If you were one of the folks we heard from who wished to attend the GTD Global Summit but simply couldn’t get away for both days this should be some welcome news.  In response to a surprising number of requests that we make passes available for each of the two days of the Summit, the David Allen Company is happy to respond in the affirmative.  You can now buy a pass for either day, and of course for both days too.

The GTD Summit is only three weeks away, can you really afford NOT to attend?  If you or your team are one of the many people that are suddenly being asked to do more with less, attending the GTD Global Summit might actually be one of the most important investments you could make.

The knowledge you can acquire from the world-class line up of experts on not only GTD, but also entrepreneurship, creativity, productivity in general, life hacking, military strategy, leadership, ethics and more will be far more enduring than any other use of funds we can imagine.

Nevertheless, we understand that for some people it simply isn’t possible to take two days off from your job, school, or family, while for others, the full price of the summit might simply be out of reach at this time.

Regardless of your reasons, the team at the David Allen Company is sensitive to your situation.  It should go without saying that David’s commitment to helping people achieve more, learn more and get more out of life goes far beyond any financial element and this attitude permeates the entire company.  It is for this reason that the team decided that unlike many conferences that are an all-or-nothing sort of affair, the GTD Global Summit will be different and will offer people the ability to attend just a single day of their choice if that is what someone wants to do.

Day passes are now available for each of the two days.  Pick one day or two.

Each day pass includes:
Autographed copy of David’s new book.
Exhibitor Expo
Coach’s Corner – your chance to sit down with a GTD coach one on one
Coach’s Theater – “how to” presentations from senior GTD facilitators
Breakout sessions with high impact presenters and moderators
All meals and beverages

The Best Part?

You will see and hear from some of the world’s leading minds on productivity, making change and adapting to our changing world. Intelligent conversations.  Compelling speakers. And more.

HOW TO REGISTER:
Pick the day pass that best suits your schedule.

Thursday, March 12th

Friday, March 13th

DAY ONE PASS – MARCH 12th

David Allen & Guy Kawasaki: Welcome & Keynote
James Fallows, Marshall Goldsmith and General Randy Fullhart
Breakout Session One
Self Management as Strategy: GTD and Leadership
Good Things Getting Done: GTD Serving Service
GTD at Home: From the Boardroom to the Living Room
Breakout Session Two
A GTD Workforce – Is There a New Industry Standard?
Innovation – Getting New Stuff Done.
GTD as Super Charger and Safety Net: Life Transitions and Transformations.
Breakout Session Three
Entrepreneurs and GTD – Making it up and Making it Happen
GTD and Education: Reading, Writing. Arithmetic and GTD
The Virtual Workplace – Does it Work?
Book Signing – David and other authors
Exhibitor Expo Wine and Cheese Reception.

Register here for your Thursday, March 12th Day Pass

DAY TWO PASS – MARCH 13th

David Allen presents “GTD Making It All Work”
Plenary Session – How the world works, and should we care?
Dave Logan
Ron Kaufman
Sanjiv Mirchandani
Michael Winston
David Allen
Breakout Session Four
Best Practices to Good Habits: Can I Make GTD Stick?
Your Brain on GTD: Why it Works
Productivity Tech: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Breakout Session Five
Critical Behaviors in the Crunch – GTD and Organizational Change
GTD and Sales. Customers and Relationships
Creativity and Clear Space – Inseparable, or Mutually Exclusive?
David Allen Final Remarks
Book Signing – David and other authors
Exhibitor Expo Wine and Cheese Reception.
Register here for your Friday, March 13th Day Pass

HOW TO REGISTER:

Pick the day that works best for you and register now. A limited number of day passes are available. See you there!

Day Pass for Thursday, March 12th

Day Pass for Friday, March 13th

1 Comment »

A Community Contribution by Arif & Ali Vakil

I love GTD Connect. And within Connect, my favorite bit is the David Allen Teleseminars. In my early GTD days I would gets heaps of coaching and guidance from every single minute of the teleseminar. However recently it’s more of the stray comment that David mentions which gives me immense value and makes my entire Connect Membership totally worthwhile. One of those stray little things that David mentioned at a recent teleseminar is creating a “My World Mindmap”.

David Allen has a mindmap called DA’s World. He uses this to link everything in his life into one single overall mindmap. Using his cue, I’ve created one called Arif’s World, and below is a screenshot of that mindmap. (You can click on it to view it in full scale):

Some of the  benefits I’ve received on creating and using this sort of mindmap have been:

1. One stop reference for everything in your world
As you can see I now have a one stop reference for everything to do in my world. If I want to peek into what’s my Area of Focus, I launch Arif’s World and then click on the 20,000 Ft Areas of Focus branch, which takes me to my Areas of Focus mindmap. If there’s something new that pops into my head that I’d like to do 2 years from now, I launch Arif’s World, enter into my 30,000 ft (2 to 3 year goal) mindmap and enter my new goal in there.

2. A place to park projects that have higher priority in the current week.
For me, the most useful branch  of the Arif World mindmap has been the Current Projects branch. Although it involves a little double entry it’s been worthwhile for me to do so. I’ve got a minimum of 100 to 150 projects. There are times when that number can go up to 300. I find it difficult to keep focus on my key projects during the week. So a neat trick that I picked up from David is entering my high-priority projects once again in the Arif World mindmap. I do it in two instances, either when I’m doing my weekly review or during a regular day when a really hot, exciting new project pops into my life, I enter it into my project list as well as into My World mindmap.

3. A place to park “Areas of Focus” that need more attention.
Areas of Focus can broadly be divided into Work, Health, Family, Finance, Social Responsibility, Recreation & Creative Expression. You may have an Area of Focus that is not necessarily in cruise control and needs more um..focus. So, there’s a separate branch for Current Focus on the My World mindmap. To ensure that you look at it regularly enough, you may enter that particular Area of Focus in to the Current Focus branch of your world mindmap so that you look at it frequently enough to bring it up to the desired acceptable standard. For eg. your personal finances may not be at a very comfortable level. Sure, you may have a project to bring it up to the standard where you would like your finances to be, but you can also enter it in the Current Focus branch of your World mindmap to keep in view that, there is a particular standard.

4. I can create a world for any key area of my life.
I recently became a dad to a beautiful princess. David Allen says that managing each child is like managing a small little company of your own. And he’s so right. For the last month or so, I was constantly preoccupied with questions like, “Arif, you have to ensure that your baby gets her immunization shots on time, what about her education, oh you’ve also got to make your home baby safe now, blah blah”. And then it hit me, all I needed to do was create a World mindmap for my daughter. In that I can list out whatever are her long term goals, what are her current projects, etc. And of course, her World would be linked through mine. So under Arif’s World, I go to My Area of Focus mindmap. In my Area of Focus mindmap, I go to the “Family” branch, which has a sub-branch named Maryam (my daughter’s name) which then links to a completely new mindmap called “Maryam’s World”.

Similarly I’ve created a World Mindmap for my Company titled VHDC World (which you can see linked to Arif’s World above). You could create one for your job, a particular hobby that you are very passionate about, infact for any Area of Focus that you believe needs more fleshing out.

A key point to note in conclusion that, having a My World mindmap becomes really worthwhile only when it’s handy and accessible. When I want to launch Arif’s world, it’s really simple. I launch Quicksilver (Cmd+Space), I hit AW, and Arif’s World pops up open for me, no matter which program I’m running. Those who are running windows can do the same using Active Words.

Would love to hear your feedback/comments if you found this useful and/or if you have any other ideas on what else can go into a Your World mindmap.

13 Comments »

Consider this:  While personal productivity tends to be low, room for productivity improvement in the average employee is high; on a scale of 1-10 the average score is 4.8.

In these circumstances, use of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology shows a minimum of 20% improvement in personal productivity and effectiveness. This was shown in a recent Productivity Scan research study conducted by Life Architect and set up in collaboration with the David Allen Company.

Personal Productivity

Productivity consists of four core elements: effectiveness, focus, control and balance. Overall productivity being the sum of these four components. Productivity is about the desire to achieve certain goals and how effectively they are attained. Control in your own work sphere is therefore instrumental in stress control.

The Life Architect Productivity Scan shows a significant difference between the personal productivity of people living in the Netherlands (5.5) compared with other countries (3.9). The scan also shows that implementation of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or “GTD” strategy improves personal productivity by 20%. The Dutch who use GTD, scored an average of 6.1 (still room to improve here too, but an average point higher than other people).

Personal Productivity: Effectiveness (4.7)

Productivity Effectiveness is measured with statements like: “I keep working harder but the loose ends keep piling up” and “I achieve all my goals”. The highest score of 5.3 was given to “I always find everything I need when I need it”. The biggest differences between the statements were found in this section. For example, the Dutch score 6.5 on the previous statement, yet only manage a 4 in response to the statement “work is always on my mind in the evening”. Dutch non-GTD users scored an average 4.5 compared to 5.7 for GTD users.

Personal Productivity: Focus (5)

The Productivity Scan showed that many respondents do not know what they want to achieve or how they want to achieve it. The average score for productivity focus is a 4.8. Several respondents indicated that they have conflicting interests scoring a 5.

The question “My goals are in line with my work / daily activities” was given a 6.6 by Dutch people compared to 3.1 outside The Netherlands. This is a relatively low score especially given the fact that half the total participants in the scan are in a senior or managerial position.

Personal Productivity: Control (5)

There is much talk about the overloaded e-mail inbox, but our research, whilst indicating this a problem area, revealed a score of 5.3, e-mail is certainly not the biggest problem.

The lowest score of 4.8 was given to the statement “I want to clear my head”. Noticeably the Dutch scored a 3.6 compared to a 6.5 for people outside The Netherlands. Apparently the Dutch have a greater need for a “clear head”. Another noteworthy difference is that the Dutch see an empty workspace as an incentive (8.1) compared to a 2.7 for other people. Dutch GTD users score an 8.8.

Personal Productivity: Balance (4.8)

“I feel that I spend my time on the right things” scored low with an average of 4.6 and the statement “I have time left for the things that are important to me” scored a lower 4 5. However considerable differences are found between GTD users and non-users.

GTD users scored a 5.3 on the statement ” I feel relaxed and in control” while non-GTD’ers scored a 4.1. There also appears to be a link with the question “I know what my passion is” which scored an average of 5.2. The Dutch showed a higher 6.9.

Conclusion

The unexpectedly low scores on this personal Productivity Scan also indicate that the respondents have completed the questions honestly. Many people do things without thinking of the desired outcome, the objectives to be achieved, or the impact and importance of their work. People may think about it but do not take the steps to effectively set priorities or next actions.

Especially in the light of current events and the world economic crisis, the importance of productivity in organizations is also dependent on the same factors described in this Productivity Scan. David Allen author and originator of GTD,says that now more than ever is the time to “get in control of what we can, with the right people at the right time”.

GTD changes the way we work in terms of personal and organizational productivity and effectiveness. This Scan shows that GTD helps to maintain control and perspective at home and at work, quickly delivering a 20% increase in personal productivity.

Public GTD seminar in Amsterdam: 19th February 2009

Would you like to be learn more about GTD (Getting Things Done) with David Allen and meet the man in person? He will be in Amsterdam on 19th February 2009 to give the GTD seminar “Making it All Work”. Registration on GTD seminar Amsterdam or http://www.davidcom.com/.

Would you like to know more about the current status of personal and organizational productivity in your organization, please contact Elise de Bres of Life Architect for the Life Architect Productivity Scan.
New translation of David Allen’s “Making It All Work”

David Allen’s latest book “Making it All Work” is now available in both English and Dutch (same title,  from February 23rd)

About the respondents

754 people completed life Architect’s Productivity Scan. Of the respondents, half indicated that they had a management or leadership role in their organization, and 28% were female half of which used GTD. Respondents were Dutch (436 people) or other Nationals (308 of which slightly less than a third from Belgium and the rest from countries including USA, Australia, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Finland, Germany, Austria, UK etc).

Personal Productivity Scan

The Personal Productivity Scan has been prepared on the basis of 23 statements in the form of a questionnaire. Five points of individual productivity and three additional points were measured.

The statements could be answered on the basis of a sliding scale (strongly agree; agree; neutral; disagree; strongly disagree). Where a positively formulated statement was filled in a response was given the following values: +2, +1, 0, -1, -2. This was reversed where statements where negatively stated.

All scores were added together and divided by the number of respondents. Thus the average was determined. Final scores were divided by 4 and rounded to 2 decimal places. For a full report on findings, please contact us via the web site. Use or publication of these findings is permitted with full reference to Life Architect.

Everyone has a purpose in his life. A successful business or career, a loving and happy family life, time for the important things and events, space for creativity and less stress. In order to achieve all that you want to, you need a plan, or blueprint. Life Architect helps you achieve more with less stress, helps you to improve your life—helps you to make, identify and interpret your life’s plan.

4 Comments »

Community Contribution by Erik Hanberg

I lurched into a Getting Things Done system over a couple fits and starts. First it started with two friends who had read the book and were talking it up. I was uninterested in what I thought was a “self-help” book.

But that soon changed when I discovered an Atlantic magazine article about David Allen and GTD by a writer I particularly like, James Fallows. Some of the ideas were interesting enough that I started doing them right away, based on Allen’s quotes in the article.

It took another week or so for me to get a hold of the book, and I fine-tuned my process as I read. I could quickly see the potential of the system, but I thought that it would take a lot more work to really get the system working the way it was described in the book (the collection phase seemed particularly daunting).

A couple weeks later, though, while spending the Fourth of July on beautiful Madeline Island, Wisconsin, I’d done a passable enough job of getting my lists assembled and I was ready to enjoy my vacation. One incredible morning I spent on the front porch of the house: just me, a cup of coffee, the view of Lake Superior, and not a thought in my head.

I was finally clued in to what David Allen had been getting at: with everything off your mind and on paper, you are free to just be. That morning was all the evidence I needed that I should make the effort to fully implement GTD.

The Sunday after returning from Wisconsin I scheduled off six hours and completed a full GTD collection. Suddenly my file system worked, my action items were easily collected, and I was feeling on top of the world.

Amazingly, six months later, I’m still doing GTD. This is unheard of for me. I’m much more the kind of person to become fascinated with an idea, an author, a certain world-view, or whatever other bright shiny thing I latch on to—only to drop it a month or two later for the next bright shiny thing.

But GTD was different because of one important function: the weekly review.

Certainly the feeling of being on top of things is a high sufficient to keep a productivity system like GTD going, right? Well … no. I feel great after burning 300 calories at the YMCA and eating a healthy dinner, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to go back the next day.

The weekly review has become an essential part of my week. Using Things for Mac, an action item appears weekly that tells me to do a weekly review.

Cribbing directly from Getting Things Done, these are the tasks and questions I go through one by one:

•    Find all loose papers
•    Go through last week of calendar
•    Go through next week of calendar
•    Review projects and action items. Should I add a project for any action item?
•    Am I waiting for anything?
•    Go through Someday/Maybe List
•    Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas I can add?

I’ll usually be able to add another 20 action items or so during the review. Some of them are triggered by the review of papers or the calendar (That’s right, I need to get that document reviewed by Tuesday’s meeting), others are triggered by reviewing the project list. (One of my projects is “Enrich relationship with friends.” This usually puts an action item on the list like “Email Aaron” or “Call Phil about games.”)

In the last six months, there have been plenty of bad weeks—bad because I’m feeling spacey, lazy, or grouchy—and I am negligent with logging action items, checking my next action list, and recording ideas when they come to me. Each and every time, the weekly review has pulled me out of it.

To make sure I actually do the weekly review, I make it as pleasant as possible. On Sunday nights I gather all my loose papers and take them into the living room, where I sit in my favorite armchair with my computer on my lap. A glass of wine and music on the stereo are usually involved, too. I’ll tell my fiancée Mary that I’m doing a review and will get a quiet hour of uninterrupted time, although recently I’ve been able to get the whole review done in 30 or 40 minutes.

Some Sunday nights scheduling won’t allow me to have the time to do a review, so I’ll usually bump it to Monday afternoon. It doesn’t have the same “feel good” impact, but I get through it and make it to the next week.

I’ve made it through 25 weeks of solid GTD work. And 25 weeks is a pretty good sign that this is bigger than a bright shiny fad. I’m sticking with it … weekly review by weekly review.

7 Comments »

Editor’s Note: It is my pleasure to introduce a new GTDtimes Contributor, Venkatesh Rao. Venkat works at the Xerox Innovation Group, where he leads technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work.

Prior to Xerox, he spent 2.5 years as a postdoc at Cornell, in Raff D’Andrea’s robotics research group. His work at Cornell was on Air Force command and control models for future battlefields. Between 1997-2003, he was at the University of Michigan, working on his PhD, which was on aircraft and spacecraft formation dynamics, with Pierre Kabamba.

His home discipline is systems and control theory, but for inspiration and ideas he draws from all the decision sciences including OR and AI. More of Venkat’s work can be found at his personal weblog, Ribbonfarm.

Recalibrating Your GTD Systems

(adapted version of an article I originally posted on my personal blog, ribbonfarm.com. GTD newbies might want to start with the for-dummies level companion piece I just posted there, before tackling this one.)

Here’s a great holiday-season project for you GTDers looking to improve your systems: recalibration. If you pull this off, your New Year’s resolutions might actually be more than a ritual in 2009. Your GTD system is really just a complex feedback control system, like your car’s cruise control or your thermostat. And like every system that depends on measurement, it needs occasional recalibration. So this article aims to show you how you can recalibrate your own systems, using my own efforts as a case study. It begins with the fundamental question, can you measure information work? The short answer: yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

Calibrating Work in the Raw

The first thing you’ve got to understand about measuring information work is that at the ground level, one size does not fit all. There are ways to abstract away from the specific nature of your work, which I’ll get to, but you still need to understand it first. The measurement methods I’ll talk about later rely on data artifacts generated by meta-work (like GTD lists). But meta-stuff must be calibrated against what it talks about. A typical next-step in your life may be an hour long, while one in my life may be five minutes. You won’t know until you look.

Every sort of information work transforms some sort of information artifact into some other sort of information artifact. Paul Erdos famously defined mathematics as the process of turning coffee into theorems, so in his case plotting ‘gallons of coffee’ (considering caffeine, metaphorically, to be information) against ‘number of theorems proved’ might have worked as a first pass.

My graph above reflects throughput patterns within my particular style of academic engineering research in modeling and simulation during that particular period (I was a postdoc at Cornell during this time). Coffee at Stella’s got transformed into written notes. Notes got transformed, in this case, into computer code with which I ran experiments, which produced data files. The data then got transformed to research output documents (papers and presentations). Here’s how I measured this throughput, each artifact in its own unit, with the graphs scaled so that the cumulative total at the end of the year is 1 (since we don’t care about absolute numbers when comparing apples and oranges) :

• NOTES: The cumulative number of pages in my research notes files. This is the best measure of “ideation” activity I could find.
• CODE: The megabytes of code and data in my working programming folders. This is one coarse measure of the amount of actual “work” being accumulated in computing work (today, I’d use a code repository and count check-ins)
• WRITING: The megabytes of working documentation in my computer “research” project folder. This measures the rate at which the “work” in 2 is being converted to completed output such as “papers” or “presentations”
• MGMT: This graph shows the accumulation of GTD data, or “overhead,” more on that in a bit, since this graph “measures” the others in a sense.

[Read more →]

1 Comment »

Will Traveler make getting things done with Notes easy?
I have a long-standing interest in devices and applications that increase mobile knowledge worker productivity, particularly those that support the GTD methodology and can sync with Lotus Notes. The problem is that most of the devices that I have used to date fail in one or both categories. For this reason, I have continued use and recommend the Treo 755p for power GTD users that want a powerful mobile list manager that seamelessly integrates with Lotus Notes. It’s not that the Treo is the best mobile platform out there. It isn’t. It simply has the best native list manager for managing projects and actions using the GTD methodology.

Since I know that someone will object to my statement, let me explain what I want in a mobile list manager: I want to click one button and see my list of projects and actions, sorted by context. I do not want to have to click Start, Run, and then click a bunch of options to find my tasks. I also want these views and the way I set them up to be persistent, which rules out two of the most popular device families on the market today.  I don’t mind using third party solutions to accomplish this, but for some devices, like the Nokia Series, they simply do not exist. I find it amazing that devices marketed to the business professional and equipped with so many productivity features would be so lacking in this vital component of productivity: list management.

For years, David Allen and I have discussed this: why do manufacturers make great hardware and then drop the ball when it comes to the suitability of their list management and task integration? (David uses a 755p, also.) I think it must be that manufacturers are expecting people to purchase based on the shiny features and not on what they can accomplish with the device. Earlier this year, a client generously gave me a shiny new Nokia E90 Communicator  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90> as a thank you gift. The E90 is a truly amazing mobile productivity device. Except, it has two problems: No task management. Zip. Zilch. Nada. (Unless you count their lame recording of a task as a note in a calendar event) and no reliable over-the-air sync of tasks to Lotus Notes. David and I played with this device this summer and agreed that while it sported an impressive list of hardware features it was essentially useless for us as a mobile GTD support tool. So, into pile of “really cool devices that I cannot use” it went. I hoped that someday, I might find a solution that would allow me to test this device as a list manager with Notes.

As much as I like the device from a productivity perspective, the Palm OS-based Treo is rapidly being eclipsed by BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices with some competition from iPhone. (I say “some” as I have yet to find a suitable on-device sync and device management solution for iPhone, which means I won’t recommend it for use with Notes and GTD.) I recently surveyed our customers that use eProductivity for Lotus Notes and found that well over 50% are using BlackBerry. In the U.S. the remaining 50% is made up of a large number of WM devices and then a variety of other devices. In Europe, the Nokia S60 platform is more common with WM coming in second.)  (Before I go further, I do plan to purchase a BlackBerry Bold to evaluate as my next productivity platform, but that’s a post for another day.)

Enter Lotus Traveler

Last week, Nokia and IBM announced support for a number of Nokia’s S60-based mobile phones, extending the reach of Lotus Notes to millions of users of Nokia devices that use the Nokia S60 3rd Edition platform. According to the announcements and blog posts including yesterday’s on GTDtimes, in excess of 80 million people – the number of Nokia S60 3rd Edition devices shipped globally – will soon be able to connect to corporate email accounts on a Lotus Domino Server. The glue that makes this possible is Traveler, a product that launched earlier this year. The Lotus Traveler software provides real time access to email, calendar, address book, journal and to-dos and the newly added support for the Nokia S60 platform is coming next month.

I think IBM is making a smart move to extend the reach of Lotus Notes to a variety of platforms. For years, I’ve used and recommended CommonTime mNotes and Sybase iAnywhere. If you have a Windows Mobile or Palm device, CommonTime simply works. Sybase has extensive device support, however, my experience is that they are making it increasingly costly for clients to buy their products. (I guess they are doing really well and do not want my client’s business.) So, I welcome the announcement of Traveler. I think it’s great to have a native Notes solution to recommend as well.

How well will Lotus Traveler handle Task Management?

I have no doubt that the Lotus team will do a good job with sync to the Nokia platform, and I have read enthusiastic reviews from users who are using Traveler on their Windows Mobile devices. What remains to be seen, is how well Traveler handles task management. This is something that Lotus and other vendors historically haven’t done very well. The IBM Web site for Traveler shows a thumbnail for a task list but there are no screen shots of any task lists so I cannot tell how well they have been implemented. Since I have yet to install Traveler, myself, I cannot comment on how well  Traveler handles task management, either on Windows Mobile or on the Nokia Platform. If you are using Traveler for task management on either of these platforms, I’d like to hear from you with your thoughts.

6 Comments »

A Community Contribution by Erik Hanberg.  Please note, this is Erik’s personal opinion. Things is not affiliated with or endorsed by David Allen Company. But we’re happy to pass along an objective review from a community member!

Too Much to Do

In April of this year, I left my full time job to “go freelance.” My schedule has been all over the place as a result. Between writing and doing web development for my fiancé’s graphic design firm,  managing my coworking office space in downtown Tacoma, operating my small theater production company, presiding over my condo association,  trying to get a novel published, and last – but most certainly not least  – getting married at the end of the year; you could say I’m a pretty busy guy.  While no single one of these activities takes up a full work week, the number and variety of things I needed to do made me feel like I was dropping the ball on all of them.

[Read more →]

21 Comments »

Editor’s Note:  This is the second part of a two part series on Action Support Folders and Tickler Lists.  The first part can be found here.

In the prior post I wrote a little about a recent coaching call I had with DAC Certified Coach, Julie Ireland and shared how she recommended that I set up my Tickler List and how I connect those items in it to my calendar where such items have a hard landscape deadline of some sort.

A number of readers chimed in with interesting comments and additional good suggestions – be sure to read the comments from the prior post to see some other excellent ways in which people are making sure that their reminders are doing their job.

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about the other rarely mentioned folder – the Action Support folder and how Julie recommends that it should be used as well as to briefly touch upon another folder that Julie suggested I incorporate into my system the “In Progress” folder.

In Julie’s system Action Support is a highly specific and constrained folder that contains only items for actions that are going to be undertaken in the very near future.  She was careful to distinguish between items in an Action Support folder and items in a Project Folder.  The former, she says should generally contain items specific to individual actions – a shopping list for the next trip to the grocery store for example versus, say a spreadsheet with statistics that is being used as research for a white paper that you are writing.  The latter of course should be placed in a Project Folder specific to that white paper – one among the likely many resources that are being used for that particular complex project.

An estimate for an auto repair would also go in the action support folder provided that this was a one-off occurrence and not a restoration project for instance.

My problem is that I have certain things that I’m doing that require more than say a single document in support of a single task, but perhaps multiple documents in support of a single task.  Let me give you an example:

Right now I’m disputing a bill with my insurance company.  I’m reluctant to call this a project (in spite of the fact that my insurance company is determined to turn it into one!) for two reasons, first because it is just a single situation that should be possible to resolve with a single thirty minute period @phone – however it does require supporting documentation, to wit a bunch of insurance documents that I already have in my (making me) Blue (and) Cross folder.

I’ve already gone to the trouble to pull the documents that I needed out in preparation for the call.  The issue is that every time I sit down at the phone determined to get this solved I dial the number and get a message that it will be thirty minutes before someone can take my call.  I don’t have thirty minutes to sit around on hold during the day – does anyone?

So now I’ve got the paperwork out and ready to go but the call may not be happening for another day or two.  I don’t really want to put the documents back into my BlueX folder only to have to go get them again in a day but I don’t really want to leave them stacked on my desk either (which is what I had been doing anyway prior to my call with Julie).

The In Progress folder is her solution to a situation like this.  I can simply put the documents into this folder (which should never have more than a couple items in it or there’s some other problem that requires more coaching then I am capable of providing) and they’ll be ready to go when I find either that I have thirty minutes during which I suddenly crave an elevator muzak concerto or when I win the game of cell-phone roulette and actually get a real person instead of a machine when I call my delightful insurers.

Julie recommends that the In Progress Folder be located in your in box or somewhere that’s within easy reach so that you can access it at a moment’s notice when your context is appropriate for tackling some task for which you’ve already prepared thanks to this convenient strategy.  It’s a lot better than having a bunch of documents that are too active to put away but not quite ready to be in use that moment.

I’m sure that some of you have other strategies that allow you to deal with similar situations in an equally efficient manner.  Perhaps a few of you would be kind enough to share your methods with other GTDtimes readers?  Let us know in the comments.  Thanks.

6 Comments »

I had a coaching session today with Julie Ireland, a DavidCo Certified Coach and felt like what she said made so much sense that it merited sharing with the community.  Since I’ve hardly ever seen discussion about Action Support Folders or Tickler Lists and since I felt like my approach towards both needed some tweaking I asked Julie if we could spend some time on that area today.  I am glad I did.

First let’s clarify what I mean by a tickler file:  the tickler file to which I am referring is a distinct file folder (Mine says “Tickler” on it thanks to my trusty labeler) that contains items that are already processed but which are not yet complete and which have some need to be completed by a particular time.

Before my call today I was struggling with this a bit – I didn’t want to put something that I’d processed back into the inbox but since I was still working with it I didn’t want to put it away in a reference file either (by the way, in my setup I have active reference files – those that are involved in some current project as well as current bills and payment records and thigs like that and archive files for work that is completed and reference material that I wish to save but which is not part of any active project at the time).

Julie told me that she has a tickler file where she puts all things that have a hard deadline such as bills due by a certain date, invitations that are on paper – etc. and that she then enters the date for which each item is due on her calendar (she says that the discipline to check one’s calendar every morning first thing is very important and I couldn’t agree more).

In addition to entering the due date for each tickler item into her calendar she organizes the items in the tickler folder in chronological order with the items due first in front.  This prevents having to shuffle through a bunch of stuff to find the item that your calendar is telling you is due on that day.

This is pretty simple and straightforward just so long as you take the time to enter the due date or deadline for each tickler file item into your calendar and then stay on top of that calendar like nobody’s business.

I’m going to try this method and see how it works for me.  If other folks have a different method of dealing with these sorts of items I would love to hear about it in the comments.

7 Comments »

Yes!  You heard it correctly.  One lucky person is going to win a full day of Workflow Coaching with one of David Allen’s executive coaches.  This is the same coaching that the David Allen Company provides to executives in some of the world’s most progressive organizations…

Now – courtesy of  GTDtimes – one lucky person is going to cash in big and get this life changing experience absolutely free.  This prize includes the complete cost (travel, etc.) for the executive coach to come to your office  and spend a full day with you to fine tune your  GTD System, work through your current projects list, capture your commitments, blaze through piles of stuff that have been there for way too long and generally help you  to become a lean, mean, productive machine.

So if you’re the sort of person that thinks that a day with a world class GTD professional would do you some good here’s what you have to do to enter:

1. Click on this link:  <GTD Executive Workflow Contest>
2. Fill out the questionnaire (it’s short and painless, we promise)
3. Explain in fifty words or less why you think a day of workflow coaching would change your life or send in a picture of your office with a caption that sums it up (please email your image and caption to    editor at GTDtimes dot com)
4. Wait patiently to be notified who got the big win

That’s it.  Nothing to mail. No purchase necessary either.  The team at GTDtimes and the David Allen Company will select the winner from all entries within one  week of the close of the contest. *

In addition to the Grand Prize there will also be a number of “runner up” prizes awarded to a few lucky people chosen at random.

Be sure to get your entries in by October 24th, 2008  so that you don’t miss your chance to win big.  Finally, be sure to subscribe to GTDtimes via RSS or email so that you don’t miss out on other contests or special events in the near future.

If you enjoy this publication, please help spread the word.  Would someone you know appreciate the information and advice that you get from GTDtimes?  Don’t keep us a secret!

*Please note the decision of the team at GTDtimes and the David Allen Company are final.  Employees of the David Allen Company and GTDtimes as well as their families are not eligible for this contest. For this contest you must live in the United States to be eligible. Winners will be  announced on GTDtimes and the individual winners will also be notified by email and will have 48 hours in which to respond to claim the day of coaching. If the prize is not claimed within the 48 hour period, the offer will be rescinded and another winner will be declared. The coaching day must be completed by December 31, 2008. This coaching day has no cash value and may not be transferred, sold or otherwise assigned.
–

5 Comments »