David Allen's Blog, page 44
September 14, 2017
GTD Public Courses
GTD Public Courses are offered regularly by our Global Partners around the world. Here are links to the upcoming courses being held over the next several months:
September 4, 2017
Commitments kept in your head
What’s on your mind?
September 1, 2017
Going the Distance to Mind Like Water
There is a light-year of difference between a system that has merely a lot of our stuff objectified, and one that has 100%. Few people have experienced what I’m talking about, because there are few people who have ever gotten to a 100% empty head—absolutely every project, action item, and potential commitment we have made with ourselves and others externalized in an easily reviewable format.
If you don’t have everything in a system that the system ought to have, you won’t have full trust in that system, and you’ll have greatly reduced motivation to keep it up and keep it current. If your system isn’t tracking every computer-related action you need to take in discreet folders or lists, then your mind still has the job of remembering what to do when you open your laptop. You’ll probably leave emails sitting in the inbox or files on the desktop, hoping you’ll remember you need to handle something. There is not full freedom to trust your intuition about which action to take off the list, since your mind still has the job of remembering and formulating all the options. Similarly, if your reference systems are only partially complete, you probably won’t be motivated to get all your reference processed and organized, as soon as it arrives in your life.
How will you know when your reminders and categories are complete? When will you know how much you have out of your head and into your system? Even if you have 99% out of your head, you still won’t know that it’s 99% because of what may be lurking in the 1%. You will only know how much you have left, when there is nothing left!
Either your head is the best place to hold all your agreements with yourself, or it’s not. (You can guess which way I vote.) I can’t imagine any intellectual justification for halfway in between. Yet most people still have over half their life in their heads. They won’t totally trust the incomplete system, nor will they totally trust their head. This fosters latest-and-loudest prioritizing, instead of trusted strategic choices.
A partial system is almost worse than none. In regard to life commitments—99%’s a bitch, 100%’s a breeze.
–David Allen
This essay appeared in David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
August 28, 2017
Episode #33 – Wrangling Your Priorities
David Allen and Coach Meg Edwards give expert coaching on wrangling your priorities. The discussion includes three common challenges: competing priorities, mapping day-to-day priority choices to your higher level goals, and prioritizing as a group.
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August 17, 2017
5 Signs You’re Getting Better at GTD
1. It feels weird to keep stuff on your mind
Capturing what has your attention is a key practice with GTD. Getting better at GTD means you are capturing what’s on your mind when it shows up, moment-by-moment and keeping something ON your mind, well, it just feels weird.
2. You empty your inboxes regularly
No getting around this one. If you’re inboxes aren’t processed to zero on a regular basis (at least weekly in your Reviews), you won’t fully trust your priority decisions, because of the unknown factor of what’s lurking in any unprocessed stacks.
3. You don’t fight the Weekly Review
The Weekly Review is the glue that keeps GTD together. Getting better at GTD means you willingly create the space and time in your life to get clear, current, and creative and no longer make excuses that you don’t have time for it.
4. You feel good about what you’re not doing
This one is big, but can be subtle at the same time. GTD is as much as about feeling good about what you’re choosing to do, as it is feeling good about what you are choosing NOT to do. The latter comes from having a complete and current inventory of projects and actions so you know what’s not getting done when you are getting other things done.
5. You naturally start projects asking, “What’s the purpose?”
Projects don’t always arrive in neat packages. And, the purpose you see may not be the purpose others see. Getting better at GTD means you clarify the purpose on the front-end of projects, to make sure you and any others on the project are aligned to the “why?”.
How are you doing on these? Any areas of improvements?
–by Coach Kelly Forrister
August 7, 2017
Getting Unstuck
Got any knots? What’s your desired outcome to resolve that? What will be true when you can you declare it done? What’s your next action?
August 3, 2017
How’s your altitude aptitude?
Over the years, it has become more and more helpful in my work to help people understand the ecosystem of GTD®
(particularly priorities) by framing their thinking and decision-making around my altitude model:
GROUND: Calendar/Actions – The nitty-gritty this-moment doing level. Call Fred. Buy tires. Draft proposal. Email Susan.
HORIZON 1: Projects – The things you’re committed to finish that one action won’t finish. Give Barbara a birthday party. Set up my new MacBook. Implement this year’s budget. Hire a new marketing VP.
HORIZON 2: Areas of Focus and Accountability – Current job responsibilities and status of key aspects of your personal life. What are your roles and responsibilities re: work? What areas of your personal life need to be maintained at some appropriate level? Given a review of all of those, what projects should you have on your list that you don’t have yet? Any projects on your list you should dump?
HORIZON 3: Goals and Objectives – The typical strategic level. Goals and direction of the organization and your work. Things you want to accomplish personally, in the longer term. Definition of current and new key result areas.
HORIZON 4: Vision – Career, lifestyle choices. Is this the job you want? Are you in the right game? What does success in the long term look, sound, and feel like? Talents, skills, interests.
HORIZON 5: Purpose and Principles – Life. Living the one you want? Quality of life issues. Values, balance, style, inner gifts, personal expressions.
So what about this? Well, too often I find people trying to solve a Horizon 4 problem with a Horizon 2 solution. Or trying to solve a Ground-level problem with a Horizon 5 solution. Doesn’t work—and even worse, it creates deep frustration and confusion because they know somehow that the questions that they are posing are good ones.
Whichever of these levels most has your attention is a fine place to begin, and to reassess its contents for yourself. However, trying to solve an out-of-control inbox (Ground) by agonizing about whether this is the job you should have (Horizon 4) is the Serious Pits. That’s why I usually coach on this scale from the bottom up—if your landing gear doesn’t work, it’s pretty hard to make real decisions from any other level! Getting control of where you are is a prerequisite for healthy thinking about where you should be.
–David Allen
This essay appeared in David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
July 31, 2017
Episode #32 – The Better You Get
David Allen says, “The better you get, the better you’d better get.” This podcast is about how to improve your skills, when you’re already proficient at GTD®. Coaches Meg Edwards and Kelly Forrister will guide you through some of the coaching they would give to a client who already has a solid foundation and plenty of experience with GTD.
Listen Now
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The best ways to deal with stress
Understand first that you’re actually IN stress
Determine what’s causing it
Clarify what you’d like to have true in the situation—what’s your desired outcome, at least in terms of how you’d like to be feeling?
Decide if there is a next action you can take to make some positive progress toward clarification and/or resolution
Engage in some activity or focus that you feel will potentially improve the situation for you.
July 14, 2017
Outsmarting Your Mind
I have the feeling and the hope every now and again that in 25 years what GTD teaches will be such a “given” that we may wonder what it was like to walk around with such pressure and stress from our suboptimal thinking habits.
The advent of the “knowledge worker” society has given so many of us projects and things to do that are not nearly as clear-cut as work used to be. (Can you ever create a perfect workshop, or write a perfect article for the newsletter?) It has created a world in which we’ve given our minds tremendous work to do. But we’ve also grown up trusting that our minds could (and should) handle it all from beginning to end (because, aren’t they smart!?).
The problem is, much of the pressure I witness going on for people is their mind trying to do things that it doesn’t do very well. Most people are thinking about how they should be thinking about what they should be thinking about. And then trying not to think about that! They’re not finishing the exercise of the thought process required for completing what it should be thinking about, nor ensuring that they have good trustworthy action-level systems in place to manage the task of reminding themselves about the results of what they’ve come up with in that clarifying process.
Our minds seduce us regularly. When you’re thinking of something, some part of you is convinced that because it’s so evident at that moment, it will never forget it, and will supply that information or perspective or thought at the appropriate time and place. If that were really true, that would be great. It’s not. Otherwise you would never even need an external calendar—your head would know exactly where you needed to be when (as well as having a consistently correct view of everything coming toward you in your future!).
When you make agreements with yourself about something (“I would, could, should, might, ought to, etc.”) your mind, dutiful servant that it is, will be glued to that task until it is given further instructions. With no sense of past and future in its short-term memory bank, however, it creates instant and unresolvable conflict if it has more than one thing to do. Learning how to manage this is as straightforward as learning how to scramble eggs. You just have to act from the place that is smarter than your mind.
–David Allen
How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? —Duc de la Rochefoucauld
This essay appeared in David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
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