GTDtimes is pleased to be the first site anywhere in the world to announce news of a major event in the world of GTD…

For the first time anywhere  five hundred of the most intelligent, inspired and productive people on the planet will gather in San Francisco, California to learn, share, explore, inspire and most importantly to Get Things Done…

The Getting Things Done Global Summit!

Headlined by the inimitable David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress Free Productivity” this first GTD Global Summit, taking place on March 11th to the 13th, 2009,  promises to be a truly once-in-a-lifetime event.

Not only will attendees get the chance to  learn the latest on GTD by the man that created the strategy, David will also be sharing new material from his forthcoming book “Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Business and Business of Life“.

Complimenting David will be a cadre of some of the most accomplished and effective people in the world:

• CEOs that have have had the insight and vision to implement a GTD culture throughout their organizations yielding extraordinary results

• Coaches who will share how implementing a GTD strategy has had profound benefits for their clients from world class athletes to struggling students

• David’s Senior GTD Facilitators who will lead hands on sessions to share their real-world techniques to help you implement GTD for yourself and your organization and maximize the success you will achieve as a result.

• Surprise guests that will inspire, awe and excite you with their stories of how they managed to achieve success, in some cases against unimagineable adversity and odds that would have been dramatically improved had they only been one in a million.

If  other conferences are about ideas and inspiration, the GTD Global Summit is about action and implementation.  No other event will have this level of practical, how to information to help you further refine your personal GTD strategy, troubleshoot your own implementation, or introduce you to new tools and techniques to take even the most advanced GTD Blackbelt to a whole new level.

In addition, demonstration areas will be reserved for attendees to check out the latest in high tech gadgetry- a veritable “geek’s paradise” of software, hardware, and accessories will be available for you to discover, test, and compare; from tried and true products you may have seen to the latest whiz-bang prototypes that you may not have even heard of, let alone seen or touched.

Of course one of the greatest benefits to attending the GTD Global Summit will be the opportunity to meet and network with five-hundred other GTD practitioners all in one place.  If you’re a GTD’er you already know that people that use GTD to help them stay on top of things are consistently among the most intelligent, informed and productive people on the planet.  Here’s your chance to make new friends, develop new professional relationships and capitalize on the energy and collective intelligence that only a group such as this can generate.   If you’ve attended special events in the past, you know that half the value lies in the people you meet and the friendships you establish.  Now take that prior experience and multiply it by 500 and imagine the possibilities.

The GTD Global Summit is scheduled to take place from the 11th to the 13th of March, 2009 at the unparalleled new Hotel Intercontinental in San Francisco, California.  Only five-hundred fortunate individuals will have the chance to attend this life-changing event.  Reservations can be made at the official GTD Global Summit Website.

Further news about the GTD Global Summit will be made available here as soon as we receive it.  The link to the conference website above is now live so be sure to make your reservation before it’s too late!

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These guys, lurking at the back of the room aren’t playing video games, at least I hope not. They are two of the newest team members at The David Allen Company, John Ward and Chris McIntyre. Both seasoned presenters, they are here to audit Kelly class and sharpen their GTD presentation skills. We enjoyed a nice lunch together, I look forward to seeing them in action, soon.

Kelly just gave us a tour on how to setup Notes and Outlook as GTD implementation tools. Even though I think I know this stuff, I still learn new things and I got to share some tips of my own. Listening to some of the questions from the audience that inspired some ideas for features I can build into eProductivity for Lotus Notes to make getting things done with Lotus Notes easier. I’ve got those items on my agenda list to discuss with my team.

The seminar is going well, Kelly’s in peak form, people are learning and laughing at the stories she’s sharing from her work in the GTD trenches. (Example: Most full e-mail box? 87,000 emails. True story from Kelly.)

Well, time to get back to the seminar. I’ll try to post another highlight, soon.

Update: Chris is ahead by 45,000 points.

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Kelly just gave an interesting illustration of thinking about projects from a…z.

Here’s how this works:
Z represents the successful outcome - what your project will look like when done.

A represents the next single physical action to take to move forward.

b…y represents any additional action steps (but not the next action) along the way.

Now, here’s the secret: Z (the project) goes on your project list. A (the next action) goes on the appropriate action list. Everything else (b…y) needs to be parked somewhere, but if they are not next actions they do not belong on your current working list. [Read more →]

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TIME 9:37 AM

Kelly started the discussion with a great question:

On a 1-10 scale, how would you rate your productivity over the last two weeks?1= I should have stayed in bed.
10=Master of Control & Perspective

What supports you/gets in the way of you being at 10 more often?

Great question. Some surprising answers. I look forward to hearing what your experiences are.

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TIME: 8:45 AM

I’m in Newport Beach today, attending the GTD Mastering Workflow Seminar. Although I’ve been to about a dozen GTD and MAP* seminars over the past 15 years, I continue to learn something new each and every time I attend.

Kelly Forrister is our presenter today, so I’m certain it will be a great day of learning and fun with a group of people committed to getting things done at work and play. I’ve had the good fortune to work with Kelly at four different organizations over the past 15 years. She’s as passionate as I am about productivity and she’s also a geek and we share a mutual interest for high-tech gear to support our productive lifestyle. (If you haven’t done so, check out Kelly’s blog .)

The GTD Mastering Workflow seminar is a relatively new format for this material. Instead of the traditional 2-day seminar, David Allen presents a one day seminar, called GTD RoadMap, which covers the high-level perspective of GTD, including theory and application. [Read more →]

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First…Thank You!

Well, it’s been a few weeks since we launched GTDtimes and I wanted to take a moment and thank those of you that have jumped aboard and joined us in this adventure. I’d especially like to thank those of you that have taken the time, not only to read something here, but who’ve also gone the extra step and added their own voice to the discussion.

In addition, I’d like to offer my special appreciation to those of you who took the time to provide us with feedback in response to my request for your thoughts on how we’re doing so far and what you’d like to see us do more, less, better or differently in the future. If you’d still like to offer an opinion in this regard, by all means, please do! We received some incredible suggestions from those of you that spoke up and I think you’ll be glad that you did speak up as we intend to take what you’ve said to heart - you should see this reflected in the content as well as some other changes that we intend to implement in the near future.

Thanks also go out to the good folks that sent in quotes that they find relevant to their own personal approach. These were so great I piped up and told folks at DavidCo that they should make a “GTD Quote a Day Calendar” - I don’t know if they will do this, but if enough people speak up and say that they’d buy one - or even put their money where their mouths are and pre-order one that would probably go a long way to making the DavidCo folks sit up and take notice.

Now On To Some House Keeping

I know that one of the reasons we had so many comments on the two posts above was because I promised some cool gifts for the folks that we determined to have offered the best suggestions as well as the quotes we enjoyed most. In both cases we’re still making up our minds. Be assured that we will come to a decision quickly and notify the winners by email and then with those folks granting us permission, we will announce their names as well as the cool things they’ve won.

If you submitted a suggestion or a quote and aren’t victorious this time, don’t worry… there will be plenty of chances to win cool stuff as I plan to make giving cool stuff out something of a regular occurrence around these parts. Please don’t write in to inquire - the winner will be contacted by us directly.

And Finally, The Future …

Way up there in the headline above I mentioned something about GTD Times future enhancements. Here’s where I tell you about some new things we’ll be adding to the site soon. I’m excited about these pending developments as these are things I have always wanted to implement on my prior blogs but never got the chance to do so.

One thing that I think you’ll find quite exciting is that we’ll be introducing a Marketplace section soon. If you’re a company that makes GTD oriented software or really any productivity oriented or organizational software you’re going to love this. A basic listing is free. that’s right FREE as in beer or no charge. We’ll also be offering other options with two levels of more comprehensive (and larger and better positioned) listings for very reasonable fees.

The Marketplace section will also have some more standard classified type advertising so if you’ve got something that you think would go over with the sort folks that read a publication like this one, then you’ll probably like this. I’m imaging that everything from Service Business to folks selling books, audios or even who want to promote another product or service will like this inexpensive way to reach a highly valuable audience.

We’ll also be starting a Jobs Board soon. You are probably familiar with these so I won’t go into superfluous detail; I’ll simply say that GTDers are known to be some of the best and most productive employees around thus there will be no place else where as a prospective employer you could identify so many people with such well developed abilities to execute. “Nuff Said.

But wait, there’s more! More sponsorship opportunities are coming available and there are some good deals to be had. If you think that sponsoring GTD Times with a guaranteed way to spark interest and attention from such a talented and successful group than by placing your corporate identity on the front page of a blog that is focused on aggregating the best content, the top writers and the latest information from the Guru himself, David Allen, than anywhere else you could advertise. Anyone interested in learning about these opportunities - which include guaranteed placement, the opportunity to be the title sponsor of a specific section as well as some new banner and tower advertising slots too.

If you’d like more detailed information write to me at Editor at GTDtimes dot com and I’ll send you an information packet with an insertion order and terms. If you’d like to write articles for the GTDtimes, speak up and I’ll send you a writer’s guidelines package so you can see what it’s all about.

Oh- and before I forget, we’ll be adding in some regular features here on GTDtimes that we think you’ll like and which will give some additional breadth and consistency to the site. I won’t spill the beans on what these sections will be yet but let it suffice to say that if you know GTD you shold be able to guess the sections - or at least a couple of them.

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Big news today from the David Allen Company. For the first time ever David Allen is making available the complete audio CDs of his world famous two-day intensive GTD Seminar. GTDLive!

This is a unique opportunity for anyone that has ever wanted to attend a David Allen seminar but for whatever reason hasn’t been able to make that happen. This is a complete Ten-CD Boxed Set that is an actual live recording of David delivering his life-changing training to a real audience. The product is as comprehensive a tool for getting started with GTD as you can possibly get short of actually attending a session with David for yourself, and at half the price of a single-day seminar you’re getting an incredible deal on top of the incredible learning experience.

From my perspective, this isn’t just a tool for people that haven’t attended a GTD seminar with David. As anyone that has been to one of his sessions knows, there is so much information for you to absorb in a limited time that something like a live audio recording of the event would be an incredible resource to help refresh the memory from time to time. Having the live CDs on hand would also allow you to clarify points that perhaps got fuzzy after two days of intense learning, and it could even be a valuable tool that you can use to share with friends and associates who themselves might be curious about GTD.

If you’re interested in this product you should click on over to the DavidCo store and grab a copy now. My understanding is that there are only a limited number of these 10-CD sets available. According to the information on the DavidCo site in addition to the 10-CD set the package will include a second multi-CD set of David Allen’s “In Conversation” interviews as well as the work-flow templates mentioned in the presentation.

Another good reason to pay a visit to the David Allen site is that there are several nice audio samples of the contents of the GTD Live CD’s that you can listen to. It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time to hear David present GTD.

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So I’m back from the Friday seminar on Extreme Productivity held and lead by Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. The seminar was great. I mean really truly excellent in the most useful and positive way. I think everyone that attended would tell you essentially the same thing. If Ismael holds one of these in your area I highly recommend you make it a point to attend.Later on this evening I will be posting a full report on the seminar, my takeaways and the really interesting stuff I learned. There were a few things that Ismael said that I felt were really significant and I can’t wait to share them with you. I’d share them now but I’m still organizing my thoughts and this is also a shameless tease to get you to check back later today for the good stuff.

What can I say? I’m a blogger, please don’t hold it against me

On another note, an additional benefit of attending the seminar was that I met a number of other people whom I think will make excellent and very interesting GTD Times contributors and I’m counting on them to send in articles fairly soon - so you’ll definitely want to check back and make sure you don’t miss those either.

Last thing before I go back to organizing my thoughts; I wanted to mention something that happened yesterday that for me was incredibly personally gratifying …

As many of you know, my closest friend, Marc Orchant, who was originally slated to occupy the position that I currently hold passed away from a heart attack late last year. As a result it came to me to try to execute upon his vision for the GTD Times. I have certainly been doing my best but Marc left some very big shoes to fill so it is with a great deal of pride and no small amount of relief that I draw your attention to a comment I received on my own blog last night that meant a great deal to me - and not just me, but for the whole GTD Times team.

Please understand that while I do a large portion of the editorial, none of this would be possible if it weren’t for the support and incredibly good execution by a number of key people. I am not sure that they wish to be publicly identified but I wanted to let them - and you - know that their hard work and support has been absolutely essential to getting this site off the ground so quickly and making it possible to hit the ground running and build momentum so rapidly - so thanks from me and know that this comment is for each and every one one of the folks that makes it possible to bring the GTD Times to you:

Rebecca Orchant

“Oliver, this is amazing. My dad would be so unbelievably proud of you. My geek factor is nowhere near that of my dad’s, my brother’s, or yours, but I seriously look forward to following your progress in this endeavor and future ones. I think you’ve totally hit the nail on the head as far as his vision for this project. I’m sure that somewhere, he’s enjoying your participation immensely, and chuckling to himself that GTD may force you to arrive somewhere on time.

We miss you. Hope things are well.”

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Friend of David and GTD Times, Ismael Ghalimi is putting on what I’m anticipating will be a very intensive and highly educational seminar tomorrow at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto - The Extreme Productivity Seminar.  There are apparently a couple of tickets still available so if you’re in the area and would like to stretch your productivity skills a little I highly recommend you head on over to Ismael’s site and get the details and reserve yourself a seat.

Ismael also puts on the very highly regarded Office2.0 Event that generally takes place in the autumn - and, as anyone who’s been to that mutli day extravaganza can attest, Ismael puts on a conference like noone else.  If an O’Reilly conference is First Class, Ismael’s are “Sleeper” class - if you’ve ever been lucky enough to fly that way you know exactly what I mean.

I’ll be attending the event to cover it for GTD Times, so if you’re there, please introduce yourself to me - that goes double if you’re interested in contributing to GTD Times.  See you all tomorrow!

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