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.  I would have to use Lotus Notes for company email and calendaring, with the eProductivity add-on being optional; LongJump for sales workflow (it is similar to SalesForce); and I would also have a BlackBerry. Starting a new job, with its learning curve, is challenging enough. Having one’s GTD system feel like it is about to blow up is downright stressful.

Fortunately, with the help of a couple of our coaches, I quickly got a rough plan on how to adapt my GTD system to a way that would be comfortable for me. My first priority was: I must keep my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and Omnifocus. The company supports Mac and PC users. I turned off eProductivity because I am going to keep my lists on Omnifocus – mainly because I want my lists on my iPhone, and I am comfortable with it.

Below is my current lists configuration (this is the result of a couple major renovations since I began the job). I separate personal from work. Within work I have different groups for projects:

• Inactive accounts – prospects and clients who do not have any activity for now but are on hold or on a trigger list for a future date
• Account development – prospects and clients with whom I am currently working, with each engagement being a project
• GTD community contributor – tracking projects such as writing this article
• DAC/GTD messaging – marketing-related projects for David Allen Company (“DAC”)
• Home office maintenance and operations – projects pertaining to my remote office
• Networking and relationships – non-sales relationships and projects
• DAC areas of focus and responsibility – higher altitude parts of my job
• DAC someday/maybe

When I get email from Notes that would take more than 2 minutes to act on it, I either move it to a folder in Lotus Notes called “Action Support” and create a Next Action in Omnifocus, or more often, I copy the content and paste it into the Next Action note and delete the email. So I do not use Notes to track anything: it is simply a conduit to me.

When I create an appointment, I do it in iCalendar. It syncs to Google Calendar and Lotus Notes Calendar, which then syncs to my iPhone and BlackBerry. However, when I respond to a call appointment sent to me via Lotus Notes, I need to manually duplicate it to iCalendar, because Notes does not replicate to my personal calendar system. Again, my personal calendar system is my “real” calendar but I need to use Lotus Notes for me job for the sake of others, so this works fine, if not perfectly elegantly.

When a prospective client calls me, I create a new project for her in “Account development.” In the project notes field, I paste her contact information from her email, and this is where I type all my notes, and paste relevant email excerpts. This is also where I transcribe any paper notes I have from meetings. Of course, I also create my Next Actions. But I still need to comply with company policy by using LongJump sales/CRM tool. So I create the record and maintain it as required, oftentimes pasting information from my project notes. So as Notes is a merely a conduit for me and Omnifocus is my trusted system, LongJump is a reference and reporting system for me and Omnifocus is where I actually manage my workflow.

When I am not at my desk, here is how I use my BlackBerry for email:  I scan incoming emails, delete the ones I can, respond to brief-response or time-sensitive emails, and File other emails to an Action Required folder. Then when I get to my computer, I process those emails into my system.

Obviously, I have a complex work set-up with many tools I must use, plus a few that I wish to use no matter what. While it certainly took some time to fine-tune and get familiar with, I have firm control over the situation. The key reason is that, no matter how many disparate systems and tools I have, I work from Omnifocus and everything else is merely either a conduit or a reference system, from my perspective. However, I am also complying with company requirements by using their systems properly: I manage work emails, maintain the work calendar, and maintain the sales/CRM system. I simply do not use any of those systems as my personal tracking system.

To some this seems complicated and redundant. However redundant some elements of it may be, the reality is that my thinking is not redundant: I have one trusted system and it is from there that I do most of my work.

Chip Joyce is a business development director with the David Allen Company and regular community contributor to GTD Times.  You might enjoy his other posts too. You can also reach him by email.

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.”Bruyneel, who says he and Lance have “a very special relationship,” shared several bottles of wine at Bruyneel’s home in Madrid, during which he reminded Lance of the importance of his Tour comeback to revitalize his Livestrong campaign and also remind him of one of Lance’s most famous phrases: “Pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever.” Bruyneel recalls, “I said (quitting) is not what you stand for… I understand at a certain moment, you’re disappointed, you’re reconsidering. ‘Do I need to do this?’ No, you don’t need to do this. But at a certain moment when you go, when you make decision [sic], you have to go until the end.”

Lance’s ultimate response was, “I just spoke with Johan, and he said I have no choice, so I guess we’ll go forward.” Bruyneel said that, “from then on he started to feel better, we got into the Tour of Gila, it felt good, then he got to the start of the Giro, and he felt good, and everything started to roll again. But if I think about that moment in Paris [at the completion of the Tour de France], when he was standing on the podium, and think back to that conversation in the beginning of April, it was two different worlds.”

Lance’s renewed fidelity to his values, including his commitment to professional cycling and to the Livestrong Foundation, occurred amidst the drama of injury and a heart-to-heart talk with his mentor. In GTD terms, Lance realigned with his Horizons of Focus, and once he put into perspective his decision whether to quit or not, the decision was obvious to him.

If you invest the time and energy toward developing your Horizons of Focus, in trying times, you can persevere by drawing strength from these commitments, and remembering that “pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever.”

Each of my “friends” fit into one of these categories. Note that I do not consider a romantic partner, or children if I had them, to be friends. Similarly, if you have a singular “best friend” that person need not be on the list. These persons are not comparable to others and are each their own category.

1. Closest and current friends. These are my dearest friends and are, fortunately, a current and regular part of my life. Contrast with Category 2
2. Closest but not-current friends. I value these friends equally to Category 1 friends but life circumstances have deprived me of enjoying them as I wish. The main reason is that they live far away. I know that if circumstances improved they would be Category 1.
3. Forever-friends. I want these people to be friends for life, but they do not have the same level of value-sharing as I do with Category 1 & 2 friends. Many of these friends are from various schools, my childhood, etc. Some of them were Category 1/2 friends but we grew apart. Many relatives might be in this category, as well.
4. Current acquaintances. I know these people and like them, but my interaction is very context-specific. If that context changed the relationship would likely end. Examples are neighbors, some co-workers, work-out partners or sports team members, and service people like your local butcher, bartender, storekeepers, hair stylists, etc.
5. Not-current acquaintances. These are people I know and like, but they are not actively in my life and presently I do not expect to do anything to change that. Whenever I run in to them, I am glad to see them. Examples would be people I see if I happen to visit their towns (or vice versa), or see them at a party of mutual friends. However, I do try to reach out via email or calls on occasion.

These categories, as you can imagine, form a pyramid: Categories 4 & 5 are massive; 2 & 3 are greatly diminished in size, and 1 is very small.

This list is practical for when you need to send Christmas cards, announcements, etc. But the really important reasons to do this are:

1. By categorizing your friends, you can then allocate your time and resources to your friends in proportion to their level of importance. Recently I told a Category 2 friend how much he matters to me, and I deeply regret the deeply between us but I have the highest esteem and affection. That made me feel good, and I think it made him feel good too.
2. It helps you to evaluate your friendships objectively rather than emotionally. For example, I felt very bad for years for not keeping in touch with my childhood best friend. Through categorizing him, I realized my emotions for him were misplaced: he was not a Category 2 friend any more. At best he is a Category 3. While that caused sadness to me, because I realized we were no longer close, my emotions readjusted and now I am content with this fact.
3. It is dynamic. If you have time for more friendships, you can look to promoting someone one by engaging with them more. If you are too busy, you can reduce the amount of time you are spending with Category 3, for example.
4. It triggers action: review the list and do something for friends you have not contacted in a while. A phone call, email, ordering a gift, etc., may be all you can do.

Finally, if you have trouble deciding where a person fits — say, a Category 2 or 3, or a 3 or 4, consider how they relate in importance to people in those categories. This is how I re-categorized my childhood best friend: I had to be honest with myself and recognize he did not hold the same status to me as did the others in Category 2.

Try it and let me know what you learned.

Chip Joyce is a business development director with the David Allen Company and regular community contributor to GTD Times.  You might enjoy his other posts too. You can also reach him by email.

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. Specifically, they are David Allen’s “Project Planning Trigger List” and the “Natural Planning Model.” Learn to master those two tools and you are sure to increase your sales. [Editor note: you can find both models in the Getting Things Done book, or in this laminated set of GTD System Guides.]

For the truth is that your customer is probably overwhelmed by the project at hand. Maybe they identified a problem and finally got the boss’s go-ahead to look into purchasing a solution, and that is why you are in a dialogue with them. You and a few of your competitors, that is. Competitors who have products that might well be better than yours, or cheaper, or which have a better brand. Competitors who probably have a dashing salesperson with a bigger expense account and box seats and a country club membership.

The only thing you have to offer is to be recognized as the problem solver, and a lot of that includes identifying what exactly is the problem and to get there you need to ask a lot of really brilliant questions that your client has not even thought of. Let us consider an example of two competing salespersons.

Imagine yourself wanting to hire a contractor to put in a swimming pool for your backyard. One salesperson drives his dazzling new BMW M5 up your driveway. Being president of the largest pool contractor in the state has really paid off! He tells you about his millions in sales and what celebrities are sipping umbrella drinks in his masterpieces at this very moment, and his brochures are slick. You wonder, is that Jennifer Aniston floating in that pool? He then measures the yard, careful not to get his Brioni suit soiled, and then asks you what your budget is. Judging by his expression, obviously you are not going to be in the Jennifer Aniston pool. He smiles, though, and he tells you that you can have a pool of a certain size, but for 50% more money you can get a nicer look. He leaves some of those brochures for you, writes a quote and hands it to you. He must be going, he says. Will and Jada’s pool is finished and he needs to stop by for cocktails with them.

Then another salesperson comes in driving his F-150. He has a worn binder with product specs and photos, and the pages are mangled. Clearly he has taken the photos himself, and there is nothing near Jennifer or Will or Jada in any of them. He looks at your yard and then asks if you all can go into the kitchen and sit around the table to talk. He asks a lot of questions and takes notes. He asks things like:

• Who will be enjoying the pool? Oh, you and your wife, and the kids. Let’s get them to talk about what they hope for. How about the grandparents? Oh, they come over on weekends? Do you want to get an idea about whether they think it would be fun to have a pool?
• What is your plan for your house? Do you plan on staying for a few years? Every plan to expand the house? What’s the overall look you want?
• Who will be involved in decision making when the project is under-way? How do you want to be involved? How do you want us to communicate?
• How much money were you thinking of spending? Do you want to get the best pool you can afford or do you want to consider less expensive options too? Are you concerned about seeing an increase in value in your property, should you decide to sell?
• Do you have anything going on in the next fews weeks that might interrupt with the installation, such as parties, neighborhood activities, vacations, etc.?
• What is going to make you confident you got what you wanted, that we delivered as promised?
• Is there anyone else who needs to give approvals? Neighborhood boards and associations, etc.?
• Your neighbors are going to see you having a great time in the pool. Do you want to tell them your plans and make sure they know they are welcome to come over too?
• Do you need to check with the city ordinances? How about with your homeowners insurance policy?
• How about if we mark off the area where the pool will be and make sure you are comfortable with losing that land for other purposes, and we’ll show you how we will have to get the equipment in here too, OK?
• Would you like to read about the various technologies we have to offer, and hear my opinion on the pumps, filters, lights and surfaces that we can consider?
• Are you active in any groups whom you might want to entertain with a pool party? That’s a great way to start enjoying the pool to its fullest.
• Let’s make sure we understand the risks involved: we are going to be moving a lot of heavy equipment and tearing up the land, so we’ll make sure you understand what is involved. You need to be comfortable with it, OK?
• Have you thought about what a perfect pool experience would be? What would be a bad experience too? Let’s really spend some time thinking about those scenarios and see what we can learn before making any decisions, OK?

Tell me who’s just won your trust? (If you like the first salesperson, quit reading here.) I hope you like the second salesperson!  For he doesn’t just know about pools–he is really looking out for you. He is thinking about the impact of a pool in all aspects of your life. He is thinking of how it effects your family, your community, your friends, your finances, your plans for the house, etc. He has just made you think about things you never considered–and they are all important. You just found the swimming pool genius, and no one has a chance to sell you a pool except for him, right?

How do you position yourself in that way as a salesperson for your company and product? The good news is you do not need to be a genius. (The other good news is you can have a BMW M5, celebrity clients, and still be a great salesperson.)

The Project Planning Trigger List is a great place to start. It is a brain-storming tool: it asks a lot of great questions to consider in order to clarify the project. If you have a planning meeting with the client and lead a brain-storming session based on these questions, your credibility is going to sky-rocket. Because not only are you going to uncover some real gems in the discussion, but you are going to demonstrate that you are a big-picture thinker. If you are selling to a company, you have proved you are thinking like the CEO because you are looking out for the company as a whole. The way you do that is to ask questions about the following.

• Resources: whose input is needed, whose could you use, what resources might you need
• Executive issues: how it relates to overall company strategy
• Administration: how are we going to manage this project
• Finance: what funds are available, what are the costs, what are the potential payoffs, etc.
• Operations: how does this fit in with other operations of the company, and how are we going to ensure delivery
• Quality: how to monitor progress
• Politics: whose buy-in is needed, and how to get it
• Stakeholders – considerations?: the board, stockholders, employees, vendors, customers, community?
• Legal: any issues to consider?
• Space/facilities/equipment: what do you need and how do you get it?
• Research: why might you need to know?
• Public relations: should you let others know what you are doing?
• Risks: what could happen and can you handle it?
• Creating thinking: push the limits of your thinking, consider wild outcomes, both good and bad

Compare these two lists and you will see I adapted the Project Planning Trigger List to the fictitious example of how to sell a swimming pool. I bet when you read my questions about the swimming pool you thought, “that Joyce guy must sell swimming pools!” Actually, I hardly know anything about swimming pools. I just picked a product randomly as an example, and I used the Project Planning Trigger List to help me think of some really good questions. Imagine what you can do with it by applying it to the products and services you really sell.

(Please look forward to Part 2, in which I will explain how to apply the Natural Planning Model to sales.)

Chip Joyce is a business development expert, regular contributor to GTD Times and member of GTD Connect.  You might enjoy his other posts too. You can also reach him by email.

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.Perhaps you get a list of leads from marketing: these are people you need to call. Keep the prospecting list separate from your other calls. There are several reasons for this that, including mostly having to do with the calls being less time sensitive so they can be postponed if a sales opportunity arises that takes over your day. So let’s call this list @Call Prospects, which will be on a sheet of paper.

When you call @Call Prospects, most of the time you get voicemail. Each time this happens mark the prospect’s name as “VM.” If you connect with a prospect, cross the name of the list. If there is no opportunity, you’re done. If there is an opportunity, cross off the name and then I  create a Project for it. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) When you are done making calls, take that @Call Prospects list and put it in your  Tickler File for one week out, so you  can try calling the incomplete ones again. That is how to manage your prospecting.

Each qualified prospect now becomes a Project and (pretending you are only using paper), so  label a folder with the prospect’s name, and put a sheet of paper in the folder, which is for your notes. Write the date of the call and everything you have learned up until that point. That sheet should  remain on the top of the folder stack, and it will be a log of all calls and exchanges. Under it you can put website printouts, meeting notes, email exchanges, etc.

All interaction with Client-Project — all calls, to-dos, waiting-fors — will be kept in your general GTD system: handle the Client-Project like any other project. The Client-Project folder is not where your next-actions reside: it is your support materials, including your notes.

Your next-actions might be on your @Calls list, or @Online to send an email, or @Waiting if they are supposed to call you back, or on your calendar if it’s a hard deadline, such as when someone asks you to call then next Friday. If someone says to call them in Q4, put their name on @Calls list in your October Tickler Folder.

All projects have a completion. A Client-Project is completed when you either  close the sale or lose the sale. If it is postponed for six months,  move the Client-Project folder into your  Archives, make a note in my tickler for when to resume it, and  replace the folder in your Active category once the sales process  resumes.

If the client is a repeat buyer, still treat each sales opportunity as a separate project. The client in this case is an Account, which may have multiple, ongoing projects. So in this way the Account is, in GTD terms, an Area of Focus. Depending on what it takes to nurture an Account, you should have reminders in your GTD system to check in on them, meet them periodically, etc.

Whether it is part of your weekly review or it also includes reporting to your boss about your sales status, the top sheet of each Client-Project will have all the summary information you need to review where you are. Anything you or your boss thinks needs to be a next step goes into your general GTD system: “Call Mary to see if I can provide more support documentation to speed up the IT due diligence,” or “Call Bob to ask when he is going to send back his comments on the contract.”

GTD works very well for when you are wearing your salesperson hat. In summary:

• Prospect calls need to be treating differently than your @Calls
• Each potential sale is its own Project
• Each Client-Project has a top-sheet that summarizes all activities, and supporting documents go underneath it
• Client-Projects have a completion and need to be moved to Archives or out of your Active area when they either stall or conclude (i.e. you either win or lose the sale)
• All next actions go into your overall GTD system to keep them integrated with the rest of your life
• Weekly reviews or status updates with your boss refer largely on the top sheet of each project, and identified next actions go into your overall GTD system.

Regardless of what software applications you may use, this is a workflow that works, and as always, make sure your software doesn’t over-complicate the process.

Chip Joyce is a business development expert, regular contributor to GTD Times and member of GTD Connect.  You can also read his great post on his Mac + paper hybrid system and Liberating yourself from paper.

GTD really required me to do something about filing stuff, but I decided for lack of space, I had to find a digital solution. Eventually I decided to use a Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner (I chose the compact S300M model but there are bigger desktop models if you’re inclined) and for software I selected DEVONThink Office Pro for document management. (I will review this software in a future contribution. While I love it, you can use the scanner without it, and there are Windows versions with included software.)

The scanner is brilliant. You simply put in a stack of papers, double sided is fine, and push the button on the scanner. The pages whiz through the scanner and in no time a window on my Mac asks me what to do with the image; I choose “save as PDF” and it compiles the stack, in order and minding both sides of the pages, into one PDF. I name the file and hit “Save.” Since my downloads and default save location for everything is my “Personal Records” folder in DEVONThink, it’s immediately collected. Originally I would then process the scanned documents into various sub-folders but I found that to be unnecessary because the software is brilliant at searching so I don’t think any organization is necessary.

My file naming convention helps. I use grouping prefixes, such as “TAXES,” “READ,” “INSURANCE,” “MEDICAL” and then name the document descriptively. For example, all records pertaining to my dog Olive are “OLIVE Vet bill for eye infection 20090315” (I like that date format: YYYYMMDD and use it all the time.)

So what do I scan? I started by scanning literally every document I was holding on to and it took a lot less time than I would have expected. This included: financial statements, tax returns, tax related correspondence, legal documents, insurance policies, medical records, receipts, proofs of purchase, warranty info, birth certificate and other forms of ID, personal letters, birthday and Christmas cards, instruction manuals, recipes, magazine clippings, research materials, etc. The scanner accepted everything, included very oddly shaped documents such as birthday cards and two foot long receipts.

Finally, if you have supporting OCR software (DEVONThink has it built in), PDFs can be converted to searchable PDFs so you can easily search for “Samsung HD TV” and find the receipt and warranty information from the content in the document. However for most documents I do not convert them to searchable PDF, as just a well named file is most often all I need to find something.

Every Sunday night I scan papers that have accumulated in my (physical) in box and throw away or shred the now unneeded paper.

Having this system has liberated me so that I can keep anything that is mildly interesting to me. I no longer have to feel the dread of, “Where I am going to put this?” and “Who am I kidding? I will never find it even if I keep it!” I have no doubt that I will end up being more creative and productive as a result of this system.

Chip Joyce is a regular contributor to GTD Times and member of GTD Connect.  You can also read his great post on his Mac + paper hybrid system.

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

…(I tried Omnifocus too, but it was too complicated). The problem is that I can’t capture info on iPhone: it is too cumbersome to type quickly. Too often I was failing to capture thoughts because I didn’t have the time to fumble with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. I have had BlackBerry and Treo devices in the past, and even with a real keyboard, a pen and paper are the best capture tools for me because I can draw arrows and circles, underline words, etc.

Before buying the trifold I tried a homemade solution by carrying some cards in my wallet, and a collapsible pen in my front pocket, but that didn’t quite work. The pen tended to fall out: I went through three in no time. Having cards jammed somewhere in your wallet that need to be pulled out, written on, and put back, was far from elegant. So I retired my nearly new and expensive wallet for the trifold.

Every night I transpose my notes from the wallet into Things on my Mac, and then I sync wirelessly with the Things app on my iPhone. That’s where my lists reside.

Chip Joyce
New York, NY
Profession: new business development expert