A Community Contribution by Lynn O’Connor, Ph.D.

Research on intelligence is also finding psychological components to levels of performance. When children are taught that intelligence is fixed, heritable, and set for life, many of them back off and put little effort into academics. Only those who have already been labeled as “high IQ” are off to high performance. When however, intelligence is reformulated and children (or adults) are introduced to the idea that intelligence is expandable, and grows with effort, many not initially labeled high IQ come out of the woodwork and become high performers. We have been thinking incorrectly about the concept of IQ. Intelligence is expandable. We can improve performance if we understand that how we do on a task is a function of our effort. Carol Dweck from Stanford has been studying what is being called the “effort effect.” A great summary of her work is found in an article written by Marina Krakovsky.

When I read Dwecks work I began to think about organizing in the same way. I always thought being well organized was a function of genes, heritable, you either had it or you didn’t. I didn’t, and I thought it was hopeless, I would never be organized. Understanding expandable intelligence led me to reconsider my organizational problem, and that led me right to David Allen and GTD. I jumped on the GTD wagon, finally getting that like intelligence, the ability to be organized was a function of effort and experience. I’m a big believer in understanding and accepting our genetic limits, but our limits as members of our species make us far more changeable than we imagine. That’s a quality of being human, the ability to learn entirely new skills and adapt to new environments.

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Jim Rider, the VP of Brand Communications over at the David Allen Company just forwarded this interesting news to my attention. It seems that Vakil Housing is the first company in India to go through a company wide GTD training program. Not only that but several key individuals went a step further and obtained additional training to become trainers themselves, enabling them to support their company’s effort to instill a GTD oriented culture.

Let me be one of the first to offer my congratulations to everyone at Vakil Housing. This is an awesome first step and I’m certain that the company as a whole will reap huge benefits from your efforts in this regard. I’d also like to invite anyone from Vakil Housing that has the desire to write about your company’s experiences adopting a GTD culture and submit the reports to GTDtimes. I am sure that I’m not alone in having an interest in hearing how your GTD efforts progress, what benefits you realize, what obstacles you encounter and how you overcome them.

From Vakil Housing:

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been eagerly awaiting this training to take place and last week it finally happened. Dream Com True! Leslie Boyer Harradine an associate with the David Allen Company, was down here for a whole week for an intensive training session, exclusively for Vakil Housing. Other than Training our staff in this methodology, Leslie, also trained a couple of us to be Trainers ourselves. So that this would not just be a one-time thing, but the practice and training will continue inhouse so that eventually a GTD culture sets-in.

If someone from Vakil Housing would like to contribute in this regard, please send me a note at: editor@gtdtimes.com and I’ll send you some details on how contributing to GTDtimes.com works.

One last thought about this; has anyone else seen companies in other countries taking steps like Vakil Housing has taken to implement GTD across an entire organization? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Again, send the information to editor@gtdtimes.com and we’ll be sure to share the news with the GTD Community.

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(This is the first installment in my series talking about how to ramp up quickly with GTD and Lotus Notes. This first post is actually not specific to Lotus Notes at all; it described my reference point for how I approach knowledgework.)

I began my recent eProductivity Seminar by introducing my eProductivity equation for knowledge worker productivity:

KWP = M x T x K

Put another way:

Knowledge Worker Productivity [or results] =
Methodology x Technology x Knowledge

That is, the outcome of any project will be influenced (one way or the other) by how well you use and apply (your methodology) your knowledge and tools to the problem at hand.

I believe GTD provides an outstanding framework for managing work productively – the methodology; I think that Lotus Notes can be a powerful tool for information, action, and knowledge management — the technology. As far as what your knowledge… only you know that.

Think about how this equation applies to your knowledge work. What are your methodologies (defined or undefined)? What tools do you use?

How does what you know influence the work that you do?

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A Community Contribution by  Jennifer George

My fellow procrastinators and I are well acquainted with the mental drama that goes on as we torture ourselves about that important task left undone. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that the thing we’re not doing signifies all sorts of icky emotions and unconscious ideas about ourselves and our lives.

In our more lucid moments, we can see that there really is nothing fundamentally different about playing GTA IV versus writing that paper that’s due tomorrow. Both activities involve synthesizing information, making decisions, and moving our hands and eyes to make the right things happen on our computer screen.

The real difference between the two is what Buddhists call “attachment” — the clinging, coveting emotions and beliefs we have about ourselves and the world, including pride, fear, and desire. In more modern terms, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy describes our habitual maladaptive thoughts as “cognitive distortions.” Both schools argue that examining our existing thought patterns and developing new, productive ones can help us reduce suffering and build more useful behaviors.

It may not be enlightenment, but next time you’re not doing something you’re supposed to, think about the attachments, emotions, and thoughts that are getting in your way. Remember that they are illusory and temporary, and try to squirm out of their grasp for a while.

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Recently, an executive at a large global consulting firm with over 100K Lotus Notes users called me to ask for help getting up to speed with GTD and Notes. He told me that he was feeling overwhelmed at work with a growing number of projects and responsibilities and in his pursuit of a solution he had found and read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. He was also aware that while Lotus Notes is an excellent tool for messaging, collaboration, and information management, it wasn’t supporting him in the way that he needed. He was calling to get eProductivity for Lotus Notes and some coaching to help him set up Notes to be more productive. After a fruitful conversation, and my promise to help him, he asked me, “How can I ramp up quickly with GTD & Lotus Notes?” (I get asked this question a lot, so I decided to write a short e-mail that would be very helpful and something that I could reuse again the next time the question arose.) I promised to send him an email that night with some lessons I had learned and some tips for getting things done with Lotus Notes.

Well, my e-mail turned into an 6-part essay of my lessons learned and recommendations from the past 15 years of using Notes and the GTD methodology.

Over the next several days, I will take a look at the methodology (GTD) and the Technology parts of the equation… and share my experience and response to this person’s question of how to ramp up quickly with GTD & Lotus Notes.

I invite you to follow-along and join me in conversation about this topic.

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