If you haven’t seen it already, you probably ought to check out the September issue of Fortune Magazine featuring a great comparison of three approaches to personal and professional productivity; David Allen’s GTD, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits and James Loehr’s Human Performance Institute. In case you missed the article, Rob Thompson of Rob Thompson.com has gone to the trouble of making it available online here.
Like Rob, I felt the piece was well written and generally fair to all three coaches. Unlike Rob I have direct, personal experience with two of the three coaches and have read the books and purchased the products of the third. This gives me a little bit of additional insight into the coaches and their methods which might be of value to anyone considering applying these methods to their own lives.
My greatest personal contact is of course with David Allen and I am a follower of his Getting Things Done systematic approach to personal productivity. It wasn’t an easy thing to get me to embrace this approach but perhaps my unwillingness to take other’s word for it that this approach works lends even more credibility to my conviction that it does work so long as it is diligently applied. Of course this would hold true for all three systems but in my experience diligent application of the principles of each of these approaches does not yield equal success.
The difference with GTD is that it is eminently practical. Every part of the process yields concrete and measurable results. You don’t have to be a believer to be an achiever. You simply have to DO what David lays out as the appropriate thing given your context and the material you are working with. It is quite simple from a simplistic viewpoint: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do…it really is straightforward and like Rob says in his review you don’t need any fancy equipment to implement GTD - in fact keeping it simple might be one of the best ways to successfully implement GTD in your own life.
From my personal perspective no other approach can deliver so immediate a change in your outlook by giving you such a significant change in your environment. There’s a lot to be said for David’s bottom up approach - take it from a converted non-believer.
As far as James Loehr is concerned, Rob wasn’t too familiar with him and neither was the author of the Fortune article. I, on the other hand, am intimately familiar with his work. It has been a part of my life for over 20 years. That’s because James spent some time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in the mid 1980’s and I happened to be a resident athlete at the time. His focus was on mental toughness training for sports and he even authored a book by the same name. (I highly recommend this to any athlete, by the way).
Most of my fellow athletes thought that this was a joke - they simply didn’t believe that lying in the dark and doing breathing and visualization exercises had any chance of making them better athletes. Well, it’s been said that the brain is the most powerful muscle in the body and based upon my experience with James Loehr’s strategies I have to agree. While my contemporaries where yucking it up and making life hard for the not-yet-famous Loehr, I was deeply focused on learning his methods. The payoff is not immediate but it is profound. I learned over time that the more consistent I was in my application of his exercises and the more deeply I was able to visualize myself performing perfectly the more capable I became at actually delivering perfect performances. In other worse, his ideas are legitimate - or at least they are as far as I am concerned.
The problem is that it takes a significant investment and a lot of conviction in order to apply his teaching. This is not a see it - do it- reap the benefits process. It takes time and effort to learn how to apply James Loehr’s techniques. And from my experience in the executive world, time is the one thing that we all find in short supply. From where I stand James Loehr’s approach is probably more useful to athletes than to executives - some exceptions might be trial lawyers or professional speakers that need to “perform” (surgeons also might benefit from Loehr’s techniques). If you’re a golfer and you want to hit par, James Loehr might be the guru for you, however.
Last but not least is Stephen Covey, the only one of the three coaches that I don’t know personally. I imagine that just about every performance oriented executive has looked into Seven Habits and for some I am sure that this approach is exceptional. The problem for a lot of us - or at least for me is not that I don’t know what I want to accomplish, but rather that I get lost trying to get there. It’s hard to have your head in the clouds when you keep on tripping over books on your office floor.
Personally, I think that Covey’s system is better for people that are naturally good organizers but who aren’t sure what their mission or even their long term goal really is. For people like that I imagine that Covey is like a sliver bullet that can almost miraculously put them on their life’s path. They don’t need to know how to go somewhere, what they need to do is figure out where it is they want to go and this system is probably ideal for helping to solve that problem.
Ultimately, there are significant benefits to every one of these approaches. Mostly how well any one of them works comes down to the individual and how serious you are about putting any approach into practice. Like most things in life you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. Whether that output will be realized tomorrow or a year from now depends largely upon which system you choose and how you go about putting it into effect.
Of course I know that most of you reading this are believers in GTD but have any of you tried the other two approaches? What about another system that we haven’t mentioned? Please share your experiences in the comments!
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Editor’s Note: This just in from DOW Jones…
I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.
