A lot of people are pretty excited about this developing software.  Basecamp, by 37 signals is a very popular application, and many folks that follow the GTD productivity strategy have found that Basecamp is one of the most efficient and effective tools for helping to keep track of commitments, projects and the next actions that they entail.

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Using the Horizons of Focus model, GTD helped me align my day to day actions to my life’s purpose, and in this post I’d like to talk about how you can do the same.

What is GTD at 50,000 ft?

The Horizons of Focus Model is basically the agreements that one has with his or herself at different Horizons. Each Horizon represents a different time-level & impact.  It’s a tool to know what your work is so that your priorities are clear. Take a look at Michael Dolan’s post for a more detailed description on the Horizons of Focus.

In David’s book 50,000 ft is defined as “This is the ‘big picture’ view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its ‘word’ really is. It is the ultimate job description.”

In other words, your agreements at 50,000 ft. are the description of your life’s purpose.

How to Find Your Life’s Purpose?

Sometimes I wish we were born with an instruction manual outlining our purpose, life would be so much easier, but then again life wouldn’t be so interesting if we had all the answers!  I like to define Life’s purpose in a two-fold manner. The first is one’s Inner Purpose, and the second is one’s Outer-Purpose.

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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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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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David Allen, the man who created the GTD paradigm and changed millions of lives as a result is offering up another helping of his incredible insight into personal productivity.  This time by way of some articles he’s writing for one of the country’s most popular business publications, Business Week. Definitely worth a read and probably worth clipping and sharing or forwarding to HR people and stressed co-workers everywhere.

As an aside, if you like something that you see posted on GTDtimes it would be very helpful if you could take a moment and Digg the post, submit it to Stumbleupon, bookmark it in Del.icio.us or simply just use ShareThis  to share the information with your friends.  Thanks!

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If you agree, check out  ThinkSImpleNow.com .  They got as a great article on how to overcome shyness as well as a ton of other content that will lift your spirits, improve your self esteem and help you remember that everyone is unique and special and also that we’re all just human. I’ll be that our two resident cognitive scientists, Jennifer George and Lynn O’Connor have even more helpful tools and enlightened commentary on shyness and how to fight it.  Perhaps one of them will weigh in on this post?

As a bonus you might want to check out another article from  ThinkSImpleNow.com that covers all the stuff we collect and some helpful methods for getting it under control.  Do you have any tips on decluttering your life that you’d like to share?  Please do in the comments.

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Story by Arif Vakil

How I first came across GTD

It was more than two years ago that I learned about GTD.  I was taking care of the HR department of Vakil Housing (our Company) then.  I was buried with applications that were flowing in for the various positions open in our growing company.  The applications were coming in through mail, through post, some were personally delivered.  To organize myself I started making stacks of these applications all around me for the different positions we had to offer and eventually ran out of space on my desk.  I badly needed a system to file all these applications in such a way so that I could retrieve an application within 30 seconds the moment I needed it.  There began my internet searching for a good filing system.  Little did I know that the system I would come across would become one of the most significant changes in my life and at our company, Vakil Housing.

I really could go on and on how every so much GTD has benefited us.  Each time I go through my actions when I’m in a particular context and “knock a few suckers” out from my list or when I come up with a truly Brilliant, Wild Success solution by using the Natural Planning Model, I always tell myself that it’s not because of me, but it’s thanks to G-O-D that I learned G-T-D which have led to such wonderful results.

How far we’ve reached in GTD implementation as a Company
As all GTD implementers would earnestly agree, GTD certainly sky-rockets ones productivity levels.  Because of GTD, I have been:

• - Arriving at Next Actions instantly, therefore moving forward
• - Taking much faster decisions
• - Visioning wild success
• - Delegating
• - Tracking each and every decision that I have given to execution.

All of the above led to two realizations.  Firstly, we have truly a brilliant team within our organization.  The staff at Vakil Housing were able to take-on much more tasks than I was handing out to them prior to GTD.  Secondly, nonetheless since I had become so much more super-productive, I needed others to keep up with me.  When a task was handed out to someone, I needed the peace of mind that the task would be handled.  But when I don’t see people writing down tasks assigned to them, a siren plays in my head screaming, “Red Alert, Red Alert, Warning, Warning”.  That’s what triggered almost a year long company wide training and implementation of GTD the pinnacle of which was an “Official David Allen Trainer coming down to our company here in India” .

For almost the last year or so we’ve been consistently having some sort of weekly GTD Training session in-house.  Our staff don’t have too much of a background of working in a “corporate” environment, where all have voice mail, in boxes or pigeonholes.  In fact some have felt & used a computer or responded to an email only after joining our company.  So we started from there and over the last many months, we have now reached a place where almost all the Department Heads and Senior Managers of our 120 staff company:

• - Clear the email in box to “zero” every 2nd or 3rd day.
• - Carry a paper based GTD Notebook with them everywhere
• - Have their personal “only-swivel-distance-away” Reference Filing system.
• - Have a clear understanding of Projects and Next Actions,
• - The always have a current list of Projects with them handy.
• - Use the Natural Planning Model to do Project Planning (I’ve only trained them on this last week so that will take a while).

As Kevin Wilde (Chief Learning Officer, General Mills) experienced it with his staff, some are deep-divers and some surface-skimmers.  But all have implemented it to some degree and we now can comfortably speak the same language.

When I look back, it seems quite incredible that we’ve reached so far, but we have.  However, we still have some way to go, till this manner of thinking becomes a solid irreplaceable culture within our organization.

What are the specific steps we took to implement GTD at Vakil Housing:
There are various initiatives that we had taken, which I shall try to expand on over a series of blog posts, most of which were:

• - Conducting Weekly GTD Training Meetings for Department Heads
• - Finding a working paper based GTD system and handing that out to everybody
• - Conducting one-to-one GTD Training at the desks of various individuals
• - Pairing people up as GTD Buddies to help each other do their daily process
• - Making a personalized pocket notepad, to encourage all to capture commitments
• - Putting up various GTD posters up in our conference room
• - Personalized Jott system within the office to encourage capturing when one is not able to write.
• - Finally being trained and creating trainers within the organization to make this an on-going process.

So stay tuned on this series of Blog post on GTDTimes, by tracking the Vakil Housing tag.  In future posts I shall describe the above steps in detail, as to how we successfully implemented GTD across our company.

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I felt a lot better about my “try new software”  habit when I read a report from the latest issue of Neuron, as described in New Scientist. In an experiment, researchers demonstrated that our love of adventure and novel objects, is based upon our hard wiring, we could say on our basic nature.  It seems that every time we explore, investigate, try out or learn something new, the reward center of our brain starts firing, much as it would if we were expecting to win a lottery, a card game, a horse race  or any kind of competition. My guess is trying out new GTD software is yet another way I flood my restless brain with dopamine.

This fact about how we’re naturally wired is long known in business and advertising. It’s why companies may put out a product with absolutely no changes, except for the packaging. People buy the new, even if it is more expensive and less convenient. We all fall for something novel. So now, maybe I can get off my case about trying out every new GTD program.

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As a result, you’ve got a chance to get a 24 hour preview of eProductivity for Lotus Notes and for those folks that put in the time and energy to give Eric the sort of detailed feeback he seeks, it seems you’ll get a preview license and also be entered into a drawing for a full version.

For more information you should head on over to Eric’s blog and check out the announcement for yourself.  Also, if you do check out eProductivity and find that it is as useful as people have been saying, could you please comment here so that others will have the benefit of your experience?  Thanks.

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On the one hand you end up dragging around this behemoth computer that does everything you need (so long as you are within cord’s reach of a power outlet) while on the other, you have ample run time however your productivity is limited by how well you planned ahead as to which data you needed to synchronize as well as how quickly you succumb to the hand numbing discomfort courtesy of attempting to work on a cramped keyboard.

Personally, I have found a third solution that allows me to use any computer while on the road and so long as the computer I’m at has a reasonable Internet connection it is pretty much just like I’m sitting at my own desk, working on my own computer.  LogMeIn isn’t really one program - rather it’s a company that provides an entire array of services that for the most part revolve around providing remote access and administration for one or more computers.

Their basic program, LogMeIn Free is free just like the name says.  Unlike most free products, however, this is not a frustratingly crippled version of some functional program that is purely intended to force you to upgrade if you really want the promised utility.  This is not the “walled garden demo-version”.  In fact, LogMeIn Free is not only the version that I, myself, am currently using, it is so robust and provides so many sophisticated capabilities that there are literally certain things that this program allows you to do to a machine remotely that are all but impossible to do while physically sitting in front of the machine that you are accessing via the LogMeIn Free interface.

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Who wouldn’t want a new high resolution display with thirty inches or more of real-estate upon which to spread your work?  Imagine the joy of having your entire spreadsheet visible at a glance and not having to futz around with freezing part of the pane.  Think of the pleasure of having two full pages displayed side by side, at a reasonable resolution no less, while editing your latest feature article.  Personally I find myself salivating at the idea of looking at the HD imagery from the Apollo missions and from the current ESA and NASA craft orbiting distant worlds.

Not that my intended use will help sell anyone’s boss, but if you’d like to turn the wistful daydream above into a practical reality for yourself, a recent report by Pfeiffer Consulting may actually have the ammunition you need to get that Apple Cinema Display you’ve been craving.

While most people would probably agree that one of those sexy big displays exudes uber-geek success and is the province of Avid and Final Cut Pro maestros everywhere, what is less well known is that these larger displays can boost general productivity using many more mundane applications.

Pfeiffer Consulting’s report called “The 30-ince Apple Cinema Display Productivity Benchmark” was intended to measure the real world productivity impact of using a larger size display.   The key underlying question they asked was:

Does this added comfort translate into higher productivity? To provide clear, activity-based data to answer this question was the aim of  his research project. 

In essence they wanted to do a clear comparison using more typical applications and see if the use of larger monitors yielded sufficient improvements in productivity that over time these increases generated a significant return on the investment (ROI).

The specifics can be found in the report which is in PDF form and can be downloaded for your reading pleasure.  For those of you that have better things to do that read a half a dozen pages of highly specific benchmarking detail, I suggest you print the report out for your boss and incorporate these quick summary findings into the email that briefs him on the wisdom behind your request for the glorious new display:

From the Report:

•  High-resplution displays such as the 30-inchApple Cinema HD Display can result in measurable productivity and efficiency gains.
• Productivity gains were present in not only professional design and publishing, digital imaging, and digital video, but also in general productivity and office applications  such as word processors and spreadsheets.
• Cumulative productivity gains linked to a large, high -resolution display can lead to a return on  investment (ROI) of several thousand dollars per year.

I swear I did not make a word of this up.  Scout’s Honor.

Should you find success with this approach and become the proud and oh-so-productive new owner of a sexy HD display,  don’t forget who shared this little tidbit of useful information with you and come and leave us a comment.  Better yet, when your friends come and jealously eye your new desk accessory, tell them how you got it and where you got the info…

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Editors Note:  Erratum.  This article had a number of errors that have been corrected from the original version.

Applebriefs‘ Jeff Kabbe has done a spectacular job authoring a very detailed review of the GTD task management application Omnifocus. Mac owners have probably seen other applications developed by Omni Group, particuarly OmniOutliner  which comes preinstalled on many machines from Apple.  The company has also developed  OmniGraffle,  OmniPlan and roughly half a dozen other useful applications.    His review is so comprehensive that it makes no sense for me to do anything except refer you to his blog where you can read it for yourself.

Meanwhile, the guys folks at Omni Group  have made a splash of their own by giving folks a preview of their soon to be released iPhone application. In addition to supporting live sync - supposedly even capable of background syncing tasks to Apple’s new MobileMe service and being FREE to registered users of the desktop version of Omnifocus, the iPhone version is also location aware and thus can automatically identify various contexts and provide you with task details that are contextually appropriate.

As you might imagine there’s quite a lot of excitement about this forthcoming application.  Omni Group says that it will be released about the same time as the new 3G iPhone goes on sale.  You can learn about more about the soon-to-be-released application in the comments on the Omni Group blog

Lastly, there’s a small bit of news for GTDtimes..   Evan Carmichael maintains a list of the 50 top Productivity Blogs.  When the updated list was released recently I was dismayed to see that GTDtimes was not listed.  I suspected that this might be due to the fact that we only launched in March of this year and that with so many good productivity resources Evan might not have even come across GTDtimes yet.

I figured that I had nothing to lose by writing him a note to introduce ourselves and Evan surprised me by adding GTDtimes to his list as a special mention just below the top eight sites listed in the GTD Category.  I thought it was incredibly cool of Evan to take the time to do this - most folks running popular sites probably wouldn’t have been so readily accommodating.

Incidentally, Evan’s Top 50 list is a rich productivity resource and his site is packed with useful content for entrepreneurs, GTD’ers, and really anyone that wants to be more productive, more successful and more balanced in their approach to work and life.  I highly reccomend you check it out  (and mention that GTDtimes sent you).

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There’s a lot to be learned from reading books and attending seminars. I routinely do both. But when I really want to improve my skills or performance in a given area I turn to a coach, a mentor, or an expert that can help me accomplish my objectives. I think it’s important to understand that hiring a productivity coach is not a magic bullet for getting things done. YOU have to do the work, but a good coach can help you see what may not be readily apparent to you and encourage you to build sustainable habits. (I’ll talk more about sustainable habits at the end of this post.)

Here’s what I wrote to the person who asked me about getting things done on the run…

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Eight ways to get exactly what you want
07 May 2008
Dan Jones
Alison Motluk

Lifting the lid on the science of persuasion
Cajole your boss into giving you a raise, win someone round to your point of view, or persuade your partner it’s their turn to put out the trash - getting people to do what you want can be very handy. Persuasion is a key element of all human interaction, from politics to marketing to everyday dealings with friends, family and colleagues. “Persuasion is a basic form of social interaction,” says Eric Knowles, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. “It is the way we build consensus and a common purpose.”
Unfortunately persuasion is both notoriously difficult to pull off and almost impossible to resist when done well. Psychologists have long been fascinated by persuasion - why some people are more persuasive than others and why some strategies work where others fail. Over the next six pages we bring together some recent insights into the science of persuasion.

For those who don’t want to be persuaded, there are lessons here too. Knowing the strategies charmers and advertisers adopt can help you resist their guile.

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Authored by guest writer Patrick Rhone, the  post does an excellent job of showing how the vertical structure upon which your entire GTD focus is based - from Runway up to your 50,000 ft Purpose and Principles - can be used as a measuring stick.  When utilized properly in the context of regular reviews, this vertical map is an elegant tool that David built right into his productivity strategy.

Patrick’s post helps bring this key point home in a clear and concise way;  illustrating the depth of the GTD system while at the same time gently reminding us of the crucial role that the weekly review plays in making that system work for us the way David intends it to.

From the post:

In other words, your actions at a daily “runway” level should be directly and vertically tied to your principals and values at the “50,000 ft” level. To get a real sense of this, look at it from the bottom up. Once you can see and understand how a project like “Fixing up the house” fits into the overall goals of life (In my case “Relationships: Bethany: Life Partner”). It will give you a new drive and focus on the importance of follow through on the various associated action items in the project. How are the projects you perform at work fitting into your job description? If the project is not fitting into that description or role then is your role changing or is that project better delegated to someone else more appropriate?

For more go here…

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Since I’ve been involved in various aspects of the Summit for a while now I wanted to mention a few things and also ask some questions of GTDtimes readers.  Here goes:

For the Media:

First, if you are accredited press and you want to attend the GTD Global Summit as a member of the media I strongly suggest that you get your ducks lined up and get an early start on applying for a credential.  Free slots for members of the media are going to be fairly limited due to the pretty restricted number of conference particpants and also due to the size of the venue.  If you are not a legitimate media professional - and by that I mean someone that earns all or most of their living producing written materials for regularly published and highly regarded publications or whom produces video or audio material that is widely circulated via the Internet or network television then please refrain from applying for a press credential.

As a member of the working press myself I can tell you that it is becoming more and more competitive to get press credentials to the major events each year and it is a real injustice when people that write recreationally but don’t earn their living writing manage to get press passes for high demand events at the expense of someone that really needs to be at the event in order to fulfill his or her own publication’s need to cover the event.

It adds insult to injury when people attending an event on a media credential don’t even provide legitmate coverage of the event.  Not only are you taking the opportunity to attend away from someone that really needed to be there, but you are also taking advantage of the event promoter.  Keep in mind that the reason promoters give out media credentials is for the exposure that this nets. It’s this trade-off that makes the system work so as a favor to all the journalists out there that work through the night so that you’ve got interesting content to read in the morning, only apply if you’re a pro and only then if you’re really going to cover the event as a working journalist.

That said, the best way to get a media credential for the GTD Global Summit will be to monitor the site as well as to continue checking here.  As soon as the page goes up that has a questionnaire for folks that want a press pass I’ll be making an announcement here.  Filling out this questionnaire completely and doing so sooner rather than later is your surest way to get yourself in the door as press.

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Now this is something you can try at home with the kids! We had fun learning this 2 second trick

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Luckily for me, the Anxiety I’m referring to actually starts with a capital “A” and is designed to reduce rather than increase the stresses of trying to remember too many things which need to be out of my head and into a trusted system - so long as you use a Mac.  Sadly, only Mac users can get this particular form of Anxiety.  PC owners will have to settle for the original version.

Anxiety is a cool little application that does one thing but seems to do it very well.  It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar or your on your dock (or both), waiting patiently for you to enter something that you need to remember.

When you invoke it you are presented with an interface that is so simple that I don’t think it could be any simpler and still be functional.  It lets you select the calendar where you want to save the task, provides room to enter the task and shows you how many tasks are open in that particular calendar.

The only other things that you can click from the interface is an icon that opens the preferences interface and a corner that allows you to horizontally resize the GUI. That’s it.

Entering a task is fast and simple and for basic “get it out of your head and somewhere fast” sort of work this is ideal.  Invoking it using ActiveWords or Quicksilver would be even slicker.

My only complaint is that in order to provide further detail about something you’ve entered into Anxiety you have to open the item in iCal which adds an extra step and a second application to the chore of entering certain tasks.

The good news is that Anxiety is donationware so you can try it and use the full featured version absolutely free for as long as you like to figure out if it’s an application that wll work for you.  With zero risk it’s probably worth a few minutes to see if adding a little Anxiety to your work day might be just what the doctor ordered after all…

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Incidentally, if you need a good two minute timer to help you determine what you can accomplish in just two minutes, there are a number of resources available to you online. There are so many countdown widgets for so many platforms that instead of naming one or two, here’s the Google search result so you can simply choose the one you like yourself.

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For the first time anywhere  five hundred of the most intelligent, inspired and productive people on the planet will gather in San Francisco, California to learn, share, explore, inspire and most importantly to Get Things Done…

The Getting Things Done Global Summit!

Headlined by the inimitable David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress Free Productivity” this first GTD Global Summit, taking place on March 11th to the 13th, 2009,  promises to be a truly once-in-a-lifetime event.

Not only will attendees get the chance to  learn the latest on GTD by the man that created the strategy, David will also be sharing new material from his forthcoming book “Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Business and Business of Life“.

Complimenting David will be a cadre of some of the most accomplished and effective people in the world:

• CEOs that have have had the insight and vision to implement a GTD culture throughout their organizations yielding extraordinary results

• Coaches who will share how implementing a GTD strategy has had profound benefits for their clients from world class athletes to struggling students

• David’s Senior GTD Facilitators who will lead hands on sessions to share their real-world techniques to help you implement GTD for yourself and your organization and maximize the success you will achieve as a result.

• Surprise guests that will inspire, awe and excite you with their stories of how they managed to achieve success, in some cases against unimagineable adversity and odds that would have been dramatically improved had they only been one in a million.

If  other conferences are about ideas and inspiration, the GTD Global Summit is about action and implementation.  No other event will have this level of practical, how to information to help you further refine your personal GTD strategy, troubleshoot your own implementation, or introduce you to new tools and techniques to take even the most advanced GTD Blackbelt to a whole new level.

In addition, demonstration areas will be reserved for attendees to check out the latest in high tech gadgetry- a veritable “geek’s paradise” of software, hardware, and accessories will be available for you to discover, test, and compare; from tried and true products you may have seen to the latest whiz-bang prototypes that you may not have even heard of, let alone seen or touched.

Of course one of the greatest benefits to attending the GTD Global Summit will be the opportunity to meet and network with five-hundred other GTD practitioners all in one place.  If you’re a GTD’er you already know that people that use GTD to help them stay on top of things are consistently among the most intelligent, informed and productive people on the planet.  Here’s your chance to make new friends, develop new professional relationships and capitalize on the energy and collective intelligence that only a group such as this can generate.   If you’ve attended special events in the past, you know that half the value lies in the people you meet and the friendships you establish.  Now take that prior experience and multiply it by 500 and imagine the possibilities.

The GTD Global Summit is scheduled to take place from the 11th to the 13th of March, 2009 at the unparalleled new Hotel Intercontinental in San Francisco, California.  Only five-hundred fortunate individuals will have the chance to attend this life-changing event.  Reservations can be made at the official GTD Global Summit Website.

Further news about the GTD Global Summit will be made available here as soon as we receive it.  The link to the conference website above is now live so be sure to make your reservation before it’s too late!

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That got me thinking. Getting things done - that means everything done. Yes even the wash. Done. Getting the wash-IN basket to empty can be done in 2 minutes. Each stage in the process need not take longer - be that collecting or processing, organizing, doing or reviewing.

Doing the wash, even big piles of it which comes with living with 3 kids, takes me (us) a couple of minutes at each stage.  The piles grow (quickly) everyday, especially with children. Mostly things just get dumped on the floor. I find things in the oddest places too, like a left sock under the car seat or a sweater next to the sofa and a hat on the kitchen table.

A visiting friend once pointed out “this house is lived in!”.

Collection is a continuous and daily task. Everything gets to the wash-in basket - and it never takes more than 2 minutes to get to done.

Process - organize and color code “What is this?” Processing the wash-in basket gets done quickly. Involving the children can make this a really fun task. It also takes the mystery out of what happens to my dirty trousers, and gives understanding to the question: “where is my favorite shirt?” Or a clean set of underwear.

• COLLECT - all the socks and dirty stuff
• PROCESS - sort and colour code, one at a time
• ORGANIZE - machine or hand wash? Dryer or hang it up?
• REVIEW - fold or iron, keep it or pass stuff on
• DO - putting it back, one thing at a time!

Like Michael Sliwinski mentioned in his recent post on GTDtimes, doing things, like the wash, is all about the 2 minute rule.

Delegate it.  I delegate tasks for the children. In fact they organize their own lists of who does what each week (more on lists in another posting). Collecting and putting away the wash for example are great habits to foster.

Learning by doing: In a situation where learning by doing sometimes means  not doing anything, I recently shared the experience of not having any clean underwear with my son. This came came about when the collection step was missed. Puzzled as I had done all the wash, dried it and folded most things - I helped see where the problem was. Sure enough several discrete piles were discovered. None had been placed in the wash-IN basket. After reviewing this “awakening” together and agreeing who does what in the process of doing the wash my son had a better understanding of how “not doing” resulted in a result also - though not the desired result to be sure.

Having fun.  Of course with kids, making things fun - even something boring like the wash is key to engaging their minds and making the lessons stick.  By incorporating the principles of GTD into doing the wash with my kids  we see that this chore can be done 2 minutes at a time and we can even have fun in the process.

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For those that missed it, last weeks correct answer was “In the Zone”.  There were no correct answers but everyone that guessed will be entered into the drawing I’ll have at the end of the month.

For next Sunday I’d like to try something a little different.  Instead of coming up with the videos and the theme myself it would be great if a reader would provide a good theme for us to identify.  To encourage folks to send in their videos in addition to the first person to correctly guess the theme each week, I’ll also send a gift to whomever sends in the videos and theme that I end up using.

These three videos are quite different from last week.  I hope you enjoy them.  Let the guessing begin!

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Sage works really great, just press “CTRL+Z” and your RSS feeds appear on the left side of your Firefox browser and once you click on the feed that you want to read, you can see all of the feed’s content right there in the browser. Neat.

The problem… I would turn on “Sage” too often… and instead of actually browsing for the stuff I needed for my work, I’d happily turn “left” to check how the feeds are going and if there is some new interesting info that has been published…

When this “habit” of checking feeds turned into a temptation I couldn’t resist, I decided to put an end to it. I removed all of my feeds from Sage and copied them to my Google Reader account.

Now when I want to read the feeds, I need to explicitly log in to my Google Reader account and start reading… and since I’m not logged in to my Google account for most of my day, this takes several steps to do.

A “Tempting” habit turned into a conscious decision…
Now, instead of “clicking and checking what’s up” I need to decide: “OK, now I’m going to log in to my Reader account and read the feeds for 30 minutes”. After that I’ll log out and won’t be reading them any more.

You can apply the very same thing to email. If you use Gmail like I do - just log in to your Google Account only when you want to check your email. Decide to check your email. Once you’ve processed your email, log out and continue with your next action on your Next Actions list.

Conclusion: focus on your next actions and help yourself resist temptation.
So there you have it. I’ve made my life a little more complicated, but then again, I don’t get distracted all that much anymore. When I want to read my feeds, I log in to my Google Reader account – once I’ve read them, I log out. When I want to process my email, I log in to my Google Mail account and also log out once I’m done. However to make sure I know what to do next, I’m always logged in to my Nozbe Account to see my list of “Next Actions”.

How do you fight your distractions? Do you complicate your life as well?
Please do let me know in the comments what your daily temptations and distractions are and how you fight them. I’ll be happy to learn from you!

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Blogging at Connecting the Dots and Minnov8 , following 171 bloggers and numerous media sources, keeps him in the game and connected with other thought leaders. Without GTD, he’d have no hope of staying on top of all the projects and tasks he’s involved in daily!

By Steven Borsch
You have a keen interest in personal or group productivity which is why you’re involved with David Allen’s GTD system. As more of us seek ways to coordinate and orchestrate our projects, tasks and activities with an ever widening number of other always-on, always-connected and willingly participative people (many of whom have already embraced GTD), a new company and their product has significant opportunity to become a preferred and social way to get things done.

Due to the success of Allen’s GTD methodology and the sheer volume of software developers among the ranks of the faithful, you know that tools abound for using the GTD method. From David Allen Co’s own Microsoft Outlook add-in to dozens of offerings for PC’s and Mac’s (as well as other types of tools), most work well but suffer from an increasingly evident fatal flaw: using GTD is a problem if all of your data is sitting on a single computer. More and more of us are on multiple devices and mobile…using a laptop, smartphone, desktop at home and the office (and even casually using computers in coffee shops, airports or at a friend’s house) and need to use GTD but be able to access it anywhere we have an internet connection.

In 2007 Eric Hedberg, an economics major from Carleton College, worked at Secure Computing and Stockwalk.com, the latter in financial sector software. Hedberg became aware of the direction applications were taking by being delivered “in the cloud” (i.e., as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted and available to anyone with an internet connection) and started looking at ways to implement a SaaS data warehousing/workflow management application for the financial services industry.

After some prototyping and user feedback, he and his college friends who’d joined him (Doreen Hartzell, CEO, and Steve Bentley, in charge of interface design) realized that the best part of what they’d built was the project management piece, which delivered collaborative online workspaces using a GTD model. That revelation spawned the current company focus, Enleiten, which is a collaborative GTD application delivered in the cloud and available for single consumer users, small groups or businesses.

I interviewed CEO Doreen Hartzell about Enleiten and their approach on taking the to-do list and project management paradigm to a new level.

“To-do lists can be very good for supporting individuals working through and organizing their tasks. They tend to be weaker about the collaborative nature of work - how to delegate and track things without creating a lot of duplicate entries or extra steps to capture things you’re waiting for. In many cases, those are also applications that can support GTD work-flows, but are not necessarily designed for it.”

She continues,

“Project management applications, in our experience, are great at presenting things to managers, but not as well designed to handle the actual specific actions that need to be done to move the project forward. The separation of tasks by project can make it difficult for users to extract their tasks and integrate those with the rest of their work. They can also be problematic if it’s difficult to reorganize projects in an iterative work-flow. We believe the efficiency of those applications can also break down a bit if members of a project team have different personal systems and then need to do double entry to their own system and the team’s project management application.”

When I asked about multiple device types and access from anywhere there is an internet connection, Ms. Hartzell touched on several of their roadmap directions and this is clearly directional for them. The Pro edition for groups includes all of the current features with these additions appearing in about a month:

• File upload
• Creating workgroups to share full projects (vs individual task delegation in the basic version)
• Ability to create custom checklist templates to streamline business workflow or commonly used lists

They have a long list of planned features, and prioritization of those will be driven substantially on user feedback. Their goal is to deliver simple software, but they’d like to accomplish that through good user interface, and careful choice on adding features.

Finally, their short list of features to add include:

• Increased input/output options including Jott integration, iCal import/export, custom RSS feeds, SMS, and within a week daily email task notifications
• Greater customization of information display by the user (what you want on your Next Actions page, maybe color coding of projects, tasks or contexts, etc.)
• Mobile and offline versions
• Establishing a community library of templates to allow users to share them.

My brief exposure to Enleiten has caused me to consider their approach carefully. While admittedly not a left-brain dominant analytical, I do understand enough about myself that I realize I need the analytical as well as both visual and experiential elements in an application to truly and intuitively “get it” and continue using it. While I found the Ajax-y goodness of dragging-n-dropping tasks into other projects compelling, I did find the application to be too transactional and thus mostly left brain (and I’d buy the upcoming “Pro”