Chip Joyce is a director of business development for the David Allen Company. He was a regular Community Contributor before coming on staff. We hope you continue to enjoy his posts.
Chip Joyce is a director of business development for the David Allen Company. He was a regular Community Contributor before coming on staff. We hope you continue to enjoy his posts.
This post is from Chip Joyce, a longtime GTDer who also happens to work for David Allen Company as Director of Business Development in New York.
A principle of Getting Things Done is to habitually write down everything that has your attention. Writing things down can be done with pen on paper, or typing into a computer, or any method that externalizes the thought. The key is to get it out of your head.
Then you need to assess whether you are going to commit to doing something about what you’ve written down. If so, what is the desired outcome? What does done look like? And what is the next action to get to that point? Alternately, [Read more →]
A challenge for many GTDers is how to have a trusted system among several discrete software systems. Typically the situation arises in the workplace where either Outlook or Lotus Notes exists, plus other systems that may be CRMs, databases, or dashboard and reporting tools. Additionally, the workplace systems might not be convenient or available for one’s personal life.
My system was working great for me. My lists were in Omnifocus on my MacBook Pro and iPhone. I used web-based Gmail, and I would copy the URL for an email and paste its hyperlink into the note field of an item in Omnifocus. I used iCalendar that syncs to Google Calendar. I also used a David Allen Note Taker wallet for my ubiquitous capture tool.
Being hired by David Allen Company created significant problems to my tidy GTD ecosystem. [Read more →]
A Community Contribution from Chip Joyce
After retiring from being the most successful professional cyclist in history, Lance returned to the sport in his late 30s to compete, for the eighth time, in one of the most challenging athletic competitions: the Tour de France. During training, however, he crashed and broke his collarbone, was in a lot of pain, and faced surgery and physical therapy. It was the first major crash of his career.
In an article on VeloNews.com, Lance recounted, “Sitting on the side of the road in Spain, headed to an anonymous hospital… I wanted to never come back,” to the sport. His long-time team manager and mentor, Johan Bruyneel, said, “I could feel he was really down. I had a feeling he was ready to walk away.” [Read more →]
Personal relationships are among my GTD Areas of Focus and Responsibility. I maintain a list of all persons with whom I have friendly relations. I informally call it my “friends list” even though I think it would be too presumptuous to call all of these people friends: There are well over 300 people on it right now. It is a work-in-progress and whenever someone pops into my consciousness and I am unsure whether he or she is on my list, I make a note on my ubiquitous capture tool and add them to the list later. [Read more →]
As a sales executive, a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition is by helping clients manage the project your solution is supposed to help. While this is known as a “consultative sale” and might seem like nothing new, ask yourself: how many salespeople actually have a system for it?
Salespersons are trained to sell, not to consult. So most people do not do well in “consultative sales” despite what they said when they were interviewed.
Fortunately, those of you who discovered GTD have two great tools at your disposal. [Read more →]
This is how to apply GTD to managing sales and client accounts. Keeping true to the technologically-agnostic principle of GTD, I am going to describe the system as it would work in a paper-based way. You can adapt it to the various tools that you prefer or that are mandated by your employer.
A sales cycle is something like: prospecting, establishing the relationship, discovering a need, defining a solution, and closing the sale. Let’s put it in a GTD framework. [Read more →]
Living in an apartment in Manhattan I have very limited space, and I cannot possibly keep the amount of file cabinets that I otherwise might. Unfortunately I have been the opposite of a pack rat: I routinely discarded material, and later regretted it. Having been a horrible organizer all my life, despite full court press attempts every couple years, I basically had a box of everything “important” that I added to, and once in a while retrieved from. Then I would cull the box occasionally, and there was no space–literally–for sentimentality. [Read more →]
You’ll find as many different ways to setup a GTD “ecosystem” as there are people practicing GTD. In case this is useful, we want to share this letter we received from Chip in New York City, who wrote to us about his hybrid paper + Mac GTD system, and what’s working well for him.
I’ve been using the trifold wallet for a couple of weeks now, and as a capture tool it can’t be beat. I have an iPhone and use the application Things on my Mac
