Editor’s Note: This just came in from one of our contributors, Lynn O’Connor. When she sent it to me she suggested that this may sound too “commercial” for GTD times, but I felt like it was such a nice first-person account of what she experienced attending a RoadMap Seminar taught by David himself that I thought it would be of benefit to people who were curious about the experience and what someone who is very accomplished, incredibly articulate and already knowledgeable of GTD thought during the day. Enjoy.
I just attended David Allen’s GTD RoadMap seminar –for the second time. The only other time I’ve taken a seminar twice was when I was preparing for the psychology licensing exam and I signed up for a preparatory statistics workshop twice. It probably wasn’t necessary but as a researcher I never regretted it, I think I learned more about running stats at that workshop than in any class I’d taken in college, on up, or more recently, in continuing education courses. So it goes with the RoadMap; I need a map of my work, of each of my projects, and lets face it, of my whole life, and the more often I get help with it, the better.
At some point during the afternoon Allen suggested that we were all
sitting there hypnotized, and that we would walk out thinking we were
going to do all these amazing organizational things in our lives, only to
have the ideas and inspiration disappear in a matter of hours. Maybe it
was hypnosis, but I got more work done in those eight hours than in the
whole week before. Here it is the next morning post-RoadMap, and its
still happening. I have my next action list, my “Emerging Task Planner”
where I can see it, and I’ve hit the ground running.
Allen is pure inspiration, a great teacher, and geez, he may not know me,
but he knows how to organize my time. At some point he asked us to
take two minutes and tackle anything we’d put on a list created earlier in
the day (we spent the whole day making lists, and since I love the process
of defining my work and making lists, it was permission to go play all
day. On one of those early morning lists I’d uncovered an area of anxiety,
something I should have been tending to but instead I’d been neglecting.
So when he said: “spend two minutes on one of the things” I jumped head
first into the thing I’d been neglecting, and wrote a plan for how to gain
“control” and maybe even “perspective” around it.
Most amazing, in only two minutes I wrote a concise, step by step plan
for tackling and running through this dreaded problem. It was easy. I am
sure I’ll find out more about why I’d been shelving it for over a month
now, as I begin to implement the 2-minute plan. But none of it is
monumental. In fact, when guided by Allen, we find out that nothing is
insurmountable. A day with David Allen is first and foremost fun, and its
almost a side benefit that each person attending -and there were many of
us-gets individualized, personalized, one-on-one coaching. Or that is
what it feels like. He’s a master entertainer, educator, coach, and all this
is wrapped around a remarkable brain.
David is humble; he can’t quite conceal his embarrassment at being
caught as creator of a life-changing program. Sometimes watching him I
think he doesn’t know what hit him, all this fabulous success, people like
me turning into groupies, while the largest funders in the world beg for
the chance to support him in whatever philanthropic things he might
want to do. He seems stunned by it all, and I suspect he has that sneaky
feeling that he doesn’t deserve it. But he does. Watching him perform for
eight hours is like witnessing a pure energy generator, wrapped up as a
normal person. Maybe he is, but then again maybe he isn’t. This guy is a
life-long learner, he is curious, inquisitive, and integrates everything into
his devotion to understanding how the mind works, and ultimately, how
we work whether its at play, in an office, or at home.
So what did I get out of yesterday? Exactly what I needed from the
smallest detail of my work-flow, to the big questions, like what am I
doing on the planet.
Allen started the day by illustrating three main Allen’esque principles of
how the mind works: The power of writing everything down, the power of
unconscious planning, and the power of two focused minutes. He asked
us take two minutes to write down -no editing-everything that had our
attention. This turned out to be one of many demonstrations of non-
conscious planning. It showed us that we knew exactly what we were
worrying about -what had our attention as he puts it-and that we could
do intensely focused tasks in exactly the amount of time we were given.
He demonstrated the power that comes with taking everything we’re
carrying around in our minds, and putting it on paper. When he asked us
to do something in one minute, or in 90 seconds, or two minutes, that’s
what we did. This illustrated how the human mind plans unconsciously,
and carries out these unconscious plans without knowing explicitly what
we are doing. It also demonstrates that we can do amazing things with
two minutes of focused attention. I had put off planning how to get
myself moving on this particular task all summer. It came into focus when
I wrote everything down.
If, early yesterday morning, on my way to the RoadMap, you had asked
me what had my attention, I wouldn’t have pointed out the particular
problem I was really worrying about. It was sitting in the background
worrying me outside of conscious awareness, distracting me, while I tried
to work on other projects. If you told me that in two focused minutes I
would be able to take the whole job and turn it into a step-by-step
project plan, a series of concrete “next actions” or tangible steps I needed
to take to get things rolling, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that is
exactly what happened. In the course of the day other unconscious
concerns came to the foreground, and were transformed into clear
project plans. I learned, once again, the power of writing an unedited list
of what has my attention, and the power of two minutes of focused
attention. Write a list, leave nothing out, and focus for two minutes may
be the essence of the GTD method.
We returned to our initial list of what had our attention, and were given
another minute (or 90 seconds, or even two minutes) to add to it, quite
appropriately because throughout the day, each exercise brought to mind
yet more things (problems) that had our attention, that we’d missed in
the first round. Allen calls this basic list construction a ‘mindsweep.” Now
as I have been following the GTD methodology for a year and a half, none
of this was entirely new. I do a mindsweep at least every few weeks if not
every week. But engaging in the Allen method of work with Allen himself
leading me through it, made the process itself more conscious. It was like
revisiting everything, to do this with Allen by my side. This is another
remarkable feature of a day with David Allen. It didn’t matter how many
people he was coaching all once, it felt like personalized instruction. He
was speaking to my work problems, he was teaching ME.
Always proceeding in an orderly manner, Allen illustrated the reliable
steps called for to move ahead in the process of organizing our work and
our lives, both mentally, and concretely. First is collection. The list of
everything that has our attention is, in essence, a process of mental
collection. In the office or at home, collection translates to gathering
absolutely everything into an inbox. When I first implemented GTD, right
after attending my first RoadMap seminar, I had so much stuff all over the
place that only my whole living room could provide the space needed for
everything, so my living room became my inbox.
The second step in the GTD method is to clarify everything collected,
whether the “stuff” is mental or physical. This means asking myself a few
simple questions: “What is this? Do I need to do something with this? How
do I label, define, categorize this?” Should I throw this away? Should I
pass this on to someone else to tend to it? Is this a piece of reference
material, I should know where to find easily? Is this a next action in a
specific project or is this a project? If this is a next action that will take 2
minutes or less to carry out, I should carry it out immediately before I go
any further. Here we see the two-minute rule show up again. A personal
note here -I think I may often fall apart at the level of clarification.
Instead of taking my time, I am rushing into the next phase of work, the
“organization” phase, where I figure out the specifics of what action I am
going to take, and sometimes this puts me into a state of panic.
Clarification, where I figure out what something is, is followed by
organization. Here, I determine exactly where to go with something, be it
physical or mental. I have a single item (derived from a collection of
“items” from a mindsweep, or derived from “stuff” put into my inbox, and
from taking a few minutes to clarify, I know what “it” is. Now I organize it
-it becomes a next action on my next action list, or it becomes a next
action related to a specific project on my project list. A project is
something that has more than one next action. If my “it” here is a
physical item, I decide if it goes into a project support file, or an archive
file (not easily accessible), or an immediate TO READ file, etc.
Organization sure makes things easy to think about, do, locate, review,
which is the step after organization. Reflect and review -before doing
something, I need to review it and reflect upon it. Here things are
presented in lists, so in essence, I am doubling back here to establish
that I made appropriate decisions earlier. Finally, my work having been
well defined, organized, and reviewed, I do. By the time I am “doing” I’ve
hopefully achieved a sense of “control and perspective.” And I really have.
To maintain a sense of peace, I have to review everything regularly. Its
recommended that we review our whole system every week. I don’t
exactly do that -instead I review my lists (including my calendar) every
few days, because they change daily. I have the hardest time routinely
collecting and clarifying. Meaning I am often in inbox trouble.
After taking us through the stages of work, applicable to any project or
series of next actions, Allen moved up the ladder, or what he calls the
vertical roadmap, from next actions to projects, to areas of focus, to
goals and objectives, to vision, to my ultimate purpose. This was a fast
incline, but it gave me just enough time to consider the larger life
purposes behind my work, including my work at implementing GTD. I
knew the first time I went to the Roadmap I ended up with some pretty
lofty ideas, but I couldn’t remember how, or what I ended up thinking. It
may be here that Allen had us hypnotized, because once again the clarity
I felt yesterday, has dimmed. So what did I decide was my ultimate
purpose?
Throughout all of these steps and stages of how we work, at almost every
point of closure or at the beginning, Allen discussed the use of the
concept of “outcome.” A next action has a “desired outcome,” a project
has a “desired outcome” likewise the process of collection, clarification,
organizing, reflecting and doing, and then, across the vertical levels of
functioning. Everything has a desired outcome, and this may be another
major principle of Allenesque (or GTD) working and living. To consciously
delineate the desired outcome at each step of the way, at any stage or
any level of operation, we have a desired outcome. Spelling this out,
making it clear and conscious, has, he tells us, a fantastic effect on the
outcome. He considers explanations for his observations found in
contemporary neuroscience.
It would be unlike me to report on a person, a movement, a meeting,
without any critical comments. Being true to nature, there is once aspect
to the GTD phenomenon that continues to bother me and that is the
commercialism that seems to be built around the David Allen message.
Several times during the RoadMap we were reminded by Allen himself, of
the sales pitch going on under and on top of the surface. The more
successful Davidco (the David Allen Company) gets, the more apparatus
they create and sell for a handsome profit. Everything from plastic file
folders to note taking wallets and Italian made file holders is for sale by
the David Allen whirlwind. We heard several embarrassed remarks about
how much he was selling his own products -and this mean tangible office
things (more stuff as he calls everything that clutters our desks), not at
all important to what Allen really has to sell, a method of overcoming
chaos in our lives, a method for how to get things done, laid out in
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, that only costs $
9:00 on Amazon .
Allen reminds us that getting organized, developing a sense of control
and perspective, happens through the process of learning. We aren’t born
masters of work organization. There may be some magic in Allen’s
teaching, but there is nothing magical about his method of working. I am
so glad I went to my second RoadMap seminar, and I will certainly go
again the next time he’s in town. Hearing Allen run through his method
was different, having implemented and used it for a year and a half. I was
familiar with all the pieces, but somehow, he pulls it all together, and I
wouldn’t miss the opportunity to get that one-on-one coaching for
anything.
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