My friend who writes the blog I Connect Dots has just sent me notice of a new show on CNBC all about collaboration.  He covers the details in his post here.  You should click over and check it out and be sure to add his feed to your reader. There are few people that think as deeply or explore topics as thoroughly as Steve Borsch.  In tech circles his white papers are widely circulated and invariably well received - he’s one of the smartest guys I know.  Now if we could only convince him to be a regular GTDtimes contributor…

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David Allen says

“You’d probably find yourself  with a much larger list of things you had taken on to get done as a result of  feeling so great from getting the existing stuff done”  (paraphrased)

You author concurs, but has an additional thought:

You might learn something about  ‘completion’: “the calm amidst  storm”

You see when I ask people in a seminar what they would feel like were I to wave a wand over their heads and complete everything that needs to get-to-done in their worlds, they seem to have a visceral experience from the inside out right before my eyes.

They seem to experience the joy, the peace, the rest of completion without actually having completed anything (unless some of them can travel at Star Trek or Star Wars speeds at an individual level and like the comic book hero the Flash, can move faster than my eyes can see).

Thus I conclude that this feeling of completion could be experienced at will from the inside out on demand.

One of the subtleties of framing desired outcomes as completion statements is that the statement itself moves one’s focus into pre-experiencing completion.  In fact for those who truly articulate the completion they are intent on achieving, they literally experience the benefits of completion every time they look at the list of projects needing completion.

Is this how your to-do list makes you feel?

It could…
Simply script your projects  and even your next action statements in the completed past tense with any  necessary descriptive bells and whistles embedded.
Then watch how they begin to  allow you to experience completion before completion has been realized.
Further, if your next actions are crafted  in an attractive enough manner, they actually begin to entice you to engage  with the incomplete items as soon as time presents itself.  Often this emerges  out of a desire to actually experience the reality of completion on the  physical versus just the psychological plane (which beats the fear of  deadline approach any day in my book).

The feeling this produces is my definition of the “calm amidst the storm”.

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Chris Bowler  of the Weekly Review has written a post I call a must read.  He talks of discipline and priorities and tweaking your system and in my opinion does a truly incredible job of putting into perspective something that I think anyone that’s done GTD for any length of time probably realizes at some instinctive level but probably can’t pull from subconscious to runway.  Now we don’t have to because Chris does so for us with eloquence.

Chris, if ever you feel like contributing to GTDtimes we would be honored.

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Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you’re completely overwhelmed with all the work that surrounds you? At those times do you then you catch yourself complaining about the outside world “I wish my job wasn’t so demanding”, “I wish there wasn’t so much competition”, “I wish my team would just listen to me” etc. What can you do to get out of this mental trap?

Here’s the secret:  getting things working for you doesn’t start by changing the outside world at all, but by changing ourselves and how we perceive our work from within. To change the world or the people around us, we must change ourselves first and then the world around us will change too. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Nevertheless, if you have some faith you might be pleasantly surprised.

The next time you find yourself paralyzed by the amount of work on your plate and you catch yourself complaining about it, try out the GTD Mind Sweep exercise, followed by processing each item

Step 1: The Mind Sweep

The first step in the GTD Mastering Workflow cycle is Collect. Take 5 mins out, and capture everything that has your attention. Here are some guidelines:

* Go for quantity not quality

* Don’t analyze or organize

* Write everything

* Write fast

Step 2: Processing

Once you’ve an objective look of all the items in front of you. Process each item by asking:

1. What is the successful outcome?

2. What is the next physical action?

This is what the result might look like:

Taking these two steps will give you an immediate sense of relief & a feeling of lightness.

What changed?

Nothing from the outside changed, neither the boss, the competition or the clients. All that changed was the way we are now looking at our work and defining what we want and the next steps to take.

Before performing the 2 steps each item that had our attention was an agreement to complete something that  we made with ourselves. Since these agreements were not being managed it was a cause of stress to us.

By collecting what has our attention and defining what needs to be done with it, we begin the process of managing these agreements.  By identifying and clarifying each of the agreements that had our attention, we’ve taken them from being overwhelming and distracting  agreements in our head, and instead we’ve taken an objective look at them & decided  what  next action each required.

Change from within

One of the beautiful aspects of GTD is that it doesn’t look to solve the problem from the outside, but rather focuses on change from within and how we perceive our work.

We agree that there is just one world in which we live and die. Yet this one world is different for each one of us because of how we perceive it. Internally our pictures of the world are different even though externally it is just one world.  Thus if we change the way we perceive our work, the world outside changes for us.

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Editor’s Note:  Here’s a short inspirational post by GTD Facilitator Maurice Gavin.  He challenges himself as well as all of us to ask ourselves a tough question; Why Not?  He doesn’t stop there, either.  He goes on to ask “What if?”  In your life you may only get a few moments where the answer to these questions can change your own future or possibly even everyone’s future.  Back when I was still racing my bike, a great Italian Champion, Francesco Moser said something to me that changed my career forever.  He said to me “to win the big races you must first risk losing them.”  I think that Maurice is making the same point only on a bigger and more important canvas than simply winning a bike race.  Take Maurice up on his challenge and ask yourself these two big questions.  For the courageous among you, how about sharing your answers in the comments below?  The best answers - according to Maurice, myself and some of the other GTDtimes contributors will get something nice from DavidCo for being so brave…

“What if you really could achieve the dreams  you conceive for yourself and your corner of this world?”

“What if you could overcome any obstacle set  before you in your life and in the lives of others at will and on  demand?”

 ”What if you saw every problem as an  opportunity to face yourself, overcome yourself and expand yourself without  fear or uncertainty during the process?”

 ”What if you could inspire others by your  example to change themselves for the better and to want to model your success  and your personal standards of integrity and excellence?”

As I write this I am doing so to challenge myself as much as to reach out to you the reader.

I have moved past

“What if”

and am now asking

“Why not?”

In fact, to be honest I am now saying to myself, if even in a whisper,

“Why not now? Right now?”

Regardless of what you do or think about this or anything else…

“What are the questions that are secretly  plaguing you from within?”

 ”What would you try anew if you were guaranteed  you couldn’t fail?”

“What is the highest level you could achieve across the  various spectrum of your life’s experiences if you were to intensify your  focus and apply yourself without regard for time required or the fear of  failure?”

What If and Why Not Right Now…!

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“Is it even possible to implement GTD across the Company?” That was the question that was plaguing me and Ali.  Even if we get tools for everyone and teach them all the basics, it’s still very likely that most employees will stick to their old ways. Change is hard from within an organization.  In spite of our efforts it is possible and maybe even likely that our people won’t crank widgets as we expect them to.

Considering these facts the question “should we then go ahead and invest so much time and energy into the training?” is one to consider seriously.  On the other hand if we don’t pursue a company wide GTD implementation what are our alternatives?  Not to teach GTD and accept the current standard of performance & accountability hardly seemed like a viable choice so we decided that we might as well give it our best shot and keep our expectations low.

Here’s what we did:

First we got  everybody their GTD Gear (covered in earlier posts of Rolling out GTD @ Vakil Housing series).  Then we kick started the Training.  The key to our methodology  has been the regularity and persistence with which we’ve gone about “the Vakil Housing Weekly GTD Training Meet”.  This is  the secret-sauce we found for implementing GTD at our office.

Logistics:
Day: We had set upon a Day for our weekly meeting, say every Friday
Time: 9:00 Am. We wanted to get started first thing every morning.
Duration: 1 hr. Many times it would stretch to an Hour and a Half.
We’ve been dong this for almost two years so to date we have conducted more than 100 hours of Weekly GTD Training at our office.

The General structure of the meeting is:
- Recap of what was learned last week.
- Take Any David Allen Podcast Interview, Article or Audio session from GTD Connect.
- Watch, Listen to or Read out loud the material while I would simultaneously draw a mind map of what is being read on the whiteboard, while explaining further what David covered.
- Pausing the presentation occasionally and going over any heavy concept that David touched upon.
- Once the interview/podcast is over, we would run through the mind map recapping what was covered. Typically I’d share my personal implementation examples, with my “aha” moments during the presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -Asking if anybody had “aha” moments of their own to share.
- Possibly give everybody an exercise to work upon and get back with feedback next week.

The topics that we covered:
- Obviously, the first course was an intro to GTD. We covered the concept that we are most effective when we are relaxed, but that we can’t be relaxed when we have a million other things pulling and pushing us. In this session we played the David Allen Video on the home page of the David Allen Company.

- In the second session we distributed the various tools (covered in earlier posts) and assisted everybody in setting those up.

- We did sessions where we told everybody to grab whatever papers are lying at their desks or in their drawers and get them all to the conference room where we proceeded to do a live joint processing session with the actual stuff that they have to deal with.

- We had a session on clearing emails from people’s inboxes. The session included sitting with one volunteer and taking 30 minutes or so to clear his email inbox while others watched to see how it was done.

- We had sessions on the Three Fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria, for which we used the relevant articles on the website.

- We once did a GTD-Quiz. Where we made teams to whom I asked questions on the podcast that was just played and we distributed sleek leather bound little pocket calendar diaries as prizes.

- After we felt our employees had truly ingrained the core concepts we did individual sessions on the Natural Planning Model and Horizons of Focus.

- In addition to the very specific GTD sessions we had many other sessions that were just general, just as many of David Allen’s interviews are. We just listen to them and we each pick out the nuggets that mean the most to us.

If you are a senior Manager within your organization and you’ve strictly implemented GTD for yourself but are having difficulty convincing others to adopt it, I would highly recommend trying out the weekly meeting the way we’ve done it as explained above. Keep your expectations low. Having your whole organization/department implement GTD is a big change and as every experienced manager knows most change only happens in small doses.

After more than 100 hours of GTD Training are we all following GTD 100% today? No, we’re not. But we’re certainly more GTD-compliant than before.  We are still working on it too. That alone made the whole process worth it. Persistence always pays. Remember, A big shot was once a little shot, who kept shooting.

This is the fourth post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing. Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.
Second Post: Cool GTD Gear to motivate all in your Organization to Collect & have a mind like water.
Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions.

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Editor’s Note:  Sarah Albright a Mom and a reader of GTDtimes recently sent in this great little article about how she uses the GTD principals to help maintain her sanity.  I’ll be that there are more than a few GTDtimes readers out there that can benefit from her ideas so I thought I’d share her commentary word for word.  Sarah, thanks for this great article.  Please feel free to send in another at any time!

By Sarah Albright

I began my GTD journey in 2005 when I took a 2 day version of the class at work. I loved the concepts, but at 27, I still placed a lot of trust in my memory. Then I got pregnant. Now that a massive hormonal shift has occurred and I’m the sleep deprived, full time working mother of a 1 year old, GTD lists are the only thing that keep me from sinking.

Outlook tasks combined with my Blackberry are my weapons of choice. Probably my biggest saving grace is the Agendas category. Three biggies: @ diaper bag , @ doctor and @Target.

@Diaper bag-Nothing is worse than getting to a restaurant with your somewhat cranky toddler only to realize you don’t have any snacks. Before I leave the house I do a quick check of my @ diaper bag list to make sure all the essentials are accounted for (Diapers, wipes, plastic bags, snacks, toys, sippy cup, extra clothes (for baby and me), etc.)

@Doctor-As a first time parent the list of things I can come up with to worry about (and of course Google) is way too long to keep between doctor visits. So if one pops up, I quickly record it, and the next time we have a check up I can bring my lists of concerns with me.

@Target-This one is self explanatory, but it’s huge for me. I’m forever running out of something, and this keeps me from realizing at 4 am that I used my last diaper before bed.

These are just a few of the small ways that GTD keeps me sane.

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As a Parent Coach and Family Therapist I spend a lot of time helping people everything from troubleshooting how to get kids to bed, to how to help dinner time go smoothly, to how to give an effective timeout when it is needed.  I also help with teaching principles about relationships. For instance, how to share control  in areas where you don’t need it as parent so that when you really do need it, kids will be willing to follow your lead. I also help clients with common therapy related skills like developing a deeper understanding of themselves or learning some self-empathy skills. Parents get a lot out of these skills. These skills create profound changes in people’s lives, yet I discovered that there seems to be a ceiling that clients  bump up against,  limiting their growth as parents.

My supervisor in grad school, a very wise and seasoned psychologist, had a knack for capturing the essence of life and of therapy by dividing things into three “baskets”. Here was what became the most important of them to me:

We have Three Primary Tasks in Life. If we’re good at these three we are successful and happy. Here they are:

1) Get along

2) Get things done

3) Self-soothe (manage our emotions)

They sound really simple and straightforward, don’t they?  I find it amusing looking back that I had no idea as a graduate student that number two was the name of a program which was on the cusp of becoming huge and which I’d one day being blogging about.

A lot of what I did with parent coaching and family therapy boiled down to the first and the last, getting along, and self-soothing, as well as teaching kids to do those same two. Those are truly important.  And they are of course much more complex than they appear at first glance, otherwise we wouldn’t call them life tasks. What I’ve discovered over the years though is that when I do nothing but helping with getting along and self-soothing, many parents hit that ceiling I mentioned. That’s because helping them with getting things done was a gaping hole that I was missing.

Too many therapists focus exclusively, by the nature of their profession, on numbers 1 and 3. And they just expect that clients either do or do not know how to get things done. They just don’t really see getting things done-skills as a task they ought to help with. But much like there are parenting skills such as the art of sharing control that in retrospect look like just common sense, there are Getting Things Done skills that are the same. That’s how we know they’re powerful. They are effective, and once you know them and practice them you get an illusory “Hey I knew that all along” feeling. David Allen has a term for that. He calls it advanced common sense .  Social psychologists refer it as hindsight bias.

What I’ve found is that parents, and all my other clients, including kids struggling in school, benefit from learning the skills from number two basket, Getting Things Done. I’m glad to have stretched the therapy model a bit, as many other therapists are doing now, to incorporate coaching on Getting Things Done. Because I would sure hate to have missed the opportunity to see families push past that ceiling by offering practical, easy-to-use GTD skills for accomplishing life’s second, and too often, overlooked  task.

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One of our challenges in implementing GTD across our organization was to change our people’s habit of keeping stuff in their heads and get them to start actually using an external tool for collection. As you might imagine, if there were leaks in “Collect” process we simply couldn’t go ahead with the other stages of Gaining Control. Of course change always happens slowly. So we continuously stressed the benefits of collecting in an external system at our Weekly GTD Training meetings and I would occasionally send motivational reminder emails, like the one below:

Hi everybody,

A reminder to all to collect 100%. Currently as I’m sitting at my
desk, I see John on the phone, Ram on the phone and & Steve
having a discussion with Omer, but NOBODY’s
collecting. Even if you feel, “oh C’mon, have we got to collect this too,
but this is nothing important”, please do so. Only if we over-collect, for the
sake of collecting only, shall it become a habit. Once it becomes a
habit then we’ll start collecting the really useful stuff.

Take care everybody & All the best,
Arif

I admit I was going through quite an over-enthusiastic GTD Phase and was highly motivated to have a team around me that was GTD ready. But I was confident that it was a change for the better that would appreciated by all once we get there.
Well, of all the measures we have taken to fire up everybody to collect, the one that was most appreciated was when we designed a personalized pocket-note-taking pad for ourselves. After all David Allen does say that one of the best way to charge yourself to implement GTD is to get some cool gear. If you really have to collect always, you’ve got to have the tools around you to do so. I had experimented with several note-taking pads, including the David Allen Official Note pad that comes with his Note-taker Wallet, but none of them seemed just right. For some either the size was too small, or it was not too easy to tear off a page once you had completed jotting down what you needed to, none of them had a cool snazzy design.
Our criteria of a good note-taker wallet was:

1. It had to look good. So good that it mad a style statement. The user’s gotta feel like keeping it with him always and whipping it out when it came time to collect something.

2. The size had to be small enough to carry in your pocket, yet large enough to fit a mind map in there if you needed to.

3. One should be able to rip the paper out really easily once he’s captured something. Most of the note-pads I had seen were either spiral bound or micro-perforated. I’ve experienced that the spiral bound notepads, don’t tear off really easily when there are too few pages left in the pad. And the micro-perforated ones need you to hold the upper section of the notepad in one hand so that you can left the bottom portion of the page and tear it off.

4. The pages should not be ruled. So if anybody wants to draw something e.g. a route-map, mind map or an engineering drawing (we are a Construction Company), it would be really simple to do so

So after very intensive R&D we arrived at our first prototype. Ta-da:

The Design is something that everyone appreciated, even Leslie Boyer Harradine (Official David Allen Trainer) complemented us on it when she was down here.

Well there you have it. We first thought we’d put these notepads up for sale to the GTD community, but then since that was not really priority, we said, let’s just have it for in-house use. Anyway, Feel free to copy any of these to make your own personalized Capture Tool. Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And if you do implement these, please do post what sort of reactions you have from the people using them. I eventually see this being like a trademark, that all Vakil Housing employees carry this particular brand and style of notepad with them.

This is the Second Installment in the series of Posts for Rolling out GTD at Vakil Housing. You can see, the first post in the series here.

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Editor’s Note:  This is the first post by new GTDtimes contributor Dan Schawbel.  His expertise is in personal branding.  You can visit his site here.

People need drive in order to accomplish goals.  Salespeople need incentives in order to act.  We all need a reason for being to feel compelled to get things done.  Passion is an amazing vocabulary word.  It means to have a strong feeling or emotion tied to something.  Passion is the energy or rocket fuel we need in order to give us a reason for being or the ability to get from 0 to 60 in 3.2 seconds like a Ferrari.  The one thing in common with most successful people is passion.  Take Oprah, Trump or Tiger Woods for example.  They all love what they do, which means that no matter what obstacles surface, they will push through because they believe in themselves and their cause.
As a brand, you need to discover what you are passionate about.  In the blogosphere, 60-80% of blogs are abandoned due to lack of passion.  Without that mental drive, you lose focus and become lethargic; therefore you stop your current activity and jump to the next.  When you make that leap, you are confused and unsure of yourself, which is detrimental to your personal and professional life.  People switch jobs all the times and sometimes they shift careers altogether.  When this happen, the skills that don’t carry over become lost and not exercised.
Where does passion come from?  The secret is that passion comes from within.  It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  It’s like a drug for the soul that reactivates it every time it’s asleep.  I always tell people that when you discover your passion, everything else comes together.  It’s like you’re having an awakening and are going through enlightenment.   Many people neglect their passion for financial reasons or because they feel they have to work a regular 9-5 job to survive.  They may have multiple responsibilities that they have to juggle on a reoccurring basis or a family they need to provide for.  The key with passion is to take time out of your day to reflect and to have a clear goal in life.
What you do for work might not even define who you are.  Sometimes it’s your work or hobbies outside of your current profession that become what you do full-time.

Tips on how to find your passion:

•    Take time out of your day and think about your situation, your skill set and goals.
•    Ask others for feedback, as to what they think you would excel at.
•    Take self-assessments from institutions such as Myers-Briggs.
•    Read a book or two to get some new ideas and refresh your mind.

Before you start a blog, a business or proceed in your career, please take time to find out more about yourself.  You will waste a considerable amount of time second guessing yourself later if you don’t invest now.  The more you pay attention to who you are in the inside, the more you can become that person on the outside.  Passionate people are confident, energetic and above all, happy.  Do you want all of that?  If yes, then start working at it.

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