Okay, if that headline leaves you scratching your head you are probably not alone.  After all, doing nothing hardly seems like a way to get anything done, however, it is my aim to convince you that at times, doing nothing is the most appropriate next action.

As you know if you’ve been reading GTDtimes with any regularity, I’m fairly new to practicing GTD and I make no claims of being an authority on the subject.  In fact, it’s a great privilege to be able to learn from so many knowlegeable and experienced GTD’ers as a direct benefit of editing this site.  Nevertheless, I believe that I can make a strong case for my statement above because my experience in another arena has proven to me that sometimes it is the choice to do nothing that leads to better results in everything down the road.

Back when I used to race bicycles for a living I had a problem finding people who wanted to train with me.  It wasn’t that I had no friends.  The problem, it seemed was that I rode too hard on my hard days and too easy on my easy days.  Most less experienced riders do exactly the opposite.  Their hard days are not intense enough and their easy days are too intense to deliver optimum recovery.  After more than two decades in the saddle, I had learned that having the discipline to take a day completely off and just do as little as possible was a key component in my training program.

Without taking the occasional day off your body never gets that chance to fully recover and recharge.  Your energy level never reaches maximum, you never get totally re-hydrated and in the long run, the twenty, thirty, forty or fifty miles that you put in while I was hanging out watching TV weren’t the miles that won you the race, they were the nails in your coffin as I rode away on fresher legs over the final climb.

Similarly, I believe that we all need a mental break from time to time so that we have the ability to focus completely, to make good decisions about what our most appropriate next action needs to be and so that we are capable of putting forth our best effort when and where it can do the most good.

In the geek culture in particular, there’s a sort of masochistic pride we seem to take in logging the most absurd hours, taking the fewest days off and forgoing meals and coffee breaks to prove we’re working harder than the next guy.  Frankly, if we were bike racers we’d be peeing off the bike on training rides instead of stopping like civilized people. (Yes, I know it sounds impossible, but it is actually something that a professional cyclist can do without wearing it - seriously) .

Peeing aside, the truth is that this sort of behavior leads to all sorts of problems.  As a double-divorcee myself I can attest to this being counter productive to relationships, but there are other costs that are equally steep.  Stupid mistakes like accidentally hitting the “send” button or misaddressing a scathing email, falling asleep in a crucial meeting or simply doing less than stellar work are all quite possible when you don’t factor some mental recovery into your productivity strategy.

Like an athlete who doesn’t realize that the body improves while recovering from the stress of training, not the training itself, an executive who works non-stop is cheating herself out of the mental recovery that can enable creative thinking, problem solving, or even simply relaxing enough to get a good night’s sleep.

People used to laugh at my training schedule when they’d see a day that said: Mileage Zero, Couch 9 hours - they figured it must be a joke until they saw me with the remote control a stack of videos and a big bowl of microwave popcorn - yet it made perfect sense to me to schedule my recovery with the same discipline with which I scheduled my other training.

The thing is I bet that not a single reader of this site has doing nothing as a next action anywhere on any list or scheduled on any calendar.  Of course doing nothing is a little bit hard to categorize as a next action.  Perhaps we should also add occasional inaction to our lists.  Who knows, you might just discover the same thing that I did during my  racing years: that sometimes a little bit time spent doing nothing leads to accomplishing something much bigger down the road…

HOPE YOU ALL HAD A GREAT FOURTH OF JULY AND THAT EVERYONE TOOK THE DAY OFF!!!

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Kathryn Allen forwarded both of these videos to me and I thought they were wonderful. Thanks for sharing Kathryn!

Here’s a short clip from a brilliant little film called “Yellow Sticky Notes”:

If you want to see the entire short, please visit this site.

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Below is a copy of a fun article that just ran in the New York Times that heavily references David Allen and GTD. I thought GTDtimes readers might enjoy the piece and since the NYT website sometimes makes you log in to view articles I thought I’d save everyone the trouble and post it here for your enjoyment:
May 22, 2008
CYBERFAMILIAS

Organize: It’s Your Civic Duty
By MICHELLE SLATALLA

THE jury summons said to go the courthouse the day I was supposed to drive the French horn car pool, write a 1,000-word column, take the dog to the vet and fax some supplementary tax records to my accountant (if I could find the slip of paper on which I wrote the fax number).

The summons said to report to Room 244.

“Don’t go,” my husband said. “What are they going to do, arrest you?”

Lucky for him, my husband was out of town the day the certified letter arrived, threatening to lock me up and fine me $1,500 if I didn’t serve.
“I can’t believe you ignored it,” my husband said. “Don’t you realize being on a jury is not only a right, it’s a responsibility?”

And a nightmare for busy people like me or, say, Madonna, who also received a jury summons this year. She reported to the Beverly Hills Courthouse in February with a personal assistant and a BlackBerry.

Since Madonna and I have a lot in common, such as demanding jobs and children and having dated Warren Beatty - O.K., two out of three - I vowed to follow her example and fulfill my civic duty without sacrificing control over my life. I don’t have a personal assistant. Or a BlackBerry, come to think of it. Instead, I reported to Room 244 at 9:30 a.m. with my most important organizational tool, a laptop, and prepared to rely on the free WiFi connection.

My plan was to read and follow the suggestions posted on all the gazillion online productivity blogs - Unclutterer.com, 43folders.com, Dumblittleman.com and Lifehack.org, for example - that offer eclectic advice on how to spend time fruitfully.

Zenhabits.net advised me to “focus on one thing at a time.” This prompted me to focus on how this was all my husband’s fault, because if I had followed the jury summons instructions, I could have rescheduled my service for a date like, say, the Friday before Memorial Day, when it was unlikely anybody would need jurors.

I felt better already.

By the time lunch rolled around and I had caught a glimpse of the courthouse cafeteria’s Chinese chicken salad, I felt it would be a cinch to follow other online tips, including Zenhabits’ “How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way.”

But then the worst happened. Even as I was memorizing tips on how to brew my own natural flavors to add to water on Lifehacker.com, my life diverged from Madonna’s in a very troubling way. Unlike the celebrity superstar, who went home a free woman after a defense attorney complained she was a distraction and dismissed her, I was put on a jury.

I almost blacked out from panic. I didn’t have time to go to jury duty for even one day, and now, suddenly, it looked like I would be at the courthouse for the entire next week. I was going to miss work deadlines. Not to mention my volunteer time slot at the public library. And Hebrew school carpooling duty. And an interview with a source who had made travel arrangements around my schedule. How would I cope?

The productivity blogs had little to say on this particular topic, unfortunately. But as I spent the weekend frantically skimming their advice on how to declutter bookshelves (at Unclutterer.com) and how to “de-clump sugar with a slice of bread” (Lifehacker.com), I couldn’t help noticing a pattern.

Many of the bloggers idolized David Allen, a best-selling author whose “Getting Things Done” time-management system was described at 43folders.com as taking “a backseat only to the Atkins Diet in terms of the number of enthusiastic evangelists.”

I reached Mr. Allen by phone. “Can these productivity blogs help me through this desperate time in my life?” I asked.

He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to ask him this question. The problem with my plan, he said, was that I wanted to take a piecemeal approach to a systemic problem. Mr. Allen thought I would be better off focusing my energy on setting up comprehensive organizational procedures that would back me up in any emergency.

“How?” I asked.

“First, do a mind sweep and make an inventory of all the projects that need to be taken care of this year,” Mr. Allen said. “Most people have 30 to 100 projects pending at one time. What I mean by a project is anything that takes more than one step and that you’re committed to finish in the year, from getting the dog vaccinated to getting new tires on the car to planning a trip to Greece to dealing with what the kids are going to do in the summer.”

“Making an inventory of everything sounds hard,” I said, thinking it might be more thrilling, say, to make my own laundry soap by following the recipe involving borax and washing soda on TheSimpledollar.com. Or to memorize a few keyboard shortcuts every typist should know, according to ProductivityCafe.com.

“It takes one to six hours to do the inventory,” Mr. Allen said. “I bet there’s a big pile of stuff on your desk and stuff all over the house that you need to read. Gather it, and then you can make decisions about what you’re committed to do to move each project forward.”

He suggested, for instance, putting all my unread material - from magazines to unopened mail to notices from my daughters’ schools - into a “To Read” box. Simply identifying this clutter as a project would count as a step toward completing the project.

Having an inventory would prepare me, he said, for unforeseen contingencies.

“Life is full of surprises like jury duty, and when you’re surprised is when it becomes critical to know exactly what you’re not going to be doing when you’re doing jury duty,” Mr. Allen said. “You also need to take with you at the courthouse all the things you could be doing instead of sitting around watching paint dry.”

IF I managed at the courthouse to complete those things - which in my case included paying bills, updating my household’s monthly finance charts and responding to critical e-mail messages - Mr. Allen suggested I make a master list of every pending project I had identified.

“Stare at the list, during a break, until you see which ones you need to finish first and which ones you just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it and then cross those off,” he said.

I followed his advice. It took me more like 12 hours to make an inventory. (I got sidetracked looking through old baby photos that I found inexplicably stuffed into a desk drawer along with grocery store receipts from 1993.)

But by Thursday I was feeling so in control of my schedule that when the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom for a brief break, I had time to read productivity blogs for entertainment.

Then I realized the fact that I found the ClutterersAnonymous.net 12-step program so riveting probably meant I was ready to move on to create another tool Mr. Allen had mentioned: a to-do list.

The first item was easy: in the future, ignore husband’s advice.

E-mail: slatalla@nytimes.com

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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Russel Davies over at his blog by the same name, is featuring a post about what can only be described as a truly novel implementation of his next actions list. Rather than explain here, check out the image and pay his blog a visit for the inside scoop. While some people think this is clever as can be others are horrified at this use (or is it abuse) of a Mac…

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“I love deadlines…especially the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by” -Douglas Adams

From time to time virtually all of us put off until tomorrow what we should have done yesterday. Most of the time we do this knowing full well that we ought to get busy getting whatever needs doing, done. What’s odd about this behavior is that in spite of our knowledge to the contrary even the most logical people would be hard pressed to explain exactly why they’re procrastinating. It’s a question that has perplexed us for a long time. In fact there are records of procrastination of one sort or another stretching back some 3000 years.

It’s also an ongoing area of study and while no concrete reasons why procrastination is so pervasive in society, there are ways that you can learn how much you tend towards procrastination when compared with the rest of the world. In addition, you can get some helpful hints on ways to improve should your level of procrastination be higher than you’d like and you’ll be helping science along the way.

Here for your idle-time pleasure (unless of course you choose to take this test when you should be doing something else!) is a brief test courtesy of Procrastination Central that is designed to measure your degree of procrastination. It takes about 15-20 minutes to answer the questions and you’ll get your results immediately upon completion of the test. If you’re taking this at work be sure to close your office door

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Is getting ready to get things done getting in the way of actually getting things done? For the “hero” in this story this seems to be a real challenge…(this video comes courtesy of a tip from Michael Sliwinski, Founder of Nozbe)

Our second video today is a special treat: it’s David Allen at Google presenting GTD and the two keys to sustaining a healthy life and work style. This is a fantastic video and is absolutely worth the 45 minutes or so to watch it through. If you haven’t seen this before you’re in for a great learning experience, if you have, it’s worth seeing twice (or even thrice).

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First off we have a great video by one of our very own contributors, Nozbe founder Michael Sliwinski. If you want a quick explanation of how to get started with GTD that is very faithful to David’s own methods this is a great 30 minute investment.

Late Night Video Bonus Feature:

It’s late, I’m working on my Mac - I have to get up early in the morning for a conference call and what? It locked up? Oh noooo…. (Has this ever happened to you?)

Just in case, as a Mac user like me you ever start to feel smug or superior…

Do you have a good GTD video you’d like to share with the GTDtimes community? Please send it in: editor at GTDtimes dot com. Thanks.

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A couple of the GTDtimes contributors sent this my way and thought that more people would find this amusing. The strip appears originally on the Comics.com site.

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As you know, GTD Times is very new. As the Editor I’m still in the early stages of tuning the content mix to determine what people enjoy most, find most useful, most entertaining, most thought provoking, most inspirational, most fun - and most importantly, what keeps you coming back every day to see what’s new here on the site.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of video - since the advent of YouTube and Google Video I’ve discovered content that I would never have seen otherwise - content that has had a profound impact upon me and my life and upon the way I see the world. I’m sure that many of you have also discovered videos that have had a similar impact upon yourselves.

I’d love to know what videos you’ve come across that fit this criteria and I’d love to be able to share them with the GTD community. These do not have to be specific to mastering your workflow and in fact, the more thought provoking, challenging, eye opening or inspirational the better.

Send the links my way and every Sunday I’ll post at least a few of these videos to the site so that the community can benefit from our individual discoveries.

I figure that Sunday would be the best day for this since it is the day of the week when we’re least likely to be at the office where watching a video may be frowned upon, not allowed or inappropriate. After all, Sunday is supposed to be a day or rest, isn’t it? So kick back, put those feet up on top of your tidy desk, and chill out for a few minutes with some video courtesy of GTD Times and the GTD Community…

Today’s Videos:

I think it would be easier just to “Get it done…”

Feeling small? Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

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David Allen has come up with some remarkable, quotable statements about GTD. Personally I like “The better you get, the better you better get” a great deal because it holds true not just in business but in sport and many other life-arenas.

Just the other day I read this quote about GTD: “Don’t think, let your list think for you.” This fine remark courtesy of Mike Saint Pierre of the Daily Saint blog.

One more - I know David likes this one and so do I: “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”. This one of course came from Albert Einstein.

So, what are your favorite quotes that are from or can be related to GTD? Come on, be creative - check your books, your notes or make something up. The best quotes will get something fun from GTDtimes so send those quotes in today!

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