Ep. 342: David Allen and Dan Pardi  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **How Dan Found And Adopted GTD** - Dan Pardi discovered GTD in the mid-2000s, read the book repeatedly, and implemented its principles daily. - He credits GTD with radically improving his personal productivity and how he runs his small company. Transcript: Dan Pardi First I'll say that serendipity is really a thing. And that meeting with Rick, you know, I went to go pick up some pants. The next thing I know, I was in a 45-minute conversation with him, and we were just so engaged. Wonderful guy. And so it's really great to connect with you, Dave. I have been interested in health my whole life. It's become really a part of my personal mission to see if I can contribute in some meaningful ways. I describe my personal mission as creating high-value, low-cost tools and strategies that help people perform at their best. And so I've been doing a lot of speaking, connecting the relationship between productivity and how you show up, the version of you that shows up every day, and your health. And I have did my work in sleep science, my PhD work. And in that, was looking a lot at the connection between if you just miss a little bit of sleep, how does your brain perform the next day? How does that change things like executive functioning, information processing, decision making? And it does so in a very, very interesting way. I love talking about it. But then also, years ago, I had done work with Dean Ornish, and we were doing a multifactorial program to help people with prostate cancer. And that made an indelible impression on me. So how can we tie together a bunch of different aspects of lifestyle into something that people can, all the different things that have an effect, tie that together to help people affect Their pattern of living in a favorable way. And that's my work with HumanOS. And I have been doing this for several years now. And I wake up every day just as motivated as I was the first day I started. ([Time 0:01:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9401f6a-1066-4c16-aa06-277e3066a095)) - **From Genomics To Sleep Science** - Dan Pardi stumbled into sleep science via a genomics company that closed, then joined a firm working on narcolepsy. - That career twist sparked his fascination with sleep and led to a PhD and work in sleep medicine. Transcript: David Allen Why? Dan Pardi Gosh, speaking of serendipity, I was working for a genomics company that raised $175 million, and we were doing all this really exciting work mining the human genome, trying to sequence It for the very first time, early 2000s. Well, that company went out of business. This is pre-23andMe, right? Yeah. This is early on when the human genome hadn't even been sequenced yet. So it was a very exciting time. But the company did go out of business because it was hard to create a business model that was sustainable. All 33 companies in the space at the time went out of business and all the talent was absorbed into pharma. And that's where I headed. So through a connection, somebody said, well, there's this great company called Orphan Medical. They're making medications for rare disorders, and they're working in narcolepsy right now. And I met the company. I was hired, and I knew nothing about sleep, nothing about narcolepsy or the medication. And I but I fell in love with it really quickly. Sleep is just the most fascinating window into our world and our body and how it works. And so the hardest decision I'd have to make every year was going to the Associated Professional Sleep Society meeting, which is the big sleep meeting in the United States, and then Deciding what track to go on, sleep immunity, sleep in the brain. David Allen And are people falling asleep in these lectures? Sorry, I couldn't resist. ([Time 0:03:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2337c99c-81b2-4b3c-b26f-a8d0a6db1816)) - **Plan Your Day The Night Before** - Do a nightly ordering of tasks by priority, starting with 10-minute clears then larger projects. - Use state-aware sequencing: move to lower-brain-power tasks when your energy dips. Transcript: Dan Pardi So do you do weekly reviews? We do. So on Fridays, on Monday morning, I will review what we had done in the previously weekly review. And then I'll look at what's come in over the weekend. Do I still agree with my Friday self? And I'll connect with everybody on the team so that they can express their goals for the week. Then what I do is I use a tool called Workflowy. I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but it's my favorite productivity tool that I've ever used. And it has everything to do with how simple it is. It's essentially a very fast way to collapse lists. So you can indent lists an infinite amount. And so I will order what I want to do the night before in order of priority, starting with things that I can clear off in usually less than 10 minutes. And then I will kind of get into more of the bigger projects. And what's so nice about that is that, you know, things are moving in and out of lists regularly, but even within a day, my organization will change once it confronts the reality of the World. ([Time 0:09:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf919968-3a61-4b16-a8f2-42e7383d7bcd)) - **Keep Tools Simple And Purposeful** - Use a simple, collapsible list tool like Workflowy for personal tasks and Asana for visible team work. - Limit team project entries to active tasks so tools stay uncluttered and actionable. Transcript: Dan Pardi I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but it's my favorite productivity tool that I've ever used. And it has everything to do with how simple it is. It's essentially a very fast way to collapse lists. So you can indent lists an infinite amount. And so I will order what I want to do the night before in order of priority, starting with things that I can clear off in usually less than 10 minutes. And then I will kind of get into more of the bigger projects. And what's so nice about that is that, you know, things are moving in and out of lists regularly, but even within a day, my organization will change once it confronts the reality of the World. So whatever comes in reacting to that, sometimes based off of how I feel or my state, I might have, I might be at that point in my list where I'm meant to write on something scientific, but My brain is not in that state for whatever reason. So then I move to things that I can do with less brain power in that moment. So I just keep the productivity wheel churning. And I've really coached everybody on my team to try to do the same. ([Time 0:10:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/871c2725-ffd7-4ee7-9b71-5e324bab6610)) - **Health As An Organizational Project** - Modern health is largely an organizational challenge of managing the project of your body. - Tether short-term performance gains to health actions to overcome delayed discounting. Transcript: Dan Pardi Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's funny too. When I, when I think about it, I think that modern health is actually in large part an organizational challenge too. So if you have good organizational skills, if you think about trying to affect your pattern of living, that is going to be things like prioritization, figuring out timing of your day, Sharpening the saw, and trying to increase your capacity for better self-care. A lot of it comes down to managing the project of you, your body, and then figuring out even the things that matter to you most so that you stay focused and don't let other things distract You from that. And, you know, for me, I feel like the perspective of long-term health consequences, know from a behavioral perspective, while we all care about them, they're pretty poor at actually Motivating us to do things in that minute, in that moment today. And we call that delayed discounting. So you discount the future aspect of something for an immediate reward. And so the more that you can tether how you're performing within a day to your health, if I, for example, if I have this smoothie or I do some exercise, I'm going to perform better at that Meeting today. You know, I'm going to write a better email. I'm going to make myself better at my day and my day easier for me. Then there are a lot more triggers to get you to do those things now. And so you end up with this circular energy that has immediate feedback. ([Time 0:17:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4f434550-cb0b-415b-afb3-02bd764bf8db)) - **Physical Visibility Beats Purely Digital** - Handwriting and physical visibility often beat digital-only systems for memory and attention. - Physical planners offer constant environmental cues that reduce friction and distraction. Transcript: David Allen I said, so if you could have a planner that was, that was just full of Mylar screens and then, so you could then add stuff to it or input stuff, whatever, but you could still have that physical, Dan Pardi Physicality and visibility of that stuff in front of you. I don't think there's any substitute for that. You know, there's been some very interesting work that shows that writing, handwriting, is actually a better way to remember than simply typing. I tend to be a mostly digital type of guy, but I recognize, you know, it's sort of the, it speaks to the insidious nature of doing work within the modern world. ([Time 0:22:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68a62c7f-e20b-4b86-ac11-00a5e424cae3)) - **Match Tasks To Energy Levels** - Match tasks to your energy curve: use naps, walks, or low-focus tasks during afternoon dips. - Reserve high-focus work for times when your alertness is strongest and distractions are low. Transcript: Dan Pardi And the more tired that a mind is, the harder it'll be to move from the thing you're working on to the distraction and back. And if you think about what that modern culture is, if you email notifications, hallway conversations, meetings, when you move from a point of focus to a distraction and back, if you Have a tired mind, that can lead to what's called switching costs, which takes a long time for you to actually get back into your focus. And so one thing related to sleep is if you are not getting the type of sleep that you need, it can take 25 minutes on average to move from a point of focus to a distraction and back. And I think that that can lead to a state of a lot of friction and dissatisfaction with your work. You get to the end of the day and you're thinking, I didn't accomplish anything with my day. It felt like a waste. In those moments, I found that the more aggressive I am attending to my list that is GTD, then that actually is very, very helpful when my mind is not as sharp it can be it happens to all of Us so you really I think modern productivity is really a combination of the idealized organizational system and the idealized sort of pattern of living so that you have the mental energy To move things friction well you know in a frictionless way but if I'm'm tired, and like, for example, in the afternoon, it tends to be a period of low productivity, because we have a dip In our alertness drive, that's why it's a great time for a nap, then that's the time where I'll go for a walk, listen to podcasts, do organizational tasks. ([Time 0:23:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/83d54cc1-2f7a-473e-bf30-06d990733ac6)) - **Stimulus Can Help Or Hinder Focus** - External stimulation can help focus for some people by boosting cortical arousal, but effects are state-dependent. - Individual traits and prior experience determine whether a café or quiet room yields better work. Transcript: Dan Pardi Yeah. So there has been, interestingly, um, there's work that if you're, if you're working in a busy cafe, you might be more productive than you would be if you were sitting in a quiet room by Yourself. And somehow that stimuli improves cortical arousal, brain awakeness essentially. Right. You can have a greater level of focus in that moment. If you think about what focus is, and if you think about ADHD, attention deficit, kids and adults that have ADHD, they have a hard time focusing on what's in front of them. And part of the reason why is that a tired mind will take in too much of that stimuli that is in the perceptual field. So you're perceiving all of it, but you're having a hard time filtering. A more energetic mind can actually harness that diversity and hone it into the stable attention on one thing. And stable is important. If you're tired, you can focus, but you just can't focus for very long. Your mind will constantly be jumping. And there are things called pre-potent automatic responses where you're responding to things in your environment without even trying. It's just you're reacting to it. And that has everything to do with that tired brain not being able to filter and focus. So it is conditional still. And I think that there's also individual, you know, some people like a busy cafe more than they do a quiet library and vice versa. So it's sort of what you feel relaxed and comfortable in and where you've oftentimes have done good work previously. And you're like, okay, I'm in my happy space. Let me get to work now. ([Time 0:26:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71a4cdc9-8b5a-4d97-8a7b-ec5b113d8dd4)) - **Create And Use Productivity Spaces** - Identify dedicated productivity spaces and use them predictably for specific work. - Entraining your brain to places (cafés, libraries, offices) improves focus and workflow. Transcript: Dan Pardi Would say identify your spaces, you know, what are your places for productivity? And I have those clear in your mind so that if you know you need to go do your weekly review, you know where you can go. One of your options. ([Time 0:31:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5d15858-cce6-48ea-90b5-1d0fb5ef9530))