Have you wanted to get your kids or teens to use GTD tools? Then this webinar is for you. Join David Allen Company CEO and GTD expert Mike Williams and Senior Coach Meg Edwards as they discuss some fun and engaging ways to share GTD with kids and teens.  The live webinar is on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST. 

This webinar is free for GTD Connect members.  You can sign up for a free trial membership, and when you log in, you’ll find the webinar information on the home page of GTD Connect.  You’ll also see an extensive list of previous webinars you can access in the archives. (Partial listing shown here.)

The free trial membership is easy to begin—just first name and email address—with no cost or commitment.

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Sometimes Christmas feels like an all-consuming project that sends us racing through malls, jumping from party to party, and being busy-busy-busy as we fill our time with lots of Christmas fluff.

I want something more than that, though.

I don’t want to have to “recover” from Christmas. I don’t want to start the new year eight pounds heavier. I don’t want my children focused only on the electronic gadgets they hope Santa brings. But everything I don’t want will probably become my reality–unless I take the initiative to implement what I do want.

David Allen’s Natural Planning Model seriously saves my sanity on everything from birthday party planning to creating new programs for my website, so this year, I decided to use the five steps of the Natural Planning Model to create a Christmas experience that is both magical and meaningful.

Step One: Defining Purpose and Principles

For this part, I sat down with my children and gave them the following prompts:

• What’s the purpose of this season?
• What do you want this Christmas to feel like for our family?
• Please finish this sentence: “I would be happy with any Christmas celebration, as long as . . .”

[Read more →]

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This post on planning a baby shower is from the Art department at the David Allen Company.

Here’s a great reminder of how helpful GTD is for any project, personal or professional.

Our team at the David Allen Company is planning a baby shower for  a co-worker.  We met today to do the following:

1. Brainstorm and mind map the project
2. Decide on next actions
3. Assign people to the identified next actions
4. Decide when to loop around again for further planning

Here was our simple mind map that helped clarify the tasks:

Our 20-minute meeting allowed everyone to move forward on this fun project with their own clearly-defined tasks.

GTD can help integrate your professional and personal life. Simple, easy, and fun planning — that’s a “GTD” baby shower!

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A Community Contribution from Björn Ljunggren, a GTD Connect member from Sweden. He shared this in our members-only Forums and we thought it was such a great story that he gave us permission to share it with our GTD Times readers.

My little GTD baby is celebrating its first birthday and it is time to look at the giant leaps and small steps taken towards a “mind like water”.

Even though I bought the book in 2007 I just implemented parts of GTD. I fell of the wagon a lot during these first years and had a major crisis in 2009 when my whole digital GTD system crashed together with the hard drive (no backup). It took until summer of 2010 before I was up and running again and decided to go “all in”.  So the system is based on three critical components:

• Complete system both Home/Work
• GTD Connect Member
• Weekly Reviews

Having a complete system is a big task to do, and I guess it is never really “Done”. But I feel very good about my system. I trust it. The GTD Connect community has helped to stay on course and get constant reassurance that I’m not alone in doing GTD when nobody I know is. Thanks Kelly and everyone! I did 49 weekly reviews the first year. Probably the biggest single factor for GTD success. [Read more →]

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This article is from Momma Can …, a blog created and run by Pam List. Momma Can … is devoted to making life “less of a drudge of more of a joyful journey.”  Pam is a busy mother of two who says she would not have had time for the blog without GTD.

I am a big fan of David Allen’s GTD system. He has written what I feel is the greatest productivity book in the history of the world.  If you have not read it and you are an overwhelmed momma then please borrow from the library or buy yourself one.  It is what keeps me sane.  It allows me to find time in the crazy busy momma world. The best part of the system is the physical inbox, what I call my big fat inbox.

The book is called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It simply rocks.

His system in a very tiny nutshell for me is something like this.

1. Collect all the Stuff and Write all the Stuff –anything that comes into mommy land goes into my physical inbox.  Mail, school papers, work papers, catalogues.  Any awesome mommy idea that comes to my head gets written down and put into my physical inbox.  This includes recipe ideas, family outing ideas, article ideas, coupon inserts, field trip forms etc.  It can really get full.
2. Process the stuff into projects, tasks, or file it away for a rainy day, just in case, or a momma memory file. And clear out the box every single day all the way to the bottom. Projects can be planning family outing, planning purchases, meal planning or putting brochures in a file for my dream vacation.
3. Review, plan, do.  This really just means planning, scheduling for how and when all the things that need getting done will get done.
   
   [Read more →]

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This is a Community Contribution from April Perry.

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed. Not because I can’t process all the tasks, projects, and goals on my plate, but because I keep forgetting that I only have one plate.

As I’ve applied GTD strategies to my life, opportunities to “live the life of my dreams” have literally exploded in front of me. My website is growing, creative ideas are spilling into my colorful assortment of spiral-bound notebooks, friends and associates are jumping on board to support the vision I’m helping to create, and my family life is exactly what I always hoped it would be.

However, along with all this excitement, my emails have quadrupled, my project load has significantly increased, and my stress level has been rising beyond my comfort level. (Once you experience “stress-free productivity,” there’s no going back . . . .)

So today I decided to apply the Natural Planning Model from GTD to my overall life plan. The point of getting organized isn’t to simply “get more done.” The point is to get the right things done–and that takes some serious decision making.

I figured that as long as I’m doing this exercise, I might as well document the process and share it with others who also might be trying to cram too much onto their plates. [Read more →]

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This is a Community Contribution from Meghan Wilker.

In an earlier GTD Times post, I talked about some of the basic ways I use the principles of GTD with my kids. That post focused on Capturing, Clarifying, Organizing and Reflecting at a high level.

This week, I spent the better part of an evening on a Clarifying mission with my kids, and it struck me that the act of processing an inbox with kids is vastly different from how we do it as adults.

If you are a parent who works outside the home, your kids probably generate a lot of artwork during the day. And by “a lot” I mean levels that will wake you up at night with hoarders’ nightmares of having to dig tunnels through the piles of coloring sheets and construction paper stacked floor-to-ceiling in your house. Or maybe that’s just me.

At any rate, Capturing & Clarifying can be particularly helpful in dealing with kids’ art projects. Here’s how I handle it.

[Read more →]

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This is a Community Contribution from Mike Vardy

Some people need silence to be productive. Some people need music. Some people need an extreme amount of light. Some people don’t need anything specific. Some people don’t need anything at all.

To anyone who falls into one “some” category, they are not likely to fall into another. There’s a subjective nature to working environments. The same goes for distractions.

[Read more →]

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For anyone who has tackled a science project, or any kind of project, here is a Community Contribution from April Perry

Tackling a 5th-Grade Science Project

My 11-year-old daughter came home with a huge packet of science project information a few weeks ago, and the entire family started feeling the stress.  Before the world of computers and fancy tri-fold poster board, science projects were a cinch.  I remember hunkering down at my dining room table with construction paper, some magic markers, and a simple sheet of white poster board.  But today’s children have a lot more pressure.  They need charts and graphs, digital photographs, and well-written hypotheses.  It’s enough to overwhelm the children and the parents.

Instead of letting the stress get to me, I decided to apply the principles I learned from Getting Things Done and show my daughter that projects don’t have to give us headaches.  Here’s what we did:

Step 1: We read through the packet of information and made a list of tasks based on context. 

[Read more →]

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A Community Contribution from April Perry

I’m the mom at the toy store on December 23rd with a cart full of car tracks, dolls, sports equipment, and art supplies my children may or may not like. I’m also the mom paying overnight shipping charges to send hastily-assembled photo albums to Grandma. I stay up late the night before school gets out for Winter Break, making bread for the teachers (mainly because I can’t think of anything else to get them). Our Christmas cards usually get sent out after New Year’s . . . if they get sent out at all. My neighbors don’t get plates of cookies from us, our mail lady never gets a card, and my husband gets only a big hug and a kiss. All the while, I’m feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with the holiday season–wishing I could pull things together. [Read more →]

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