“Yes, but not the way most people seem to understand goal setting. In my experience, the real value of defining desired futures is not so much in the world they describe, but the change in perception the process of setting goals fosters.”

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE VALUE OF GOALS

What we focus on changes what we notice. Our brain filters information, seeing one thing in a situation instead of something else, based on what we identify with, what we have our attention on, what we’re looking for—more or less consciously.

The reason for long-term goals is the permission they give us to identify with the greatest value we can so it changes our filtered perceptions. The future never shows up (have you noticed?—it’s always today!). But playing with it as a working blueprint can be a remarkably useful tool to see things (and how to do and have them) that you never saw before.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 4 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

My essay this month talks about the wisdom of “the way out is through.” I hope it gives you some good direction on dealing with what may be dragging on your psyche and systems. Defining what you are not doing is as important as knowing what you are doing for stress-free productivity. Having things you’ve told yourself to do (implicit agreements with yourself), still undone, can be deadly to your confidence and energy if they are not appropriately managed by constant renegotiation with yourself.

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE WAY OUT IS THROUGH

Most of you reading this don’t even have time to finish to perfection your current set of projects, even if you stopped the world from giving you anything new, and you had several months or even years within which to do them.

It’s strange, but I work with people to define the work they are not doing.

There’s an old Gestalt theorem — the way out is through. Defining what we could do, and what we are doing right now instead — managing the triage strategically with ourselves and others, is a key component of managing ourselves and our workflow these days. You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.

There is no catching up. There is only catching on.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 4 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

Does your company plan things correctly? Or are meetings unproductive due to poor planning? We continue our Leadership Hall of Fame series . . .

How Bad Plans And “Good Ideas” Ruin Meetings

BY David AllenTue Nov 1, 2011

When the “Good Idea” Is a Bad Idea

Have you ever hear a well-intentioned manager start a meeting with the question, “OK, so who’s got a good idea about this?”

What is the assumption here? Before any evaluation of what’s a “good idea” can be trusted, the purpose must be clear, the vision must be well defined, and all the relevant data must have been collected (brainstormed) and analyzed (organized). “What’s a good idea?” is a good question, but only when you’re about 80 percent of the way through your thinking! Starting there would probably blow anyone’s creative mental fuses. 

You can read the complete article here.

Fight the Frazzled Mind:

Proactive Steps Manage Stress

A new study suggests that preventive, proactive approaches are the most helpful—and that our stress management IQ is painfully low

In this video, co-author John Tierney talks to Reason.TV about success and failure and the positive impact David Allen and GTD can have on all that. 

(The video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a few moments to load.)

(The video is streaming from TechCrunch TV, so you may need to give it a moment to load.)

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

GETTING FREE

One of the reasons the GTD approach can be so empowering comes down to a simple, primal dynamic: When something is named, it is known; and when it is known, its hold on us is released. When things we have allowed into our inner or outer world are appropriately and accurately identified, we feel curiously freed from them. It’s all about clarifying what things mean to us and sorting them in our world appropriately.

Do you have any projects that you haven’t identified as projects yet? Got anything you’ve been thinking that needs clarification, resolution, or looking into, that you don’t have on a Projects list yet, that you look at regularly to keep actions moving toward?

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

What’s your plan for a summer vacation? Or is it a staycation for enjoying your home? And how connected will you be to work, while you’re on vacation?

How Vacations Help the Business Brain

In exactly 12 days, I will be going away on a 10-day vacation. The thought of this impending time off from the daily in and out of work exhilarates me — and worries me.

On the pro side is the anticipation of rest, renewal and relaxation. Weighing in on the negatives are preparing to go in the first place and a heavier workload when I return. 

Question: Since I’m always completing “old” tasks and “generating” new tasks, my “list” ALWAYS has tasks to be completed. GTD is nice because you can see all task and never lose track of anything, but on the other hand it’s weird because it gives me the feeling that it never ends!

David Allen: The answer to your question is very simple: you’re never finished until you’re dead (if even then, on other levels of our existence).  The essence of GTD is to get yourself “in the driver’s seat” about what you’re doing, and want and need to do. It’s not about finishing everything. You don’t have to finish something to be free of it. You simply need to decide what it means to you, park the outcomes and actions in the appropriate places that you trust will be reviewed at the right time… and you’re free.

A principle of Getting Things Done is to habitually write down everything that has your attention. Writing things down can be done with pen on paper, or typing into a computer, or any method that externalizes the thought. The key is to get it out of your head.

Then you need to assess whether you are going to commit to doing something about what you’ve written down. If so, what is the desired outcome? What does done look like? And what is the next action to get to that point? Alternately, you might decide not to do anything about it right now — it is something you will park on a someday/maybe list to reconsider in the future. Sometimes such a decision is difficult. Sometimes it is the first time you’ve really faced the issue with clarity, instead of merely having a nagging feeling about something you dread. There is a tendency, therefore, to not write down everything, to write down everything except those really tough issues.

Writing down everything is fundamentally different than writing down most things. The standing order to yourself to “write down everything” is not at all the same as “write down everything except that which I feel too bad about.” According to GTD, writing down everything is supposed to be an exercise that is free of value judgments. You are not supposed to think about, analyze, measure, assess, assign importance to, weigh against other things, etc. You are supposed to capture everything that has your attention as a discrete phase. If you are being selective in what you capture, you are cheating yourself. No matter how pristine and functional your trusted system appears to be, you will know it is incomplete. Most likely, especially during a review, you will keep remembering everything you did not want to capture. Your lists will become repellent to you as they will remind you, ironically, of what is conspicuously not on them.

If you had written down the things you dread, and made an up-front decision about them, they would be on a list somewhere. Perhaps as a project, a new area of focus, or a someday/maybe. By doing that, you have accepted the situation. By avoiding it, you have avoided acceptance. Putting something on a list in a GTD way, is really about acceptance.

The next time you review your GTD system, strive for acceptance of everything in your life, everything in your head, and write down what you have avoided so far. Be as honest with yourself as you can, and strive for being free.

Perhaps a good exercise is to ask yourself if those who know you best looked at your lists, what would they know was missing from them. It might not be easy to capture everything, and it might take months. It might be emotionally exhausting and you might find you have to pace yourself. Nothing is wrong with that.

Lastly, do not think everything you are holding back from your lists is negative stuff. What hopes and dreams do you have that you are not writing down? What are you avoiding writing down because you feel embarrassed or silly or irresponsible, or childish, or unrealistic, by having those thoughts? Learn to accept those and write them down too, for in them may be the beginning to your life’s fulfillment and greatest joys.

Mike: Let me ask you this. How important is it to follow this system exactly as you’ve outlined? I read the book a few years ago. I’ve implemented the system. I’m probably not using it to its fullest. What’s your perspective on that?

 

 David: Well, you either want nothing on your mind or you want to keep stuff on your mind. If you want nothing on your mind, you absolutely must rigorously download everything that is potentially meaningful, decide the outcome and action steps embedded in those, and park those in some place you trust you’re going to look at, at the right time.

(The video is streaming from YouTube, so you may need to give it a moment to load.)

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Getting GTD onto cruise control

If you’re like most people who’ve begun the implementation of the GTD^® methods, you’ve had some starts and stops in your journey. While my approach is really nothing more than advanced common sense, doing these practices consistently requires some re-grooving of your behavioral patterns. And some of those, though not optimally productive, are likely deeply rooted. How does “doing GTD” become second nature—something you live by but rarely even think about?

Keep reading David’s article.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks.  You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Why “list” is a dirty word

What’s wrong with lists?  Most people haven’t had a lot of success with lists, especially the ones they’ve tried to use to “get organized.”

You are either attracted or repelled by your lists and everything on them. There is no neutral territory. When you look at any one item . . .

Keep reading David’s article.

Subscribe to Productive Living.  It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks.  You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

The purpose of having the granular next action on a list is to define what “doing” looks like and where it happens, so you can finish your thinking about what to do about the commitment (outcome, project, etc.)  That said, another reason for the granularity on the action lists is to subvert the procrastination that potentially shows up because of a pre-conscious insecurity about success.  As in, “I don’t want to step into something I don’t think I can control.”  If the enormity of the next action causes you to falter, then it’s advantageous to define a smaller, doable chunk.  For example, “draft plot ideas” instead of “draft great American novel.”

 For more on this topic, see this excellent article in The New Yorker that mentioned David’s book Getting Things Done, and the value of the GTD approach.

90+ % of the to do lists I’ve seen are incomplete inventories of still-unclear things.  The Next Action definition (if you’re really getting down to having no ambiguity about the next visible physical activity required to move something forward), actually finishes the thinking you’ve implicitly agreed with yourself that you’ll do.  “Mom” is an unclarified to do item.  But when “Mom” is translated into “Celebrate Mom’s birthday with a party” as a project outcome, then “Call Sis about what we should do for Mom’s birthday” is a clear next action.  Because “Mom” is vague, it still triggers stress when you look at it on a list.  “Call Sis . . . ” triggers action and positive engagement.

A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg

There’s an idea I’ve read about when it comes to how different kinds of people schedule their day.  It’s maker versus manager.  Like me, many people work as both maker and manager.

Managers tend to schedule in one hour blocks.  There’s usually not a question about whether or not there’s a meeting at 2:00; it’s a question of who that meeting is with.

Makers tend to think in half-day blocks, scheduling three, four, or more hours for a single task.  Writing, coding, creative problem solving, etc., are all done best with a lot of hours put toward them all at once.

I’ve found the same tension in my own schedule as well.  Some of my work makes perfect sense in hour-long segments.  But some of it really needs to be in half-day chunks: building websites really requires at least two hours of solid attention to get anything significant accomplished, and often more.

I’ve gotten much better at scheduling meetings to give me the half-day chunks I want for coding or writing.  Here are some of the ways I’ve balanced it:

• My first step is to try to pack the meetings together.  If I have the choice, I’d rather have a 1:00 and then a 2:30 and then a 4:00 as opposed to a 10:00, 1:00, and 4:00, which leaves a lot of awkward space in the middle.
• I try to make busy days busier.  If there are already three meetings on one day, there may as well be five.  I’ll schedule more on that day to try to keep other days free.
• When there’s no avoiding having a lone meeting on a day, I’ll usually try to schedule it at the end of the day to give me the morning and early afternoon for work.
• I get up early.  I’ve never been much of a morning person.  I mean, I like mornings once I’m up, but I don’t like the getting up part.  I’m actively working at changing that.  An earlier start means more time.
• I still often look to nights and weekends for those 4-hour blocks of time. On a recent Saturday night I spent three hours developing out a shopping cart for a client. It’s not an ideal way to spend Saturday night, I suppose, but when things are going well and you’re making progress, there’s a certain flow that you get into, and it can be pretty enjoyable. 

I think these steps have helped give me the open time I need to get projects done while balancing all the meetings I need to attend. 

David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is great for getting work done during those unexpected times that will always develop.  If you schedule yourself with maker vs. manager tasks in mind, you’ll keep those awkward times to a minimum.  And you’ll find you can get more productive use from your day.

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

GOOD RIDDANCE

It’s time to purge.

The end of a year and start of the new is a great metaphorical event you can use to enhance a critical aspect of your constructive creativity—get rid of everything that you can.

Keep reading David’s article.

Subscribe to Productive Living. It’s free and sent about every 3 weeks.  You’ll find lots of great productivity tips, tricks and strategies.

GTD has transformed (and I do mean transformed) my life.  From chaos and stress two years ago, I have found peace and order today, mainly as a result of implementing GTD across my life.

It occurred to me recently when watching one of David’s talks where he explained that we are all trying to operate in a digital world with a stone-age brain, that there are a lot of parallels between physical and mental exercise. We need both in this world we have created that evolution has not prepared us for.  In the face of this challenge it’s as though GTD and mindfulness are to the mind as cardio and weights are to the body.

Thank you for all you guys do.

Best wishes,

Paul

A Community Contribution from Erik Hanberg

For me, one of the easiest and yet most difficult concepts of David Allen’s Getting Things Done was thinking of everything as work.

After all, who wants to work all the time? But I quickly learned there was strength in the idea.

As I was implementing GTD for the first time, I understood the concept as a way to make sure that I didn’t lose track of the fun things in life. If my lists concerned only work-related areas, it would always feel like a chore to check them. But I added projects like “Experience great art,” and “See the world.”  That means that every week I think about those two projects and make sure I am scheduling them, whether it’s “Watch next disc of Mad Men” or “Reserve train tickets in Italy.” (These might be the only projects I have that I’m glad there is no “done!”)

I also understood the concept as a way to re-think procrastination. David Allen’s system encourages me to take into account my energy level as I consider projects. So if I don’t have the energy to do that massive task in front of me, and instead I check off a lot of little things related to home or personal life, that’s still work. I’m not shirking, I’m still … ahem … getting things done. It’s all work.

But in the last two years, I have come to realize that there is even more power behind this idea than I’d originally thought.

My professional life is fractured into many small pieces. I am the part-time Executive Director of a civic non-profit (12.5 hours per week!). I am in public office, one of five commissioners overseeing the park district here in Tacoma, Washington. And I am a web developer, project manager, and bookkeeper for my wife’s graphic design company, which further divides into projects related to each client we have. Non-profit, government, and for profit work.

I don’t know if I could do it without GTD.

Clearly, having a well-maintained task list is essential to pulling off this kind of cobbled-together professional life. But it’s more than that. At times I can feel how easy it would be to let it get to me. On days when I have meeting after meeting after meeting—and none of them even barely related to the others—it’s tempting to think that if I could just “simplify” life would be a lot easier.

But I think that kind of simplicity is an illusion. In reality, even when I had a 9 to 5 job, I was tugged in different directions all day. Long-range goals, short-term goals, budget meetings, staff meetings, and—oh yeah—I’m the only one who knows how to replace the toner cartridge.

Thinking of my jobs, plus my personal roles, plus my volunteer roles as parts of the same big ball of “work” helps me achieve more than I’d ever thought possible. It’s all the same work. It’s all the same life.

If I were too busy trying to maintain a “work/life balance” I wouldn’t be doing nearly as much, and I wouldn’t be having as much fun with my work as I am.

“Use your mind to think about your work, instead of thinking of it.

Your mind does not remember or remind very well, compared to what a good system can manage.  What it does do well is review options and available information and then put together “how-tos.”  It’s not free to do that if it’s trying to remember and remind. Without an airtight system, it must work at a lower level than it should and becomes a misused resource.”

-David Allen

Excerpted from Ready For Anything

David Allen: When I started out doing management consulting, I was interested in thinking/processing models that worked universally to provide value and improve conditions for people and organizations. That, combined with my own awareness of the strategic and psychological value of clear space had me quickly develop a way to research and apply a set of best practices that invariably worked for the executives and entrepreneurs I worked with. I’m continually motivated to keep doing this work, because it never stops being quite transformational for anyone who applies the principles, and there are few things I’ve ever come across that provide as much reward for so little risk.

This same world view somehow seems to be plagued with jargon about priorities: how to set them, how to classify them, and how to sort them out. It claims to give us a sense that we are somehow in control. Several of my clients are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of the stuff they have to process and even more so as their resources to make the things they need to make happen get reduced, sometimes to the point of scarcity. So their question is “how do I set my priorities in any given day, so I know I am not wasting my time? So I know I am doing the right thing?”  The underlying question may well be, “How do I know that I am in control, so that what I am doing is the most relevant; the one that adds the most value?”
No one really knows what the best choice is until everything that is really “on his or her plate” can be seen accurately. Our suggestion is that you work from a complete life-list, where the inventories of everything you need to do, have agreed to do, be responsible for, would love in your life, are waiting for, etc. is listed and reviewed regularly. When that happens, you can rest assured that any decision you make regarding what you do is the best possible decision you can make.

That is because you really have got all the elements at play and the good feeling you will have about a particular choice, that excludes other actions that could also be acted upon, will come from knowing exactly what your choices are.

“You have more to do than you can possibly do. You just need to feel good about your choices.” David Allen

In the Getting Things Done seminar, we go over a model for choosing actions in the moment, based on 4 criteria: Context, Time Available, Energy Available, and Priority. Context refers to the location and setting you’re in. Are you in the location where the action can happen; do you have the tools you need: office, home, phone, computer, etc. The time available will determine what kind of work you’re willing and able to do. If you have 5 minutes or 2 hours, time will affect your choices. The third criterion is your energy level. How much energy do you have? There are times when you’re fresh and ready for clients, and other times when you’re toast and it’s best to purge the files, water the plants and/or fill your stapler… And finally, after you’ve considered your context, time and energy, now you can ask, “What’s the best thing for me to be doing?” (This info can be found in more detail in David’s book,  Getting Things Done, Chapter 9, “Doing: Making the Best Action Choices.”)

“Every decision to act is an intuitive one. The challenge is to migrate from hoping it’s the right choice to trusting it’s the right choice.” David Allen

David Allen has said it more than once, “You can only feel good about what you are not doing, when you know what you are not doing.” It is important then to keep collecting, processing and organizing information, so that the system you review periodically earns your trust.  Paradoxically, your outer environment will still do what it does, regardless of your efforts to make it do something “better.” Creating a system that captures the “whims” of the outer environment does and will help you do the best you can with what you’ve got. Thus it is called “controlling” your inner environment.

Ana Maria Gonzalez is responsible for comprehensive planning and management of the international expansion strategy for the David Allen Company.  Ana Maria has more than 10 years of experience as executive coach and trilingual management development trainer with The David Allen Company.

David: Weight is lifted because the weekly review allows you to clarify and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself. That simple. Negative stress usually occurs because of inner conflict that can only be resolved with conscious dialogue with yourself and decisions made that resolve the discrepancies (you can’t do everything at once.)  I applaud your discipline to discover this!

This is a Community Contribution from Don Khouri, based on his personal experience with GTD and personality assessment tools.

You may wonder how your personality supports your ability to get things done.  In this article, I will elaborate on various preferences and the connection to Getting Things Done® (GTD®).  This is a follow-up to my response to David’s post about GTD and Personality Types.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument (MBTI®) is a self-assessment which measures people’s behavioral preferences across four dimensions.  Learn more from the creators of this instrument.

Let’s start with the fourth MBTI dimension which is our attitude toward the external world and how we orient ourselves to it.  Judgers (Js) prefer structure and lists; Perceivers (Ps) prefer experience, flexibility, and options.  Js like GTD because they like to plan, enjoy having lists, and finishing things.  Ps do not like making lists as much as the Js do; they like having options available to them.  GTD facilitates this very nicely because when making decisions on what to do, there are options available based on your energy level, time available, and context.

The third dimension identifies how we make decisions.  Thinkers (Ts) make their decisions based on facts and principles.  Feelers (Fs) make their decisions based on personal values.  When defining next actions, Ts may be likely to focus on the tasks and problems, Fs may be more likely to focus on relationships.  GTD can help strike the right balance between tasks and relationships.

The second dimension identifies how we take in information and the type of information we prefer.  Intuitors (Ns) see possibilities and connections, and are future-oriented.  Sensors (Ss) prefer facts and details and live in the present.  Thinking about the Horizons of Focus, Ns will be better at the top of the pyramid — purpose, principles, vision, and goals which are all future-oriented.  Because of their propensity for connections, Ns are more likely to want to make the connection of next actions to projects.  Ss may prefer to work at the project and next action level — the detail and more here and now.  We may say, Ns like perspective, Ss like control.

Coming back to the first dimension of MBTI, this identifies how we get our energy.  Extroverts (Es) get their energy from being with other people.  They focus their energy and attention outward.  Introverts (Is) get their energy from spending time alone, and they focus inwardly on thoughts.  The weekly review requires time alone, thinking, and focus.  For this reason, Es who prefer to be out and about with people and things may find this process more challenging.  It will work better for Is since they enjoy time alone, thinking, and the inner world.

There is much more to explore here recognizing that the combination of these preferences (the 16 MBTI types) has its own set of characteristics.  All MBTI types certainly have the ability to get things done, and the key is self awareness which will help leverage the strength of behavioral preferences.  The beauty in GTD is in its flexibility.  So by recognizing your MBTI type, you can customize GTD to cater to your preferences.

Don Khouri is an executive coach who helps technology leaders enhance their productivity.  He has been utilizing David Allen’s methodologies himself for almost 20 years.

- David Allen (from Ready for Anything)

David Allen: People tend to both over-commit and to be inefficient. Few people know exactly how much work they actually have, and therefore must take everything on that they think about and that others ask them to do. Their integrity forces them to agree to take things on because, not being real clear how many projects they already have on their plate, some part of them thinks they actually MIGHT be able to do it.

And, most people are inefficient because they don’t force themselves to decide what things mean and what they are actually going to do about them when they first show up. So they are constantly rethinking the same things over and over and not making any progress in doing so–only adding to their stress.

And when they DO finally decide what to do, it’s usually because they have allowed the situation to get into “last-minute” mode, and they now have to go deal with things as a crisis, one at a time, instead of in an orderly, timely, manner. (e.g. when you are talking to your boss about the urgent thing, why not also talk to them about the five things you need to talk to them about, before they are urgent?) Most people are not that good at making next-action decisions and organizing the results effectively. The inefficiency creates greater inefficiency, and it can get out of hand easily.

For more tips from David, check out our free articles, like “Overtime…All the Time.”