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Editor’s Note:  Here’s a post from new contributor Erik Hanberg.  When he wrote me about this and said that he was going on his honeymoon with no more advance planning then the tickets home I thought to myself poor man – he’s going to come home a divorcee… Apparently he chose more wisely that I had in my marriage or else his devotion to GTD is a magic elixer for travel trouble with a spouse but it seems he managed to survive the trip unscathed and actually had a little fun in the process.  This post is also a good example of doing something with GTD that I need to learn to do myself; that is use if for things that you want to do too- not just things you have to do.  Welcome home, Erik and thanks for the entertaining post.

Two Return Tickets, No Reservations.  What could go wrong???

A three-week honeymoon to Thailand and Cambodia … what need is there for GTD, right? On my main list of “contexts” for my tasks–home, office, phone, email, online, read/review–there was little I could do. I wasn’t at home, my phone didn’t work, I had limited access to the Internet, and as for “read/review”–I had packed all my magazines and books that I intended to go through. So again, why would I even be thinking about GTD?

Well, how else was I going to make sure I did the fun things I wanted to do? How else to make sure we had our flights, visas and hotels arranged on the fly? And how else could I make sure that I returned home ready to hit the ground running when I came back to work?

All we had was a return ticket and three weeks to kill…

When my wife and I landed in Phuket, all we had was a ticket home three weeks later. No hotel reservations, no tours booked, no real definite plans–just a flight home. The freedom to let the wind carry us where it would was wonderful, but it also gave me a lot of action items at the start of the trip: apply for a visa to Cambodia, book Phang Nga Bay boat tour, research hotels in Bangkok, etc.

Certainly we could have done a lot of that work before starting the honeymoon, but we both felt a lot better about making decisions once we saw the lay of the land (not to mention that the weeks ahead of the trip were full of wedding planning).

To make it a little easier, I created a “Thailand” tag in Things, my GTD program of choice, that allowed me to quickly separate the 5 or 6 action items I needed to do on vacation from the 150 other items. That said, I was able to check off some items I hadn’t expected, like “get a haircut” and some other tasks that would have been mundane at home but were actually kind of fun and challenging to do abroad.

Be Present

After the burst of planning, the need to plan ahead fell by the wayside and we were able to just be present to enjoy the beauty of Thailand and Cambodia. We explored ancient temples, sampled pad thai from street vendors, and lounged on some of the world’s most beautiful beaches. With limited advanced planning, we operated based on how we were feeling that day. If we were tired of hanging out at the beach, we grabbed a taxi and headed for a remote attraction. If we felt like we hadn’t seen enough of a particular town, we extended our stay another night.

Work and home were far away things, and if I ever had a thought I wanted to remember later, I jotted it down and went about my vacation.

Two Weeks In

After about two weeks of travel, I started to notice I was getting fidgety. Home and work–which had previously felt light-years away–were now suddenly looming. My mind was starting to dwell on projects and tasks I had waiting for me back home. Late one night while on an overnight train transfer I pulled out my computer and–for the first time on the vacation–did a full weekly review. There hadn’t been any need before that, but I found that tucked into the narrow confines of an upper-berth bunk I was in the perfect place to cleanse my mind of the random thoughts that had been distracting me. In less than an hour I added more than 40 action items to my list and a few new projects that had occurred to me on the trip as well.

Going through that short exercise helped me fully engage with the last week of our vacation with no worries about the jump back in to work. It also gave me a renewal of energy. The wear of travel that had slowly accumulated over two weeks was washed away, and it felt like the trip was starting over. The next day I took a Thai cooking class. The day after, I bathed an elephant–a task that doesn’t normally appear on my action list, unfortunately. (If you want to see a short video of my excursion to the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, check it out here.)

Now that I’m back

Coming back from long trips, I used to feel like I needed a vacation from my vacation. That wasn’t the case this time. Was that GTD? I don’t know for sure. But I came back feeling refreshed, excited, and ready to go.

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Contributed by Pat Smith, CEO of The David Allen Company. He has worked in the HR/OD/OE field for over twenty years, and is considered an expert in the field of organizational development, change management and leadership development. Pat can be reached at pat.smith at davidco dot com

In Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times (McGraw-Hill), renowned management consultant Ram Charan offers executives a detailed guide to surviving the worst financial and business crisis since the Great Depression. The key, Charan says, is “management intensity”-deep immersion in the operational details of the business and the outside world, combined with hands-on involvement and follow-through.

Plans and progress must be revisited almost daily. Big-picture, strategic-level thinking cannot be abandoned, but every leader now must be involved, visible, and in daily communication with employees, customers, and suppliers. In this world, everyone needs detailed, up-to-date, and unfiltered information. And they have to act decisively when trouble looms. “If you don’t prepare for the worst,” says Charan, “you will put both your company and career at risk.”

Management Intensity and HR
HR has been pretty intensely consumed with issues related to talent management over the past decade. This has been largely as a response to economic and demographic factors. The economy has been booming (meaning a higher demand for skilled workers) and the birth rate has fallen (meaning a decreasing supply of them).

In response, many organizations have increased their focus on attraction, retention and development–to put it another way, getting the right people in the right seats and keeping them there.

Major initiatives such as career development, employee engagement and retention, workplace satisfaction, and mentoring have been widely implemented to support the achievement of talent management goals.

As I sit here in January 2009, however, recession once again dominates the business headlines, and in boardrooms across the country executives are meeting to discuss falling revenues and budget cuts.  Now comes a study from Leadership IQ, a training and research firm, which bears out the conventional wisdom. Three-quarters of layoff survivors say their productivity has declined while customer service has worsened. The survey also found that 69 percent of the remaining workers believe the quality of the company’s products or services has declined since the layoffs.

The company’s survey of 4,172 workers who kept their jobs after a layoff also found that an astonishing 64% of surviving workers say the productivity of their colleagues has also declined.

Getting the right people remains critical, but in the short term, hiring will decrease and employees will become more security-conscious and thus less eager to jump ship.  There will be a renewed focus on costs, and that includes salary costs—-specifically productivity per employee (be that in terms of revenue, profit or production units).

HR to the Rescue?
Inherent in the current economic condition is an opportunity for organizations (and HR in particular) to expand their focus beyond attraction and retention to also include productivity.

Now that the new economic reality has set in, leaders have an extraordinary opportunity to add new value to the enterprise by focusing on initiatives to increase productivity and efficiency in the midst of economic downturn.  In this case, that equates to what people do—and how they do it.

GTD as a Possible Solution
As the world’s leading skill set for personal and organizational productivity, one unique aspect of GTD is that it can be immediately applied to the current projects an individual is working on. For this reason, personal and organizational productivity can be immediately impacted. In our various GTD seminars, most of the work that participants work on is real world project work. This ensures that every participant departs fully enabled to immediately be more productive—both on the job and at home.

Another important aspect of GTD is its scalability.  In support of a company-wide productivity initiative, GTD’s productivity behaviors can be easily scaled across even a global multinational organization.  GTD is commonly mapped to an organization’s core competencies to ensure that productivity is systematically supported by the various HR systems.

Finally, a distinctive feature of GTD is the amazing residual benefit that participants experience in their personal lives. GTD offers the participant and the organization tremendous value – not only because of the improved quality of work life that often lasts for the rest of one’s career, but also because of the increase in personal satisfaction, stress-relief, and productivity that people practicing GTD experience.  For organizations, this translates to more productivity in troubled times as well as more satisfied employees.

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Consider this:  While personal productivity tends to be low, room for productivity improvement in the average employee is high; on a scale of 1-10 the average score is 4.8.

In these circumstances, use of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology shows a minimum of 20% improvement in personal productivity and effectiveness. This was shown in a recent Productivity Scan research study conducted by Life Architect and set up in collaboration with the David Allen Company.

Personal Productivity

Productivity consists of four core elements: effectiveness, focus, control and balance. Overall productivity being the sum of these four components. Productivity is about the desire to achieve certain goals and how effectively they are attained. Control in your own work sphere is therefore instrumental in stress control.

The Life Architect Productivity Scan shows a significant difference between the personal productivity of people living in the Netherlands (5.5) compared with other countries (3.9). The scan also shows that implementation of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or “GTD” strategy improves personal productivity by 20%. The Dutch who use GTD, scored an average of 6.1 (still room to improve here too, but an average point higher than other people).

Personal Productivity: Effectiveness (4.7)

Productivity Effectiveness is measured with statements like: “I keep working harder but the loose ends keep piling up” and “I achieve all my goals”. The highest score of 5.3 was given to “I always find everything I need when I need it”. The biggest differences between the statements were found in this section. For example, the Dutch score 6.5 on the previous statement, yet only manage a 4 in response to the statement “work is always on my mind in the evening”. Dutch non-GTD users scored an average 4.5 compared to 5.7 for GTD users.

Personal Productivity: Focus (5)

The Productivity Scan showed that many respondents do not know what they want to achieve or how they want to achieve it. The average score for productivity focus is a 4.8. Several respondents indicated that they have conflicting interests scoring a 5.

The question “My goals are in line with my work / daily activities” was given a 6.6 by Dutch people compared to 3.1 outside The Netherlands. This is a relatively low score especially given the fact that half the total participants in the scan are in a senior or managerial position.

Personal Productivity: Control (5)

There is much talk about the overloaded e-mail inbox, but our research, whilst indicating this a problem area, revealed a score of 5.3, e-mail is certainly not the biggest problem.

The lowest score of 4.8 was given to the statement “I want to clear my head”. Noticeably the Dutch scored a 3.6 compared to a 6.5 for people outside The Netherlands. Apparently the Dutch have a greater need for a “clear head”. Another noteworthy difference is that the Dutch see an empty workspace as an incentive (8.1) compared to a 2.7 for other people. Dutch GTD users score an 8.8.

Personal Productivity: Balance (4.8)

“I feel that I spend my time on the right things” scored low with an average of 4.6 and the statement “I have time left for the things that are important to me” scored a lower 4 5. However considerable differences are found between GTD users and non-users.

GTD users scored a 5.3 on the statement ” I feel relaxed and in control” while non-GTD’ers scored a 4.1. There also appears to be a link with the question “I know what my passion is” which scored an average of 5.2. The Dutch showed a higher 6.9.

Conclusion

The unexpectedly low scores on this personal Productivity Scan also indicate that the respondents have completed the questions honestly. Many people do things without thinking of the desired outcome, the objectives to be achieved, or the impact and importance of their work. People may think about it but do not take the steps to effectively set priorities or next actions.

Especially in the light of current events and the world economic crisis, the importance of productivity in organizations is also dependent on the same factors described in this Productivity Scan. David Allen author and originator of GTD,says that now more than ever is the time to “get in control of what we can, with the right people at the right time”.

GTD changes the way we work in terms of personal and organizational productivity and effectiveness. This Scan shows that GTD helps to maintain control and perspective at home and at work, quickly delivering a 20% increase in personal productivity.

Public GTD seminar in Amsterdam: 19th February 2009

Would you like to be learn more about GTD (Getting Things Done) with David Allen and meet the man in person? He will be in Amsterdam on 19th February 2009 to give the GTD seminar “Making it All Work”. Registration on GTD seminar Amsterdam or http://www.davidcom.com/.

Would you like to know more about the current status of personal and organizational productivity in your organization, please contact Elise de Bres of Life Architect for the Life Architect Productivity Scan.
New translation of David Allen’s “Making It All Work”

David Allen’s latest book “Making it All Work” is now available in both English and Dutch (same title,  from February 23rd)

About the respondents

754 people completed life Architect’s Productivity Scan. Of the respondents, half indicated that they had a management or leadership role in their organization, and 28% were female half of which used GTD. Respondents were Dutch (436 people) or other Nationals (308 of which slightly less than a third from Belgium and the rest from countries including USA, Australia, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Finland, Germany, Austria, UK etc).

Personal Productivity Scan

The Personal Productivity Scan has been prepared on the basis of 23 statements in the form of a questionnaire. Five points of individual productivity and three additional points were measured.

The statements could be answered on the basis of a sliding scale (strongly agree; agree; neutral; disagree; strongly disagree). Where a positively formulated statement was filled in a response was given the following values: +2, +1, 0, -1, -2. This was reversed where statements where negatively stated.

All scores were added together and divided by the number of respondents. Thus the average was determined. Final scores were divided by 4 and rounded to 2 decimal places. For a full report on findings, please contact us via the web site. Use or publication of these findings is permitted with full reference to Life Architect.

Everyone has a purpose in his life. A successful business or career, a loving and happy family life, time for the important things and events, space for creativity and less stress. In order to achieve all that you want to, you need a plan, or blueprint. Life Architect helps you achieve more with less stress, helps you to improve your life—helps you to make, identify and interpret your life’s plan.

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