Have you ever been getting ready for work in the morning and find that you have absolutely no idea if you’ve taken your vitamin (or washed your face, or some other repetitive task that you do every day)? It happens to me regularly, and it turns out there’s a reason.

According to Gary Marcus’s new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, context is “one of the most powerful cues affecting our memory.” So, if you learn something in a classroom, you’re more likely to remember it in a classroom. If you smelled lavender while memorizing a list of words, lavender will help you recall them. (Study after study proves it.)

It turns out that the more contextual clues you have about something, the easier it is to remember. But that also means that the things we do most often, and have the most cues for, are strongest and tend blend into each other. That’s why I can’t remember to take my vitamin.

According to Marcus, “What we remember and what we forget are a function of context, frequency and recency…” Memory prioritizes. The things we’ve thought about recently are easiest to remember. This is the reasoning behind something like the Noguchi filing system, which organizes files according to how recently we’ve accessed them.

The brain works much like the Noguchi system. Says Marcus, “For our ancestors, who lived almost entirely in the here and now (as virtually all nonhuman life forms still do), quick access to contextually relevant memories of recent events or frequently occurring ones helped navigate the challenges of seeking food or avoiding danger.”
The solution is something pilots know: checklists help with repetitive tasks. Can you imagine flying every day for weeks at a time? Would you remember every step of the takeoff procedure?

When checklists aren’t practical, we need to arrange our lives to compensate for our weaknesses in memory. Take a look in my car’s glove compartment and my office desk drawer. You’ll find vitamins there.

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I’ve got a special treat for you this evening.  David recently presented GTD to the Hewlett Packard Corporation.  Following his presentation he took the time to sit down with Ian Griffin , an executive speech writer for the company.  Ian is also the author of the Professionally Speaking blog and that’s where this great podcast he’s done with David is hosted.

It’s Friday.  Take a break. Put your feet up, and indulge yourself for ten minutes while David talks about Getting Things Done…

By the way, great content like this - from more audio and video to articles, commentary, and even forums where you can get answers to your personal productivity questions - can be had with a GTD Connect membership.  In addition to the email newsletter subscription written personally be David Allen, there is an entire member’s only section of the DavidCo website that is reserved exclusively for GTD Connect subscribers.

As an extra bonus, here’s another podcast with David Allen - this one from the DonationCoder blog:  Part 1,  Part 2.

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Earlier today I got the chance to get a personal tour of a new application called Presdo that makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings with one or more people. My tour guide was Presdo founder Eric Ly who also happens to be one of the co-founders of another little application called Linkedin. Eric and his very small team - which he calls one and a half people - has been laboring over Presdo for the better part of the last two years and it shows.

Presdo, unlike one of its principal competitors, Tungle, (previously profiled on GTDtimes here) is a completely web-based application which means there’s no client to download, no limit to the type of operating system it will work on and no need to integrate the software into any other product such as Outlook or Exchange.

[Read more →]

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Editor’s Note: We’ve had an incredible response to my request for contributor’s with a cognitive sciences background. Several notable individuals have very kinds offered to author posts that deal with questions of the brain that I believe are of great importance with respect to helping us understand why we do what we do, why GTD works where other systems fail, and how to get the most out of our own curious intellectual circuitry.

One such contributor, Jennifer George has authored the post below and will begin her contributions to GTDtimes with a series of posts based upon the ground-breaking book, Kluge, authored by Gary Marcus.

Jennifer George is a productivity geek and Web addict who writes the blog Lifemuncher. In the real world, she is a fundraiser for UCLA and
a graduate student in clinical psychology at Capella University.
by Jennifer George

Gary Marcus’s book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, examines the strange collection of more or less ancient systems that makes up the modern human brain. As he explains in chapter one:

“Measured nucleotide by nucleotide, the human genome is 98.5 percent identical to that of the chimpanzee. This suggests that the vast majority of our genetic material evolved in the context of creatures who didn’t have language, didn’t have culture, and didn’t reason deliberately. This means that the characteristics we hold most dear, the features that most distinctly define us as human beings — language, culture, explicit thought, must have been built on a genetic bedrock originally adapted from very different purposes.”

The word Kluge is an engineering term, and means an inelegant solution that works, but not in the best way possible because of historical and/or environmental constraints. Since our brains evolved over millions of years, building on existing systems rather than scrapping them and starting fresh, we find ourselves with a brain that’s like a marvelous Rube Goldberg device, held together with duct tape and chewing gum. It’s great at things that helped us survive and reproduce on the African savannah, and not quite as good at things related to language and abstract thought, which evolved much more recently.

According to Marcus, the human brain is primarily interested in helping you survive - noticing predators and food sources and finding potential mates. Figuring out the next step on that computer program you’re writing? Evaluating whom to vote for for president? Not so much.

The book is a fascinating and humbling overview of the evolutionary forces that built the modern brain and the resulting strengths and weaknesses that constrain and influence the way we live. Much of what Marcus describes is directly relevant to GTD and productivity, and could give us insights on better ways to do things. In a series of posts, I will be examining his findings on and trying to apply them to the life of a modern office drone. Look for the first one, on memory, later this week.

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I usually do OK tracking individual actions and small and medium sized projects. These are items for which I can easily envision the completed state - I know what “done” will look like and I know I will mark these complete in a few days or weeks. Sometimes, however, I have projects where the completion date is not days or weeks ahead but months or years ahead. I find those harder to keep in front of me. Even with regular review, I sometimes find it difficult to keep a sense of time about a project that is off in the distant future.

As I prepare to launch eProductivity, a GTD implementation tool for Lotus Notes , I need to keep one or two key milestones in sight at all times. Specifically, we have a few big milestones - things like “launch web site” or “Prepare for meeting with David” or “Deliver presentation to IBM” that we have been working on for many months or in the case of the product launch, several years.

Several months ago, I watched a NASA Shuttle mission video and I was inspired by their countdown clock and their mission elapsed clock. I decided that I needed my own countdown clock, so I decided to create one for myself.

Starting with a countdown clock mechanism that I purchased on-line, I created a custom clock face and built five eProductivity countdown clocks. I set each one to the date of a key milestone. I kept one clock for myself and I sent the other four to key people on my team. Now, I have a tangible reminder of each event and the time remaining in which to complete it. I’ve had the clock on my desk for a few months now and it’s been a fun reminder of an event that I am looking forward to. The key question “What’s your next action?” keeps me focused on the little things that I need to accomplish to achieve my goal.

It’s been a fun way to get things done.

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There are some exciting developments in the work here at GTDtimes. I wanted to take a moment to share them with you so that you could be prepared since some of what we are doing will probably merit your attention.

First, we are preparing to launch a GTD Job Board. If you’re an employer looking for the most productive employees you can find, this should be your first stop when you place an ad. After all, the folks that read this site practice GTD which by default means that they are likely to be an order of magnitude more productive than a typical hire. Of course if you’re a company that already has a culture that practices GTD why would you want to hire someone that wasn’t already familiar with and using David Allen’s strategy?

Why spend time training someone when you can find an employee that can hit the ground running. The job board will be up within the next few weeks so if you are interested in having an ad as soon as possible, please contact us at “jobs at GTDtimes dot com”

We’re also getting ready to launch a classifieds section. This area will be focused on companies that have developed software for GTD practitioners as well as other sorts of GTD-specific gear and gadgets. For software developers a basic advertisement is free with additional advertising opportunities also available within the marketplace section that will enjoy featured placement and color images as well as room for descriptive text about your program or product. Please contact us at “classifieds at GTDtimes dot com” to submit information for a basic ad or to get additional details about premium placements.

Speaking of advertising, GTDtimes will have a limited number of slots available for premium site sponsors opening up in the next few weeks. If you’d like to have a headline banner on the home page, or a 125×125 advertisement featured above the fold, or even if you’d like to sponsor a specific topic such as “mobile” or “software”, please get in touch with me directly and I’ll get you some information on the various options available. “editor at GTDtimes dot com”.

On the content side I am very pleased to announce that we’ve had a phenomenal response to my request for a contributor with expertise in psychology and related fields. I’m not going to spoil the surprise yet but keep your eyes open for some new names added to our contributors roster. The posts that I expect to see from these new additions are sure to be among the most interesting, insightful and informative material you’ll find anywhere regarding GTD. If you ever wondered why it is you do what you do - GTDtimes will be the place to help you find an answer to that question.

Lastly, a thank you to everyone that’s been subscribing to GTDtimes or simply stopping by on a regular basis. GTDtimes has been enjoying some excellent growth lately - thanks also to so many of you who have linked to us, commented on posts or shared links to this site with friends. Our goal is to be a real resource for the GTD community and we are always on the lookout for great content posted on other GTD blogs.

If you’re writing something about Getting Things Done be sure to let us know. We want to help people find your content. If you’re a developer working on a GTD related project, be sure to tell us about it - we’d love to do a review. And if you’ve got a great personal GTD story (or some fun before and after photos of your office) send them on over and we’ll post them for you.

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Hi folks. Since today is a Holiday - and I desperately needed a day off - I figured that our usual Sunday videos could be pushed off a day. The first video is one that I think you’ll find interesting - Jay from InternetBusinessMastery.com does a nice job sharing how he and his associate Sterling use MindMeister - a mind mapping application for their collaborative GTD worksystem.

This is a pretty cool and novel approach although I’d love to know how they deal with integration with a calendar application for reminders and critical dates.

The second video today is one that represents another milestone in our exploration of our solar system. NASA has successfully landed the Phoenix Lander at Mars northern pole. This lander, which is stationary - unlike the successful rovers that preceded it - will be using a robotic arm to probe the soil in its immediate vicinity looking for signs of life in the supposedly frozen soil. Congratulations to NASA’s Polar Lander Team for a job well done!

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Below is a copy of a fun article that just ran in the New York Times that heavily references David Allen and GTD. I thought GTDtimes readers might enjoy the piece and since the NYT website sometimes makes you log in to view articles I thought I’d save everyone the trouble and post it here for your enjoyment:
May 22, 2008
CYBERFAMILIAS

Organize: It’s Your Civic Duty
By MICHELLE SLATALLA

THE jury summons said to go the courthouse the day I was supposed to drive the French horn car pool, write a 1,000-word column, take the dog to the vet and fax some supplementary tax records to my accountant (if I could find the slip of paper on which I wrote the fax number).

The summons said to report to Room 244.

“Don’t go,” my husband said. “What are they going to do, arrest you?”

Lucky for him, my husband was out of town the day the certified letter arrived, threatening to lock me up and fine me $1,500 if I didn’t serve.
“I can’t believe you ignored it,” my husband said. “Don’t you realize being on a jury is not only a right, it’s a responsibility?”

And a nightmare for busy people like me or, say, Madonna, who also received a jury summons this year. She reported to the Beverly Hills Courthouse in February with a personal assistant and a BlackBerry.

Since Madonna and I have a lot in common, such as demanding jobs and children and having dated Warren Beatty - O.K., two out of three - I vowed to follow her example and fulfill my civic duty without sacrificing control over my life. I don’t have a personal assistant. Or a BlackBerry, come to think of it. Instead, I reported to Room 244 at 9:30 a.m. with my most important organizational tool, a laptop, and prepared to rely on the free WiFi connection.

My plan was to read and follow the suggestions posted on all the gazillion online productivity blogs - Unclutterer.com, 43folders.com, Dumblittleman.com and Lifehack.org, for example - that offer eclectic advice on how to spend time fruitfully.

Zenhabits.net advised me to “focus on one thing at a time.” This prompted me to focus on how this was all my husband’s fault, because if I had followed the jury summons instructions, I could have rescheduled my service for a date like, say, the Friday before Memorial Day, when it was unlikely anybody would need jurors.

I felt better already.

By the time lunch rolled around and I had caught a glimpse of the courthouse cafeteria’s Chinese chicken salad, I felt it would be a cinch to follow other online tips, including Zenhabits’ “How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way.”

But then the worst happened. Even as I was memorizing tips on how to brew my own natural flavors to add to water on Lifehacker.com, my life diverged from Madonna’s in a very troubling way. Unlike the celebrity superstar, who went home a free woman after a defense attorney complained she was a distraction and dismissed her, I was put on a jury.

I almost blacked out from panic. I didn’t have time to go to jury duty for even one day, and now, suddenly, it looked like I would be at the courthouse for the entire next week. I was going to miss work deadlines. Not to mention my volunteer time slot at the public library. And Hebrew school carpooling duty. And an interview with a source who had made travel arrangements around my schedule. How would I cope?

The productivity blogs had little to say on this particular topic, unfortunately. But as I spent the weekend frantically skimming their advice on how to declutter bookshelves (at Unclutterer.com) and how to “de-clump sugar with a slice of bread” (Lifehacker.com), I couldn’t help noticing a pattern.

Many of the bloggers idolized David Allen, a best-selling author whose “Getting Things Done” time-management system was described at 43folders.com as taking “a backseat only to the Atkins Diet in terms of the number of enthusiastic evangelists.”

I reached Mr. Allen by phone. “Can these productivity blogs help me through this desperate time in my life?” I asked.

He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to ask him this question. The problem with my plan, he said, was that I wanted to take a piecemeal approach to a systemic problem. Mr. Allen thought I would be better off focusing my energy on setting up comprehensive organizational procedures that would back me up in any emergency.

“How?” I asked.

“First, do a mind sweep and make an inventory of all the projects that need to be taken care of this year,” Mr. Allen said. “Most people have 30 to 100 projects pending at one time. What I mean by a project is anything that takes more than one step and that you’re committed to finish in the year, from getting the dog vaccinated to getting new tires on the car to planning a trip to Greece to dealing with what the kids are going to do in the summer.”

“Making an inventory of everything sounds hard,” I said, thinking it might be more thrilling, say, to make my own laundry soap by following the recipe involving borax and washing soda on TheSimpledollar.com. Or to memorize a few keyboard shortcuts every typist should know, according to ProductivityCafe.com.

“It takes one to six hours to do the inventory,” Mr. Allen said. “I bet there’s a big pile of stuff on your desk and stuff all over the house that you need to read. Gather it, and then you can make decisions about what you’re committed to do to move each project forward.”

He suggested, for instance, putting all my unread material - from magazines to unopened mail to notices from my daughters’ schools - into a “To Read” box. Simply identifying this clutter as a project would count as a step toward completing the project.

Having an inventory would prepare me, he said, for unforeseen contingencies.

“Life is full of surprises like jury duty, and when you’re surprised is when it becomes critical to know exactly what you’re not going to be doing when you’re doing jury duty,” Mr. Allen said. “You also need to take with you at the courthouse all the things you could be doing instead of sitting around watching paint dry.”

IF I managed at the courthouse to complete those things - which in my case included paying bills, updating my household’s monthly finance charts and responding to critical e-mail messages - Mr. Allen suggested I make a master list of every pending project I had identified.

“Stare at the list, during a break, until you see which ones you need to finish first and which ones you just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it and then cross those off,” he said.

I followed his advice. It took me more like 12 hours to make an inventory. (I got sidetracked looking through old baby photos that I found inexplicably stuffed into a desk drawer along with grocery store receipts from 1993.)

But by Thursday I was feeling so in control of my schedule that when the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom for a brief break, I had time to read productivity blogs for entertainment.

Then I realized the fact that I found the ClutterersAnonymous.net 12-step program so riveting probably meant I was ready to move on to create another tool Mr. Allen had mentioned: a to-do list.

The first item was easy: in the future, ignore husband’s advice.

E-mail: slatalla@nytimes.com

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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There’s been a really exceptional amount of interest and excellent commentary associated with my post on why we (or at least why I) sometimes procrastinate. Based upon this interest and the fascinating number of specific organic and psychological pathologies that seem to be associated with this issue it seems to me that this topic deserves much deeper exploration.

Is GTD a means to much greater self control and productivity for people that are forced to deal with these particular challenges? Are there reasons why GTD may (or may not) be the best strategy for gaining some form of mastery where none existed before? Are people with a particular personality type more attracted to GTD than others? There are so many questions that merit analysis and discussion.

Is there someone out there - a psychologist - a psychiatrist - or perhaps even a neuro-biologist or cognitive scientist who would be interested in furthering our understanding of these issues as a contributor to GTDtimes?

You won’t get rich, but you could get famous - or at least more well known in the rarefied circles of GTD practitioners who read blogs and other GTD related websites.

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that someone with the training to evaluate these issues and particularly someone knowledgeable about ADD, ADHD, OCD, and other related syndromes could offer a fascinating lens into this topic and help us to understand what it is about GTD that may be so beneficial for people that deal with difficulty concentrating, trouble showing up on time or simply getting their work completed in a timely fashion or at all.

If anyone out there would like to take up the mantle of writing for GTDtimes on this and related topics I would love to hear from you. Please send an email to my attention at editor at GTDtimes dot com with “psych guy” (or gal) in the subject line and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

This is one of the most fascinating areas I’ve seen as it relates to GTD and it seems to me to be one of the least acknowledged or understood. GTDtimes would be privileged to have someone qualified join us to help  throw some light on this area and open up the door to greater insight into this very important subject.

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You’ve read his books, you’ve seen his videos and now, you can see a David Allen seminar in person for 10% less than the regular price. I know this sounds like an advertisement but the bottom line is that I’ve just been given word that GTDtimes readers can save 10% off the price of any David Allen seminar by clicking this link and entering the code: GTDtimes10 when you check out. Your discount will be applied automatically.

If you’ve never seen one of David’s seminars live before, you owe it to yourself to take this opportunity to learn more about GTD from the people who he’s personally selected to teach the practice. These seminars are enlightening, educational and entertaining and you’ll not only get the chance to learn directly from David or one of his hand picked presenters but you’ll also get to meet dozens of like-minded GTD practitioners with whom to compare notes, explore opportunities or simply strike up new friendships.

This discount is only available to readers of GTDtimes as our way of saying “Thank You!” for being a reader.

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