A Contribution from Maurice Gavin, a former staff presenter and coach with David Allen Company

At ‘that’ moment, you understand the power of getting it out of your head.

Some might think that means merely writing it down, but it actually requires one to implement Peter Drucker’s thinking from the Effective Executive treatise (1969) that one must:

1. decide a desired outcome
2. frame a next action and, if possible,
3. execute that next action as quickly as is  possible (in an attempt to achieve the desire of your  outcome).

When you are concerned about:

1. your soon-to-be-newborn’s heart  rate
2. the speed with which they are intending to  induce your wife and
3. the fact that you are still 45 minutes away  from the hospital,

…you realize the power of being able to focus past your desired outcome toward next action execution.  At times like these, with as little unproductive stress as possible, you hope to conduct yourself such that you can eliminate all drag associated with achieving the desire of your outcome(s).

And thanks to Providence and the mechanics of GTD, I was able to arrive just in time to see them starting the inducement process and to be the support my wife needed (I still need personal growth in this area) to get through the initial steps in the process.

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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When you start climbing up the GTD implementation ladder you begin collecting, processing and organizing every cool idea that you come across.   Pretty soon you have a huge list of projects together with an even more colossal list of next actions. It’s tempting to try and accomplish all of them; but what if you are @computer, @office and @call all at the same time?  Do you feel like you should be doing many of the tasks in each of your multiple lists simultaneously?   Suddenly you realize that you’re overwhelmed. Instead of eliminating this feeling from your life which is what GTD is supposed to do, it seems to have multiplied it instead!

So what do you do about it?
In one of the Teleseminars hosted on GTD Connect, a caller asked David this  same question, i.e. “David my lists just keep getting longer and longer, what do I do about it?” David, admitted that, this is a difficult issue to handle.

David Says:  “the trick is to keep getting better at being Okay when Not Doing something.”

Here are some tips that can help you do that:

- Learn the Limiting Criteria, and implement it ruthlessly. Be clear on which context you are in and how much time and energy you have and make decisions accordingly. If you have only 30 minutes and are feeling like burnt toast, you’re not likely to be in the mood to do some highly engaging task and would probably be okay with doing some fun, relaxing item from your Next Action list.

- Identify your goals and passions in life. Revisit the higher horizons frequently and see which of your projects and next actions are more aligned to it.

- We all have the same amount of time in a day, it’s maturing to the fact that there will always be some things that you can handle and some things that you can’t.

Here’s a lovely passage from Page after Page by Heather Sellers, that also beautifully addresses how to feel okay not being so busy.

“Are you swamped?” My colleague Nat likes to ask me.
I always force myself to say no. No, I’m Not Busy, I’m Not Swamped. Why would I get Swamped? That is not my life.

For me, its too passive, too fake, too braggy to be always saying how busy I am. “I wish I had two more weeks before the semester starts, ” my boss says every summer in late August. I feel like we’re feeling really insecure and unimportant when we talk like this. “I’m so important. I have been entrusted with so much work that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me. Look at me! So much work!”

Get real, I want to say to my “busy” friends. Be accurate and tell the truth. You do have two weeks before school starts. You do have time . Get a grip. Time is not all that surprising. If you can’t do a whole lot more stuff, it’s okay to just know that, and to stop orienting yourself in kinky ways to time.

Notice time.
Notice your passion.
Follow where these two intersect.

I am used to people saying to me they want to “write” (edit-insert your passion here) if only they had time. I always look up to the sky, and check in with the gods when I hear this. “We all get the same amount of time, right? “Yup,” say the gods. “You mortals all get the same allotment. It’s the single fair thing in life.” “Thanks, “ I say. “Just checking.”

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A Contribution by former presenter and coach with the David Allen Company, Maurice Gavin

“What if you really could achieve the dreams  you conceive for yourself and your corner of this world?”

“What if you could overcome any obstacle set  before you in your life and in the lives of others at will and on  demand?”

“What if you saw every problem as an  opportunity to face yourself, overcome yourself and expand yourself without  fear or uncertainty during the process?”

“What if you could inspire others by your  example to change themselves for the better and to want to model your success  and your personal standards of integrity and excellence?”

As I write this I am doing so to challenge myself as much as to reach out to you the reader.

I have moved past

“What if”

and am now asking

“Why not?”

In fact, to be honest I am now saying to myself, if even in a whisper,

“Why not now? Right now?”

Regardless of what you do or think about this or anything else…

“What are the questions that are secretly  plaguing you from within?”

“What would you try anew if you were guaranteed  you couldn’t fail?”

“What is the highest level you could achieve across the  various spectrum of your life’s experiences if you were to intensify your  focus and apply yourself without regard for time required or the fear of  failure?”

What If and Why Not Right Now…!

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By Michael Gorsline

OmniFocus is a GTD inspired productivity application for Mac. When I visit the OmniFocus discussion boards, at fairly regular intervals someone will ask, “But why can’t you Omni guys incorporate a way to assign priority to action items?” and an argument promptly ensues. GTD folks try to explain why that just doesn’t make sense. Others work to advance the idea that rating the priority of action items is essential.

From the Getting Things Done perspective you don’t want to assign “priority” to action items on the front end for a couple of reasons. The first is that priority always depends on the constellation of situations at hand. From a GTD view you just can’t decide priority in a vacuum. To the question, “What is the priority?” the question that needs to be asked to answer it is “…the  priority in what context?” When you know more about the the given situation in the moment, the priority becomes clear.

When you do try to assign priority to action items on the front end, you’re apt to run into the following problem. As soon as a couple of variables shift, as they are guaranteed to do, it will alter the array of possibilities. So lots of the action items you have rated at given priority levels are going to change. And when they do, then you’re busy re-prioritizing all those items. You finish and brush the dust off your hands, breathing a sigh of relief. Then another change pops up and your priority labels are inaccurate all over again. I lived through doing this re-prioritizing hamster wheel in the early 90′s and ended up dropping the practice. Looking at the on the ground practice, GTD suggests that priority makes a lot more sense to assess when you know the complete context of the given moment.

What You Need to Know

So what details do you need to know? First, what is the context? Where are you, and what tools you have at your disposal? Examples are at the computer, @computer; at the computer and hooked up to internet service, @computer: online; talking with my spouse, @Erin in my case; at the hardware store, @cavernous box store, etc. Unlike priority, context is something that makes sense to decide on the front end. If you know you want an avocado, you likely know where you’re going to want to buy it. If you have an email to send, you know where you’re likely to send it from. So deciding the context of each item on the front end and writing them down makes sense. Here’s another reason.

As I’ll discuss further in an upcoming post, our brains just aren’t good at carrying around that kind information, or more accurately, they aren’t good at retrieving it when we want it. It either will clog up our psychic RAM and take up valuable processing space, or it will be relegated to long term memory. Unfortunately the way our cranial long term storage works depends on cues that may or may not come to mind at the moment we need them. So writing down next actions and the contexts we know we’ll do them in, or digitally recording them, will make the best use of how our brains work. This in turn will ensure that when we leave the grocery store, for instance, we’ll have all the things we need, not just the ones that happened to be triggered by internal and external (grocery store visual input) cues that happen onto our mental scene.

The other two variables you’ll want to take into account before deciding on priority are the time available, and energy available. One of the strengths of Getting Things Done is the way that it seizes all sorts of strange little windows of time, and distills those into moments of productivity. They’re usually moments that we wouldn’t get much out of in any case. Sitting waiting for Super Lube to finish up their signature service on my wagon doesn’t usually leave me with any rewarding sense of satisfaction. On the other hand if I have the gut sense that just sitting and being present in the moment as I wait for them to pronounce me ready for checkout is a priority, then I could go for that option. If I do go with getting something done, that is work that won’t need to be done later, leaving you that much closer to the GTD goal of “having nothing on your mind”.

Sift Out Context

So let’s put it all together. Rather than making our decisions about what to do based on predetermined priorities that are likely to change like specks in a kaleidoscope anyway, GTD suggests that we use four criteria to decide:

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy Available
4. Priority
Using all four requires looking at context in the moment—where we are and what tools we have—and assessing time and energy available on the fly. Only then are we able to use our brain’s strength, intuition, or gut if you prefer, to assess what the priority might be given the circumstances consisting of the prior three criteria in our list. I use context, time available, and energy available as a sieve to sift out what can be done in this weird little window of a few minutes. Only after I’ve looked at these three can I determine what is the priority for right now, the present moment.

Say I’m sitting in the shoe store waiting for the shoe salesman at 6:17. I’ve got my phone and my notepad with me with some notes from this afternoon’s meeting. I’m not going to listen voicemails because the salesman might come striding up and interrupt me in the middle of a message, and I’d just have to listen to it again later—time wasted. I open my email program on my phone and take a gander, and there’s that email I still need to respond to. I’m too fried to think about the details clearly now. The meeting this afternoon didn’t have anything urgent in it. Plus it will be more efficient to pull next actions out of my notes when I have a legal pad in front of me. Not very convenient to do here. I also could look over my calendar to review upcoming meetings and deadlines. I could do some minor deck clearing by deleting any emails that don’t contain any info I need to access or file. Based on intuition and the relatively similar priority. I decide to go with reviewing my calendar.

Going with Your Gut

Now these little windows are often easier to decide what to do with than larger swaths of time. But the small window of time serves as a nice example, keeping the process front and center. For some this post was review, which is often good in any case. For others this will clarify the nature of how GTD triangulates priority by using your brain’s crowning skill, on the ground intuition. So letting your gut lead you doesn’t have to mean that it’s been too long since you’ve been to the gym. Instead it can mean using your brain in a manner that enhances its strengths and shores up those areas it just does better with support, keeping you moving on the path toward effortless productivity.

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If you’re one of the people that wouldn’t miss the GTD Global Summit for anything than you probably aren’t too concerned with hearing about the recent updates to the GTD Global Summit website.  However, if this is something that you haven’t yet reached a conclusion on one way or another you might want to click on over to the site once more to take a look at the schedule and the different educational tracks that are going  to be included.   I have to say it looks like it is going to be an amazing event and I can’t wait to participate as well as blog it for those of you that can’t be there.

In addition to information about the schedule, there is also material that has been posted regarding exhibiting, sponsorship opportunities and more.  If you want to go but haven’t yet made up your mind be careful about waiting too long.  The number of spaces is a fairly limited and you don’t want to wait too long only to discover that you’ve missed your chance and are now on a waiting list instead of happily registered.

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NOTE: This article is about creating an inexpensive organizer once you have already mastered the basics of GTD. If you are new to GTD, we highly recommend the GTD System as the fastest, most inexpensive way to get started on the road to stress-free success:

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Having a trusted reminder system is a critical success factor for GTD.   Given GTD is really an approach that is tool agnostic, nearly any tool will work as long as you have the right ingredients.

I laughed when I read a blog recently where someone tried swiping at GTD saying that “GTD is for techies only.”  David Allen’s roots in working this methodology, as well as my own, come from the paper planner world.  You can’t get much more low-tech than that.  In fact, some of the most elegant and accessible lists I’ve seen are paper ones.  Sure, there’s the rewrite factor of paper, but electronic list managers have the “over-featured” trap to watch out for. There are pros and cons to both.  I say, go with what works best for you.

Some of the most technically savvy people I know manage their lists on paper to shift their consciousness away from all of their electronic input.  It’s a fantastic pattern interrupt to switch over to a paper list when you stand in front of a fire hose of email and the Internet all day long. There’s also almost a zero learning curve with a paper system.  And, if you’re building it yourself from blank paper, you have a ton of flexibility on what it looks like.

So for any of you looking for a hard copy GTD system, with ingredients you can likely find around in your house or office, here’s what to do:

1.  Go to your graveyard of old 3-ring binders (every company has one!) and find one you like.
2.  Find some divider tabs (if you can’t find some, Post-it notes or flags will work to delineate each section.)
3.  Grab a stack of blank paper from your copier or supply closet and hole punch it into the binder.
4.  Download this free article on Setting up a Paper Organizer from the GTD store and assemble the sections.
5.  Populate the lists with your complete inventory.

If you can’t find all those supplies at hand, even buying them from your local stationary supply store would only run about $6.  Could you spend more than $6?  Sure.  You could really trick it out with a leather binder and high-quality paper.  If you’re choosing one of the many web-based electronic systems out there, you’ll want to make it accessible from anywhere–especially when you’re offline.  This kind of paper system would work well if you’re doing a hybrid of digital and paper.  For example, electronic lists could be your home-base, but you print key lists to a binder for easy access and portability.

Next time you walk into a meeting, notice how many people have a paper lists or printed calendar with them. It’s more common than you think. If it’s your style to do things on paper, do yourself a favor and create a great hard copy system.

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GTD Connect is David’s members-only website. Ordinarily there’s a monthly fee of $40 (based on an annual subscription) but right now – if you act quickly – you can get a free fourteen day trial of GTD Connect with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Even if you read GTDtimes religiously, you’ve never seen a GTD resource with as much information as you’ll find on GTD Connect.  Here’s a sample:

• The world’s largest collection of GTD multimedia content (audio, video and text), with more added on a regular basis.
• Sixteen Getting Started Modules (video and audio) delivered right to your email inbox.
• Exclusive videos of David’s coaching and insights.
• An extensive collection of essays on topics from managing email to prioritizing and goal setting.
• Interviews with leading productivity experts, technology gurus and leaders in business, education and non-profit organizations.
• Member forums where you can learn from and share with others – about technology, work life mix, implementing GTD – whatever is on your mind.
• Weekly reminders and reinforcement pushed directly to your email, when and where you ask for it.
• Social networking features that can help you to find other GTD Connect members in your city or state.

Eight times a year you’ll also receive an audio CD delivered to your door (and available as a download) entitled, “In Conversation”; David’s interviews with leading thinkers and achievers who are part of the GTD network. You’ll benefit from rich conversations with successful people Getting Things Done.

Connect members also get 25% off the price of any David Allen seminar and 10% of lots of merchandise from The David Allen Company Online Store.

If you want to try GTD Connect for free don’t waste a minute.  Visit this special page and sign up for you free trial subscription!

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For those of you that love to read each and every article about GTD or every interview David gives, we’ve got a treat for you today.  David Appears in a Business Week article that just went up overnight.  Allow me to state the obvious; GTD is starting to catch fire.  If you’ve been a GTD’er for ages you can probably sense the huge momentum that is starting to build – if you’re relatively new then you might not see just yet how fast this is suddenly starting to take hold of the corporate mindset.  By this time next year GTD could be the hottest business productivity strategy in the world (if it isn’t already).  What this may mean is that you should probably register for the GTD Global Summit if you haven’t already.  I have a sneaking suspicion that people that wait until the last minute to reserve their place might end up disappointed…

I don’t think the days of GTD courses as part of college curriculums or continuing business education are that far off.  I can also see how being trained in GTD could become a prerequisite for certain jobs or at least an advantage when applying for one.  I know that I consider it a real advantage that I’ve been able to get the first hand training and continuing coaching to help me implement GTD successfully.

Speaking of successful implementations of GTD I wanted to toss this out there:  what do you think of having a worst to best contest to showcase some of the community’s biggest GTD transformations?  I was thinking that having people send in pictures of their offices or even just stories about how GTD has changed their lives for the better would be a lot of fun.  The best stories would be showcased here on GTD times and I’m sure that I can find some cool prizes for the folks that get their stories posted to the site.  What do you think?  Anyone game?

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“Is it even possible to implement GTD across the Company?” That was the question that was plaguing me and Ali.  Even if we get tools for everyone and teach them all the basics, it’s still very likely that most employees will stick to their old ways. Change is hard from within an organization.  In spite of our efforts it is possible and maybe even likely that our people won’t crank widgets as we expect them to.

Considering these facts the question “should we then go ahead and invest so much time and energy into the training?” is one to consider seriously.  On the other hand if we don’t pursue a company wide GTD implementation what are our alternatives?  Not to teach GTD and accept the current standard of performance & accountability hardly seemed like a viable choice so we decided that we might as well give it our best shot and keep our expectations low.

Here’s what we did:

First we got  everybody their GTD Gear (covered in earlier posts of Rolling out GTD @ Vakil Housing series).  Then we kick started the Training.  The key to our methodology  has been the regularity and persistence with which we’ve gone about “the Vakil Housing Weekly GTD Training Meet”.  This is  the secret-sauce we found for implementing GTD at our office.

Logistics:
Day: We had set upon a Day for our weekly meeting, say every Friday
Time: 9:00 Am. We wanted to get started first thing every morning.
Duration: 1 hr. Many times it would stretch to an Hour and a Half.
We’ve been dong this for almost two years so to date we have conducted more than 100 hours of Weekly GTD Training at our office.

The General structure of the meeting is:
- Recap of what was learned last week.
- Take Any David Allen Podcast Interview, Article or Audio session from GTD Connect.
- Watch, Listen to or Read out loud the material while I would simultaneously draw a mind map of what is being read on the whiteboard, while explaining further what David covered.
- Pausing the presentation occasionally and going over any heavy concept that David touched upon.
- Once the interview/podcast is over, we would run through the mind map recapping what was covered. Typically I’d share my personal implementation examples, with my “aha” moments during the presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -Asking if anybody had “aha” moments of their own to share.
- Possibly give everybody an exercise to work upon and get back with feedback next week.

The topics that we covered:
- Obviously, the first course was an intro to GTD. We covered the concept that we are most effective when we are relaxed, but that we can’t be relaxed when we have a million other things pulling and pushing us. In this session we played the David Allen Video on the home page of the David Allen Company.

- In the second session we distributed the various tools (covered in earlier posts) and assisted everybody in setting those up.

- We did sessions where we told everybody to grab whatever papers are lying at their desks or in their drawers and get them all to the conference room where we proceeded to do a live joint processing session with the actual stuff that they have to deal with.

- We had a session on clearing emails from people’s inboxes. The session included sitting with one volunteer and taking 30 minutes or so to clear his email inbox while others watched to see how it was done.

- We had sessions on the Three Fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria, for which we used the relevant articles on the website.

- We once did a GTD-Quiz. Where we made teams to whom I asked questions on the podcast that was just played and we distributed sleek leather bound little pocket calendar diaries as prizes.

- After we felt our employees had truly ingrained the core concepts we did individual sessions on the Natural Planning Model and Horizons of Focus.

- In addition to the very specific GTD sessions we had many other sessions that were just general, just as many of David Allen’s interviews are. We just listen to them and we each pick out the nuggets that mean the most to us.

If you are a senior Manager within your organization and you’ve strictly implemented GTD for yourself but are having difficulty convincing others to adopt it, I would highly recommend trying out the weekly meeting the way we’ve done it as explained above. Keep your expectations low. Having your whole organization/department implement GTD is a big change and as every experienced manager knows most change only happens in small doses.

After more than 100 hours of GTD Training are we all following GTD 100% today? No, we’re not. But we’re certainly more GTD-compliant than before.  We are still working on it too. That alone made the whole process worth it. Persistence always pays. Remember, A big shot was once a little shot, who kept shooting.

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