A successful executive
June 10th, 2010 GTD Times Team - Staff ContributorsCategories | David Allen | Inspiration
A successful executive is one that solves bigger problems than he/she creates.
-David Allen
A successful executive is one that solves bigger problems than he/she creates.
-David Allen
For those of you in the Los Angeles area, David Allen will be the featured speaker at an event in Thousand Oaks, CA.
When: Tuesday, June 15th
Times: 7:30am – 9am
Topic: Creating Order Out of Chaos – Staying Afloat in a World of Too Much To Do
This is a paid, in-person only event–not a Webinar. Please follow the link to learn more from the organization hosting this.
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For a Webinar with David Allen, the next one will be on June 23rd from 11am-12pm through our online learning center–GTD Connect. David will be taking attendee examples to coach people through the GTD Fundamental Process (What’s the Outcome? and What’s the Next Action?) Free to all GTD Connect members. Register now on the home page of Connect. Not a member? Try the 14-day trial.
We’ve all been there!
Longtime GTDer Jacki shared this on our GTD Facebook Fan Page about her experience with the GTD Weekly Review:
For the longest time I avoided the Weekly Review and just moved from day to day reacting to what came up – in other words, I had not implemented the most effective part of GTD. Then I set aside an hour on Sunday, turned off the phone and TV, and put on a pot of tea and some relaxing music. During that time I asked myself why was I avoiding the Weekly Review? I found the answer to be that once I knew how many things needed to be done in my personal and business life, I felt overwhelmed. But then I realized that once I had it all out in front of me, I could pick and choose what I could do when, delegate in some instances, and negotiate deadlines on some items, and put off some indefinitely. I started with just telling myself to do it for 15 minutes, and that stretched to an hour. Now that golden hour every week helps me face whatever comes my way. I can make adjustments and still get through the week with confidence and with most of my life and business tasks accomplished.
What has your experience been doing (or not doing) the Weekly Review?
Dominique James has written a book review of implementing Getting Things Done with Cultured Code’s “Things” software. As a creative professional, it’s an interesting view of what he needed in a software program to work for his GTD setup. Read more…
Question: I have been trying to become “less papered” in business and home and have not found any references in your material that covers this aspect of organization.
David Allen: What to store simply as paper and what to bother putting into digital form is purely a matter of how you want your library structured. There’s an infinite set of possibilities about that. Once you’ve filtered appropriate actions and projects and someday’s from your material, all the rest is simply up to logistics for data storage and retrieval. Make sure that you are OK with short-term paper-based materials being filed. Otherwise if you feel it’s too much trouble to scan or store, they’ll wind up in a stack instead.
For more GTD tips on Reference filing, grab David Allen’s free article in our store. There are also a few great videos on GTD Connect about filing, including David Allen talking about the best practices of “clean edges”. And you’ll find an audio podcast available only on Connect where David talks about how he manages his financial files. Not a member? Try the 14-day free trial.
A Community Contribution from Pam, who wrote to David with her story
Since the moment that I graduated from college about a year ago, I have been dealing with a copious amount of change, some good, some bad but mostly I was dealing with a deep lack of direction. I finally determined that a lot of it had to do with my inability to get a grip of my ‘To-Dos’ and a lack of planning and organizing in nearly everything about my life. I can say that I am now more organized whereas my past self would stubbornly deny that I was ever any other way. You see, I would organize in parts so everything was sorted in its “designated” area (or anything that looked like it could be together) and resolved the part done. But none of these parts worked together and there’s a long list of unfinished projects to prove it. Most of my time was spent finding parts and ideas that were stuffed into random, sorted parts and by the end of it, I would just give up. [Read more →]
