You’ve heard about it, you’ve read preliminary reviews for it, and now, finally, after months of waiting, you can own it yourself:David Allen’s new book, “Making it All Work; Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life”, has gone on sale at book stores everywhere.  You can get your copy by clicking the link above.

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Mark Walsh of Integration Journal

Mark Walsh writes the Integration Journal, and authored a great post on GTD last week. This post might be especially interesting for you if you know that you need to change something to get a handle on your commitments, but  aren’t certain if GTD is the solution for you.

To learn more about GTD services and offerings in the United Kingdom, please contact Next Action Associates.

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A Community Contribution by Arif and Ali Vakil

Photo: I recently heard Steve Pavlina’s podcast “What is your Purpose”, in which he presented an excellent framework for arriving at your specific purpose. This ties in very well with GTD’s 40,000 ft horizon of focus and also a continuation of my previous post “GTD @ 50,000: How to find and fulfill your life’s purpose“.

At 50,000 ft you’re clarifying ‘what’ your set of values are and clarifying the ultimate purpose of why you exist.

At 40,000 ft you have to take your values and use them as a basis to   craft a vision. Your vision manifests your purpose into real life goals of ‘how’ you want your life to be.

In this post I’ll be showing you how you can craft a comprehensive vision that covers all major aspects of your life (Body, Mind, Heart & Spirit) to make yourself a complete a human being.

The Four Questions

* Body: What are my material needs?
The answer to this question should cover the details of what kind of lifestyle you would like to live. This would include the money you like to earn per month. What sort of house would you like to live in? etc

* Mind: What am I capable of doing?
Address your core skills. Every human being is endowed with certain skills, or interests that help to develop those skills. List out the things you are best at doing.

* Heart: What do I want do do?
Where are your dreams? Where does your passion lie?

* Spirit: What should I be doing?
Based on your beliefs & values, what is your conscience telling you that you should be doing?

Score Card

The answers you get to the above questions will be ‘areas of activities’. Jot these down under the activities column and score each of them from 1 to 10, as to how much they address the needs of your Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit.

Matrix

Once you’ve totaled the value each activity is giving you, you’ll intuitively be able to see which activity will give you most balance in your life. This will help you to see very clearly what your 40,000 ft vision needs to be, and based on this you can derive specific measurable goals for the 30,000ft horizon.

Advantages of having a Vision

* Clear direction of where you’re heading
* Clarity whether your next actions align with your Vision
* Feel Motivated
* High Energy
* Feel inspired
* Ability to Focus

Have you crafted your vision @ the 40,000ft Horizon of Focus? Please share any tips below for GTDtimes readers.

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Have you ever wondered how Santa maintains perspective and control over everything that has his attention? I mean, with all of the letters, a toy shop to supervise, flight plans and air travel restrictions to deal with … and the weather! It’s enough to drive any normal person crazy. I always thought Santa must have a secret to staying productive. Apparently, he does.

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Community Contribution by Erik Hanberg

I lurched into a Getting Things Done system over a couple fits and starts. First it started with two friends who had read the book and were talking it up. I was uninterested in what I thought was a “self-help” book.

But that soon changed when I discovered an Atlantic magazine article about David Allen and GTD by a writer I particularly like, James Fallows. Some of the ideas were interesting enough that I started doing them right away, based on Allen’s quotes in the article.

It took another week or so for me to get a hold of the book, and I fine-tuned my process as I read. I could quickly see the potential of the system, but I thought that it would take a lot more work to really get the system working the way it was described in the book (the collection phase seemed particularly daunting).

A couple weeks later, though, while spending the Fourth of July on beautiful Madeline Island, Wisconsin, I’d done a passable enough job of getting my lists assembled and I was ready to enjoy my vacation. One incredible morning I spent on the front porch of the house: just me, a cup of coffee, the view of Lake Superior, and not a thought in my head.

I was finally clued in to what David Allen had been getting at: with everything off your mind and on paper, you are free to just be. That morning was all the evidence I needed that I should make the effort to fully implement GTD.

The Sunday after returning from Wisconsin I scheduled off six hours and completed a full GTD collection. Suddenly my file system worked, my action items were easily collected, and I was feeling on top of the world.

Amazingly, six months later, I’m still doing GTD. This is unheard of for me. I’m much more the kind of person to become fascinated with an idea, an author, a certain world-view, or whatever other bright shiny thing I latch on to—only to drop it a month or two later for the next bright shiny thing.

But GTD was different because of one important function: the weekly review.

Certainly the feeling of being on top of things is a high sufficient to keep a productivity system like GTD going, right? Well … no. I feel great after burning 300 calories at the YMCA and eating a healthy dinner, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to go back the next day.

The weekly review has become an essential part of my week. Using Things for Mac, an action item appears weekly that tells me to do a weekly review.

Cribbing directly from Getting Things Done, these are the tasks and questions I go through one by one:

•    Find all loose papers
•    Go through last week of calendar
•    Go through next week of calendar
•    Review projects and action items. Should I add a project for any action item?
•    Am I waiting for anything?
•    Go through Someday/Maybe List
•    Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas I can add?

I’ll usually be able to add another 20 action items or so during the review. Some of them are triggered by the review of papers or the calendar (That’s right, I need to get that document reviewed by Tuesday’s meeting), others are triggered by reviewing the project list. (One of my projects is “Enrich relationship with friends.” This usually puts an action item on the list like “Email Aaron” or “Call Phil about games.”)

In the last six months, there have been plenty of bad weeks—bad because I’m feeling spacey, lazy, or grouchy—and I am negligent with logging action items, checking my next action list, and recording ideas when they come to me. Each and every time, the weekly review has pulled me out of it.

To make sure I actually do the weekly review, I make it as pleasant as possible. On Sunday nights I gather all my loose papers and take them into the living room, where I sit in my favorite armchair with my computer on my lap. A glass of wine and music on the stereo are usually involved, too. I’ll tell my fiancée Mary that I’m doing a review and will get a quiet hour of uninterrupted time, although recently I’ve been able to get the whole review done in 30 or 40 minutes.

Some Sunday nights scheduling won’t allow me to have the time to do a review, so I’ll usually bump it to Monday afternoon. It doesn’t have the same “feel good” impact, but I get through it and make it to the next week.

I’ve made it through 25 weeks of solid GTD work. And 25 weeks is a pretty good sign that this is bigger than a bright shiny fad. I’m sticking with it … weekly review by weekly review.

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Editor’s Note: It is my pleasure to introduce a new GTDtimes Contributor, Venkatesh Rao. Venkat works at the Xerox Innovation Group, where he leads technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work.

Prior to Xerox, he spent 2.5 years as a postdoc at Cornell, in Raff D’Andrea’s robotics research group. His work at Cornell was on Air Force command and control models for future battlefields. Between 1997-2003, he was at the University of Michigan, working on his PhD, which was on aircraft and spacecraft formation dynamics, with Pierre Kabamba.

His home discipline is systems and control theory, but for inspiration and ideas he draws from all the decision sciences including OR and AI. More of Venkat’s work can be found at his personal weblog, Ribbonfarm.

Recalibrating Your GTD Systems

(adapted version of an article I originally posted on my personal blog, ribbonfarm.com. GTD newbies might want to start with the for-dummies level companion piece I just posted there, before tackling this one.)

Here’s a great holiday-season project for you GTDers looking to improve your systems: recalibration. If you pull this off, your New Year’s resolutions might actually be more than a ritual in 2009. Your GTD system is really just a complex feedback control system, like your car’s cruise control or your thermostat. And like every system that depends on measurement, it needs occasional recalibration. So this article aims to show you how you can recalibrate your own systems, using my own efforts as a case study. It begins with the fundamental question, can you measure information work? The short answer: yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

Calibrating Work in the Raw

The first thing you’ve got to understand about measuring information work is that at the ground level, one size does not fit all. There are ways to abstract away from the specific nature of your work, which I’ll get to, but you still need to understand it first. The measurement methods I’ll talk about later rely on data artifacts generated by meta-work (like GTD lists). But meta-stuff must be calibrated against what it talks about. A typical next-step in your life may be an hour long, while one in my life may be five minutes. You won’t know until you look.

Every sort of information work transforms some sort of information artifact into some other sort of information artifact. Paul Erdos famously defined mathematics as the process of turning coffee into theorems, so in his case plotting ‘gallons of coffee’ (considering caffeine, metaphorically, to be information) against ‘number of theorems proved’ might have worked as a first pass.

My graph above reflects throughput patterns within my particular style of academic engineering research in modeling and simulation during that particular period (I was a postdoc at Cornell during this time). Coffee at Stella’s got transformed into written notes. Notes got transformed, in this case, into computer code with which I ran experiments, which produced data files. The data then got transformed to research output documents (papers and presentations). Here’s how I measured this throughput, each artifact in its own unit, with the graphs scaled so that the cumulative total at the end of the year is 1 (since we don’t care about absolute numbers when comparing apples and oranges) :

• NOTES: The cumulative number of pages in my research notes files. This is the best measure of “ideation” activity I could find.
• CODE: The megabytes of code and data in my working programming folders. This is one coarse measure of the amount of actual “work” being accumulated in computing work (today, I’d use a code repository and count check-ins)
• WRITING: The megabytes of working documentation in my computer “research” project folder. This measures the rate at which the “work” in 2 is being converted to completed output such as “papers” or “presentations”
• MGMT: This graph shows the accumulation of GTD data, or “overhead,” more on that in a bit, since this graph “measures” the others in a sense.

[Read more →]

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For folks that are curious about David Allen’s new book,Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life, I’ve got a treat for you.  bNet has just put up a full chapter excerpt that you can check out right now.

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It’s not just the little guys that appreciate all that David Allen and GTD has to offer.  Some of the biggest corporations on the planet have implemented GTD to improve workplace productivity and personal life/work satisfaction of their work forces.

One such company, Costco, has a publication that they send to almost six million small business owners.  It is having a house list such as this that makes Costco one of the most successful businesses of its kind in the history of the world.

Thus, it is a tremendous honor for everyone involved with David Allen and the David Allen Company that David is featured on the cover of this month’s Costco Connection as well as in a multi-page article on the inside. It’s free so be sure to check it out!

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A Community Contribution by Eric Hanberg

When I started implementing GTD this summer, I thought the main benefit was going to be felt in my work life first and foremost, as GTD would help me juggle my pieced-together living as a freelance writer and web developer.

GTD has certainly helped me professionally, but it has been my personal life—the non-work, non-paying responsibilities I have—where I’ve seen the most dramatic changes thanks to GTD.

Let me give you an example.

I have lived in a condo in a small four-plex building in downtown Tacoma for the past five years. I’ve served as the president of the condo association since moving in.  This was an accident. At the very first meeting of the four owners I made the mistake of asking; “Who’s going to sign checks?” Apparently everyone decided that the person who thinks of the question should be the one to do it, since I was immediately elected.

But with such a small association, a better title for my high office might be Master Light-bulb Replacer – Or Chief Leak Investigator – Or even Director of Spider Removal. The sum total of the work required of the president probably totals no more than two hours of work a month. And yet I never did it. It was as if the less time it took, the more likely I was to put it off.

Neighbors complained about dark staircases, or poor lawn care service, or the build-up of recycling in the garage. And I felt ashamed I hadn’t been more proactive. I didn’t deal with problems until the last minute, sometimes much later. I got in to the habit of ducking my neighbors and hated bumping in to them on the stairs.

Managing Two Minutes at a Time

The GTD system has turned this around, thanks almost exclusively to David Allen’s Two Minute Rule. (For the uninitiated, the Two Minute Rule states that if a task can be done in less than two minutes, it’s best just to get it done there on the spot.)

It was amazing how many of my duties were only two minutes long. A neighbor says the gardeners are missing a patch of grass? Fire off a two-minute e-mail to the management company. I notice some windows have lost their seal in my unit? Fire off e-mails to the other owners to see if they are having the same problem. Standing water got me worried? Call the handyman and schedule a time for him to come out.

Because of my shame at the lousy job I was doing, I used to mull over these tasks and endlessly put them off. Which, not surprisingly, made me feel worse about the lousy job I was doing.

And now it’s hard to even remember why I dreaded them so much. Most of them take just two minutes!

Certainly, I can’t credit the Two Minute Rule for everything here. The whole GTD suite of solutions has been helpful. But I’ve come to realize that so many tasks I used to dread at work or at home are really just two minutes of my time once I commit to doing them.

When I think of the worry and heartache I used to put myself through … I’m relieved that it’s all behind me.

These days, I doubt I spend anywhere close to two hours a month on the condo association. So I’ve cut the time I spend on the job, stuff is actually getting done, and I don’t feel guilt or shame when I see a neighbor. In fact, I enjoy running in to them in the hallways and catching up.

So, yes, good fences make good neighbors. But I’ve learned good task management systems make for pretty good neighbors, too.

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