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

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According to a number of clever studies that were discussed in the January 22nd Print Edition of the Economist it just might.

In each of three studies conducted by a team led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, researchers found that groups that were asked to perform concrete tasks and to provide specific information tended quite significantly to respond within the allotted time whereas groups that were given tasks where the answers were not as defined and which required more abstract rather than linear reasoning skills tended to respond after the proscribed time frame or to not respond at all.

While on one level these results are not suprising I think it is important not to draw too many conclusions from this sort of seriously limited study.  For one thing studies such as this suffer quite significantly from the fact that the researchers have little control over many hundreds of extraneous factors that can influence the results of their research.

Further it is important to be certain that what they are seeing is truly a cause and effect relationship between the type of task each participant was asked to perform and the way in which the participant responded.  How, do the researchers know, for example, that there isn’t someone within the group that is self medicating with procrastination induced fear rather then because of some abstract question they were asked to answer?

While I am reasonably sure that the conclusions of the study point towards a relationship between abstract thought and procrastination in some people I suspect that this is only a very small part of the complete picture.  A lot more research in this area is needed before any valid conclusions can be drawn in my opinion - after all- it may be that procrastination is more likely to cause abstract thinking than to be caused by it; just ask anyone that knows me well.  They’ll tell you…

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Earlier today David Allen took a few minutes to record the following special invitation.  In it he talks about the upcoming GTD Global Summit and shares with us why he thinks that this event is even more timely and will be more valuable as a result of the continuing financial crisis facing the US and the rest of the world.

From a personal perspective I would add that this event was partially the brainchild of my late friend, Marc Orchant.  Marc passionately believed that a gathering of people from around the world to share knowledge of GTD, to exchange ideas, swap tips and tricks and show off our coolest shiny toys would be invigorating, intellectually stimulating, and above all offer a very significant opportunity for self improvement.

I’m excited about the forthcoming event and hope that I’ll finally have the chance to meet many GTDtimes readers in person for the first time.  Of course I’ll be providing extensive coverage of the Summit here at GTDtimes (as well as announcing in advance some of the special presenters who will be joining us).

If you can only attend a single conference this year the GTD Global Summit will be the one that delivers the most lasting value and real world practical advice to help you become more productive, better balanced in your work and home life and ultimately more capable to weather the current turbulent economic times in which we’ve suddenly found ourselves.

One last note:  If you are an accredited member of the media and would like a press pass for this even, please send an inquiry to me at editor at GTDtimes dot com and I will get back to you with a response.  Please note that only accredited journalists from publications with a recognized name and meaningful circulation numbers wiill receive a complimentary pass as spaces for journalists are highly limited.

If you are a less accomplished writer looking to attend there may be some discounted slots available on a first come, first served basis at the discretion of the event management.

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Editor’s Note:  this is another installment in the ongoing series “Oliver’s GTD Experience”.  The goal with this series is to share some of the thoughts, experiences, and personal as well as professional discoveries that have come about as a result of my effort to employ GTD in my life.

I’m in Ojai today and at the moment I should be over at the Ojai Valley Inn participating in the David Allen Company’s annual retreat.  I really should be over there, but last night I had a discussion with a GTD coach that resulted in a major shift in my understanding of GTD.

I’ve been thinking about this all night and this morning while I was getting ready to head over to the conference my thoughts clarified into a post.  I’ve been writing long enough to know that when that happens I should just sit down and pound on the keyboard or I risk losing my best thoughts as other things in my world start to interfere with my focus and ultimately kludge up what I want to write.

Originally I had planned on writing an introductory post about a new contributor to GTDtimes, Meg Edwards.  Meg is a long time GTD practitioner and one of the most experienced GTD coaches working with DAC.  For a variety of reasons that I will get into when I do her formal introduction, Meg typically ends up coaching the problem cases.  Or as she puts it “the people who are stuck”.

According to Meg, what often happens is that people who get stuck have some issue or other that interfers with their ability to focus correctly on some part of the GTD process.  For example, people with ADHD or those that have difficulty dealing with sequential processing.

David Allen, Meg says, basically assumes that people reading “Getting Things Done” (or “MIAW”), have pretty much normal executive function.  However if they don’t…well, they end up getting some help from Meg if they’re lucky.

Now I don’t have too much trouble with executive function- usually.  Those of you that have read my other posts may recall that I tend to be late so I can “self-medicate” with adrenaline by driving like a bat out of hell - I don’t do this intentionally, but the brain is a tricky and manipulative creature - sometimes I wonder who’s running the show in my case - me or my brain.  Does that make sense?

Anyway, I was talking to Meg about the fact that I have started feeling sort of numb to my lists lately.  I’ve been using Things for almost a year now and I realized that I am starting to develop an aversion to even clicking on the icon to check what needs to be done each day.  Then, after several days go by I open Things and have to tick off a dozen or more items that I’ve completed (or realize in horror that I missed something important).

Obviously this is not a terribly GTD way to go about things and worse, for me it means that I have fallen back into my old habit of remembering everything (or almost everything since I’m still pretending like my trusted system is capturing everything which of course it can’t possibly be since I’m not opening it every day, right?)

Mark would be kicking my butt if he were around.  This is not the black belt approach to GTD he followed.  It isn’t even a brown belt approach.  In fact, it’s more like a grey belt approach - you know, the sort of gray color that comes when you wash something white with a new pair of blue jeans??  This is hardly the color belt that the editor of GTDtimes ought to be wearing, is it? But I digress…

At any rate, I was explaining this to Meg and she was asking me some questions about what is going on in my world and in particular she asked me what I do when I have a task that I don’t particularly care for.  Needless to say she wasn’t surprised to hear me explain that there are certain things that I detest doing so much that it practically takes an act of God (or one very pissed off female) to get me to get on with the getting done.

Shortly thereafter we started talking about another topic and didn’t really close the loop on this discussion.  When we were walking out to the parking lot however I showed her one of my lasers (I’m the biggest nerd).  This lead to my showing her video that I’ve taken of something that I believe may actually represent a somewhat significant scientific discovery that I may have made (this is a long story in and of itself, but if you want to see the footage you can find it here.
).

Meg was intrigued and after talking about this for a few minutes she asked me what my next action was.  I explained that I was waiting to hear back from one of several microbiologists that I had written to in an effort to get confirmation.

Meg then asked me what my ultimate goal was with this project.  “It’s not really a project I said; I’ve been playing around with this for years before I did GTD.”

“Do you know what your desired outcome looks like?” Meg asked me.

I told her I did and explained what my goals were.  she asked me why I didn’t have a project for this and why it wasn’t anywhere within my lists including my long-term horizons of focus.

I tried to explain again that this was just a hobby and that…

You can see where this is going right?  Of course this should be listed.  It should have concrete next actions, it should have an ultimate final step to allow me to close the loop and if I am not really working on it seriously then I should park it in “Someday, Maybe”.  What I shouldn’t do is spend thousands of hours a year on this “hobby” without stating my objective and having a systematic approach to  getting to that point.

I tried once more to tell Meg that I didn’t have this as part of my trusted system because I just worked on this stuff for fun.

This was the “ah ha!” moment.  “Fun?” she said.  “Yes”, I explained. ” I do this for fun so I don’t need to put it in my system.”

Meg said to me “is everything in your trusted system something that you don’t want to do but know you have to do?”

“Of course” I said.  That’s how I stay on top of that stuff and make sure that I can keep myself on track.  There are some things I hate doing so much that in order to make myself do them I have to promise myself little rewards in order to get them completed.

“No wonder you are going numb to your trusted system”, Meg explained.  “Anyone would if everything in there was a hateful task that you have to force yourself to do it.  Why don’t you put things you like to do in your system?

I didn’t have an answer to this last question.  I should have one.  I would have liked to have had one.  I told Meg that I needed to go back to my hotel and digest.

End result?  After digesting all night - <burp> - I have come to a conclusion.  Mind you I still  don’t have an answer to the confounding question of the night prior but I have a solution just the same.  I can avoid having to answer that particular question by making one simple change.

I need some new lists.  Lists that include things I actually want to do not only things that I have to do.  You know, I’m supposed to be pretty intelligent but sometimes I wonder what gave me (or anyone) that idea.  Has anyone else failed to incorporate things that they like doing into their GTD lists?  Or am I uniquely incompetent in this particular regard.  Well, someone has to be the “dumbest wolf”*, I guess today it’s me - but I’ll bet you didn’t have an epiphany today, did you?  You’ve got to take the bad with the good.  It’s just the way of the world.

*the “Dumbest Wolf” is a reference to a story I used to tell about contextually relevant intelligence.  Basically what it means is that if any one of us were suddenly turned into a wolf (a-la- King Arthur), in spite of the fact that our human intelligence is far greater than that of a wolf in our own domain- even this huge intellectual advantage isn’t sufficient to overcome the handicap of lacking the domain specific knowledge and expertise required to be a functional wolf.  Thus, in spite of all our brain power, in the context of being a wolf, every sing one of us would be the dumbest wolf - and most likely the first one shot, trapped, hurt, or killed by the pack for being so stupid that we were too much of a liability.

Whenever I start to think I’m so smart I take a deep breath and remind myself that but for the grace of whatever divine power exists in the cosmos I could be the dumbest wolf or something even worse.

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At this time of the year we are all greeting one another with “Happy New Year!”

A very Happy New Year

How happy are you? And what difference does being happy make to you and your work? Or life with your children for that matter?

GTD helps give me more time for fun. GTD helps me to achieve  balance and meaning in life. For me, GTD is about making the right choices for my life and work. At least that is what I am working towards even though I sometimes fall off the wagon.

I’ve resolved to do more  with GTD in 2009. To reach new heights (thanks Oliver) and achieve even greater happiness.

Martin Seligman is a positive psychologist who tells us more about what being positive can do for us (see his TED talk and The BBC happiness formula).

I also recommend taking a closer look at the Authentic Happiness testing center. Measure your overall happiness, your current level happiness and your approach to happiness. You might also find it interesting and useful to test the character strengths of yourself and your children—I found this particularly insightful—I am curious and have an interest in the world.

Finally, be sure to take a  listen to the happiness anthem!

GTD makes me a happier person! Here’s hoping it does the same for you! And wishing you all a very Happy 2009!

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