody is nothing but an incomplete list of still unclear stuff. By the way, every single thing on any one of your lists right now is either attracting or repulsing you psychologically every time you look at it. There is no neutral territory. No, you either look at it and go, ooh, when can I mark that off? Or, ah, back away, get out of my face, because they're still thinking about you. I haven't done, and I don't have the energy to think right now. Stop reminding me I'm overwhelmed. Get out of my... That's not the purpose of a to-do list, to stress you out. But it does for most people, because you're still looking at... You barely just collected. You still haven't processed what it means yet. So your brain knows there's still a delta. There's still work to do about what I wrote down. It hasn't finished yet. Is this making sense to anybody? Any of you catching? So learning how to collect it all first, process it sooner than later, and then have an appropriate and, if you will, organic organization of seeing what you need to see when you need To see it. You know, master key here in terms of stress-free productivity to b... ([Time 0:15:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0cf80a69-760b-4b75-9faa-c2e0c231c42c)) - **Organize Reminders Appropriately** - Use simple organizing tools like categorized folders or notes to park reminders effectively. - Keep reminders where you can access them when the context and resources for action are available. Transcript: David Allen So I'll go over what those different things are. And we'll talk there and we'll probably have a good bit of back and forth here about gear, personal organizing gear and tools, because you need tools. If you're not going to keep it in your head, you're not going to finish it when you think of it, you've got to have some tool to be able to park reminders of these things. And that's where personal organizing, you know, tools, you know, show up. Now, tools can be in what we call low-tech or just a paper-based form. And that's worked very well. Very, very, very well. Phone calls you need to make would be to keep a file folder, literally just a folder, and just title it calls or calls to make or at phone. And every single call you need to make, just write it on a scrap of paper and throw it in that bucket, if you will. Works great, by the way. Do you think that's unsophisticated? Some of the most sophisticated chief executives that I've been coaching recently love that system because it's very fast, very fast, and it can keep up with as fast as they think. One guy I coached, he has a big stack of just plain paper. Actually, it's golden rod. He loves gold. He loves the color. He just keeps, after I coached him, I mean, he just keeps a big stack of paper on his desk and a pen right there. God knows when stuff shows up. He needs to decide about, makes a decision about, whatever, and as he does, if he's not finishing it right then, he's writing a note about it, deciding the action item that's required On it. And then he whips around. He's got about 20 folders on a rack right behind him. This is stuff to do with the computer. This is stuff to do with the phone. These are errands I need to run. And then he's got about 15 or 18 for each one of his direct reports, his spouse, his attorney, the board meeting, et cetera, because a lot of these things have to happen at that person. So he's just putting them on the right piece of paper. That person walks in, turns around, grabs the folder. He has already triggered in there everything for which at Bob is where this moves forward. So Bob's in there. Okay, Bob's here. Now let's move these six things forward. As soon as Bob says, yeah, I'll get back to you about that, he whips around, takes that same piece of paper, drops it in a little bucket called Waiting For, which he reviews weekly, to then See if he needs to light a fire, check status. This guy, talk about no residue, but he's got to have a system to make sure that those decisions are made and a place to park it. Now, you could call that low tech, but I'll say that's very fast. And it's very elegant because he can keep up with that stuff pretty much wherever he is simply by moving paper appropriately once it's right there. So there's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, for many people, that is going to be more effective. I'm a pretty high-tech guy, but I still have some low-tech categories. ([Time 0:23:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0dfcf80d-eab5-4aa1-b920-79d03e2a58ff)) - **Expect Continuous GTD Refinement** - Expect to go through cycles learning and refining your GTD system. - Revisit resources periodically to discover new insights and deepen your practice. Transcript: Speaker 2 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. I remember 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 I initially I read this got it all set, 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. And 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 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 0:27:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d4a2f18-b3d2-4dcc-b535-a064bae81183))