Ep. 356: David Allen and Justin Hale  🔗 **Source:** [Ep. 356: David Allen and Justin Hale](https://share.snipd.com/episode/097b0520-ea17-40b6-8525-d753a429190b) ## Highlights - **How Justin First Found GTD** - Justin Hale joined VitalSmarts (now Crucial Learning) and discovered GTD after years training Crucial Conversations and related courses. - He read the original GTD book before meeting David Allen and felt it aligned with their mission to teach life-changing skills. Transcript: Justin Hale Okay. You left me very open, so I'm excited. I could go a lot of different directions here, but no, I'm grateful to get a chance to talk again. For people who don't know who I am, I mean, in essence, I'll say I'm a pretty normal person with lots going on. So just to start with the most important part of my life, my wife, Christine, and I live in Utah here in the U.S. We have four children from eight years old down to three, all four of them right inside that area. So if you talk about stress-free productivity, that's always something that's on my mind. And so, no, but for me, I've spent about the last 14 years at what was Vital Smarts when I joined it, what is now Crucial Learning. And it's always funny because if you look at the evolution of an organization's name, Vital Smarts used to be called Praxis. Grateful they moved away from that name. A little too academic for me. And now on to Crucial Learning, which makes a lot of sense. ([Time 0:01:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dddfd144-3d5c-4db4-9cb4-a1f922f5d8fb)) - **GTD Matches A Learning Company's DNA** - GTD is behaviorally focused and transferable across work and home, which matched Crucial Learning's goal of teaching a small set of life-changing skills. - Justin saw GTD as skill-based, research-backed, and immediately impactful across contexts. Transcript: Justin Hale Yeah. So when I came to Vital Smarts, the founders had written a handful of New York Times bestselling books and had some training programs to go with those. So the most popular would be Crucial Conversations people know about, right? How to talk about high stakes issues. They had another course at the time was called Crucial Confrontations. So you talk about having to re-explain the name of the company, say Crucial Confrontations. Wow, I hate confrontation. No, no, no, no. That's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. Thankfully, we rebranded that course to Crucial Accountability along the road, trying to talk about how to hold others accountable, performance management. And then when I first started, we developed a training course called Influencer. So at the time, that was the portfolio of the courses. And primarily, I was spending time training and teaching and speaking on crucial conversations. And so that was most of my time, most of my energy was around those content sets. And then that's what led us to working with you, which is interesting because you spend all this time training like the same three courses over and over and over again. And so when they said, hey, we're going to partner with David Allen and we're going to do this getting things done thing, I thought something new. This is so cool, something different. And it was interesting because it was really, I never thought of myself ([Time 0:04:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7d19792-1dfe-4406-b356-6c1c109f00db)) - **You Fall To Your Productivity Habits** - Many people overestimate their productivity self-awareness and underestimate how habits shape outcomes. - Justin notes people say they do productive behaviors while reporting overwhelm, revealing blind spots about daily habits. Transcript: Justin Hale And I think that it's interesting too, because a lot of people I work with, it's funny because they will, when I work with them with GTD, I'll say things like, you know, here's some of the Behaviors that we find that when you do consistently, you get these incredibly impactful outcomes. And a lot of people say, yeah, I do that. And yet I'll say, wait a second, wait a second. Tell me about your daily experience. And they'll say, oh, I'm overwhelmed. I'm burnt out. That's a big word right now. I'm burnt out. I just have so much. I just can't focus. I'm just distracted. I'm letting people down. And I said, wait a second, you're telling me you do these behaviors and yet you're experiencing these outcomes. I'm not so sure you're as self-aware. I think that I get the impression that throughout our lives, more people have given us feedback about our poor interpersonal skills at times than they have given us feedback about our Poor productivity skills. I think about, you know, starts back in college when you do teamwork and they have like a team project. And there's always those one or two people that don't pull their weight and nobody says anything. We all say, oh, now we know who those two people are. The rest of us just gonna have to do it all. And we just sort of accept that. Okay. Sort of accept that. And I think that that carries over into our organizations. And from a productivity standpoint, people aren't as self-aware as they should be. They assume that where they got comes from what they did. And often that's not the case. ([Time 0:12:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/132278c3-b348-409e-acac-b2f1398c1a83)) - **Design Training From A Beginner View** - Use the beginner perspective deliberately when designing training because it mirrors learners' initial experience. - Justin deliberately stayed new to GTD to capture learners' questions before the curse of knowledge set in. Transcript: Justin Hale One of the books I really, really love in our space is a book called Rookie Smarts. And it's this woman, Liz Wiseman, she lives in the Bay Area. She wrote a book later on called Multipliers as well. But her book, Rookie Smarts is all about this idea of, her argument really is to say, when you're hiring really, you're trying to hire someone for a great position. The tendency is to hire someone who's maybe overqualified because they'll be so skilled to be successful. And she actually argues the opposite. She said you should hire people that are slightly underqualified. But she says what you really want to hire for is someone who thirsts to know what they don't know. Right. There's power in this pursuit of knowledge. And sometimes the best people to have are the people who are trying to figure it out, people who want to know, who want to learn. So I bring that up to say, I was helping design the crucial learning version of getting things done training while I was learning getting things done for the first time as an individual, As a participant. A lot of people might say, well, that seems odd. You should be an expert of many years. You should be a practitioner of many years. And I remember saying to my team, and we sat around, we went through the David Allen Company version. We were first being introduced to the content, and we all sat down and just talked for a day. What are your impressions? What are your thoughts? Where are some of the nuggets? Those kinds of things. And I looked at everybody and I said, hey, we are never going to be in the position we are in right now, which is in six months, we will be experiencing what we like to call the curse of knowledge. We will know too much that we'll never be able to be in the position we're in right now, which is we are sitting in the position of every learner we are going to sell to and teach to in the future. We are new to this. We are looking at this through the lens of someone who's just being exposed to it. ([Time 0:16:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3720c46f-ccc7-4014-9fe7-494d783ef904)) - **From Weekly Word List To Contextual Next Actions** - Justin described shifting from a weekly Word to-do printout to organizing next actions by context after Ana Maria's training. - He was excited but fearful to change a comfortable system even while convinced it would help. Transcript: Justin Hale First time was really being exposed and being trained on this idea of, hey, maybe you should consider organizing your next actions according to context. So she teaches this idea and my mind goes, whoa, like, I never really thought of that. Every Monday morning, I would print off this Word document and just set at the top to-do list in red. And it was just, that was it. And I printed off every Monday and I carried it around with me to every meeting and I would add things to it. And then on Friday, I would update the Word document and then I would print it off again when I came back to work on Monday morning. And I trusted this thing and definitely worked pretty well for me for the time. But I said to her, she shared this idea and I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. But I also thought, wow, that's pretty scary. And I was, I was, because I had this way of approaching things. And I looked at her in the middle of the course. And I said, Ana Maria, I'm going to be honest with you right now. I just want to be transparent. I believe you that this will help me be better and more efficient, have what I need when I need it, but I'm not yet sure how that's going to work for me. And she was great about that. I just was sharing my fear of like, I get it. And I've never thought about it, but I'm scared. I'm fearful. I'm worried. I want to go here, but I just feel so comfortable where I am. And you're telling me if I try some of these things, I'm going to go here. ([Time 0:19:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6203eb4d-cba5-4aba-a357-42572bbea94c)) - **Show The Model Then Force Practice** - Teach by showing a model, then force learners to practice the skill immediately for durable change. - Justin recommends video demos of experts plus in-course deliberate practice and coached repetition. Transcript: Justin Hale Thank you. Yeah, what we tried to do, and watching a lot of your approach, I mean, because when I was going through it the first time, I had the advantage that probably 99% of people don't, which I Had you. I had access to you and Ana Maria. And so one of the things that we had talked about as we sat down, as we said, there'd be massive benefit, of course, if each person could see a model of the way David Allen approaches this, Not to copy him, but to understand the black belt and say, let me watch the black belt. Let me go, okay, let me, now that I understand the principle of what he did, let me make it work for me. And you had a number of videos online and I said, some of these should be in training. People need to hear us teach them about clarifying and then watch someone spend 90 seconds clarifying and go, oh, there it is. Or hear about the importance of being deliberate about capturing and then watching someone capture for two minutes and going, ah, that's what it looks like to do this. David Allen That's like trying to learn to swim by reading a book. It's amazing. I don't think it could do that. Justin Hale It's amazing how often when I'm teaching say crucial conversations and I will say, I'll teach him skill, for example, like how to create psychological safety when the other person Gets defensive and we'll teach the idea and they'll say, oh, that's really brilliant. I love that. And then I'll say, okay, now we're going to practice. And they go, oh, right. And I look at them and say, I mean, if you wanted to, you know, kick a soccer ball like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and you can just watch them, you know, or read a book, or I could tell You how to kick a ball, it'd probably be fairly helpful, but you probably would never kick that effectively. ([Time 0:23:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba5e9900-d756-4491-b708-726a2b720a11)) - **Discomfort Signals The Right Practice** - Deliberate, uncomfortable practice is essential for behavior change and elite performance. - Practicing the hard version (e.g., role-play with resistance) produces faster skill acquisition than safe repetition. Transcript: Justin Hale I love that. And then I'll say, okay, now we're going to practice. And they go, oh, right. And I look at them and say, I mean, if you wanted to, you know, kick a soccer ball like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and you can just watch them, you know, or read a book, or I could tell You how to kick a ball, it'd probably be fairly helpful, but you probably would never kick that effectively. But what if I took you out on a field and gave you a soccer ball and made you kick 10 or 12 or 20 or 100 or 1,000? Don't you think you'd get better faster? And they're like, okay, I get it. Practice is one of those things that's so essential to behavior change. And deliberate practice, the right kind of practice where you're getting feedback from a coach, you're trying it again, you're doing it over and over and over again in the right way, Is something that people are very reticent to do. It's uncomfortable, which by the way means it probably works. If you look at the research on deliberate practice and acquiring skills to become an elite performer, one of the things the researchers say is if you're doing a type of practice that You really hate, you're probably doing the exact kind of practice you need, And so like, if you're sitting there, if you're good at shooting free throws in a basketball court, you probably Don't need to shoot free throws. You probably need to be shooting in the corner three-pointer with someone in your face. ([Time 0:24:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9dab45f7-c748-492c-9018-55ceeffe8f18)) - **Make GTD Tangible With Short In-Session Drills** - During training, convert instruction into immediate, short exercises like a three-minute capture to make GTD tangible. - Justin uses quick, guided in-session tasks so participants experience capturing and clarifying on the spot. Transcript: Justin Hale And we try to implement that so often of saying, I tell you how to capture. And they go, that's so cool. That's so cool. I go, no, no, no, you do it now. You know, especially when we're doing a virtual course, I say, okay, take three minutes and capture, capture around the space right now. Look around where you're at. Where is something hanging around? It doesn't belong where it is the way it is. Start capturing that. Right. And they start to go, oh, okay. And so the sense of learn, do, learn, do is something that we really value. And we've tried to implement with GTD. ([Time 0:26:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/945aa0a1-1d99-4fda-92ef-17b9710bbd35))