GTD Secrets: True Confessions of a GTD Coach – Episode 3

Have you ever been stumped by the difference between a Project and an Area of Focus?

In this great 5 minute podcast, David Allen Company senior coach Meg Edwards talks about the GTD best practices for creating a Projects list. She gives tips on:

• understanding the difference between a project vs. an area of focus
• getting to a complete projects list vs. one that is “semi-complete”
• why most people have a projects list that doesn’t really work
• when to “bump up” or “bump down” in looking at your Horizons of Focus

In the podcast, she references her own Areas of Focus, which she captured in a mindmap:

Add yourself to the David Allen Company podcast feed.

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Wow! What an amazing turnout! We’ve finally selected our winner and the runners up in the GTDtimes / David Allen Company Executive Workflow Contest. You guys certainly didn’t make it easy. We were overwhelmed at the number of high quality entries from the GTDtimes readership. .

There are so many people with compelling reasons as to why they needed coaching and interesting jobs that they’re doing that we could easily have awarded ten days of coaching! Well, maybe next time. For now here are your winners and the runners up:

Grand Prize Winner: Jeff Goza – Jeff wins a full day of executive workflow coaching at his home or office as well as the full cost for the coach to travel to his location and any other expenses incurred in the course of providing Jeff with his full day of training.

Upon learning that he’d won, Jeff had the following to say:

“My name is Jeff Goza. I have the pleasure of working at a facility that serves over 500 men & women with Mental Retardation. We provide 24/7 care to those who can’t care for themselves due to various mental & physical issues. As you can imagine, our workload is high and many of the things we do can literally be life & death issues for those we serve.”

“My experience with GTD has been very helpful since I read “THE BOOK” and started implementing many of the GTD principles. Like others, I have fallen off the wagon numerous time but with the help of the GTD Community and rereading various chapters I have been able to come back into the fold. I have struggled with various parts of the system as I try to fit into my day-to-day work but I have found GTD to be flexible enough that it can be done.”

“I am very grateful to the David Allen Company and GTDtimes for making the opportunity for Executive Coaching available. I will look forward to writing a full accounting of my day in the near future.”

First Runners Up: The below-named runners up will each receive free registration for a regularly scheduled David Allen Company public seminar to be used before the end of 2009.

Ran Barton
William Brown
Mike McCollum

Second Runners Up: The below-named individuals will each receive a copy of David Allen’s recent GTD Live Ten CD Set from the David Allen GTD Online Store.

Congratulations to all our winners! Well Done!

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As many of you know, I was not a GTD’er prior to accepting the position of Executive Editor here at GTDtimes.  I had read David’s book and my best friend was widely known in our technology community as a long time practitioner and unquestioned authority on GTD but I had remained unconvinced that I myself needed to employ such a rigorous methodology to my own day to day life.  As I’ve mentioned, the event that caused me to decide to open up to GTD was attending one of David Allen’s Seminars and seeing the connections between his “Horizons of Focus” and the periodized approach towards training a world class athlete with which I was familiar.

As you might imagine, in order to take on editing GTDtimes with any degree of credibility it was essential that I practice GTD and moreover that I also become a student of the practice so that I could effectively edit this online publication in a way that other GTD practitioners could see was genuine and not merely giving lip-service to the principles and techniques that David has developed.  Over the past five months I have learned a great deal about GTD and even a few things about myself. However one thing that I didn’t learn from GTD was how important coaching is when trying to quickly acquire a new skill or when one is attempting to perfect a skill that is complicated or difficult to master.  I already knew this from my career as an athlete.

Thus, when I got the opportunity to have some coaching to help me apply GTD to my life I jumped at the chance.  I’ve been fortunate in my life to have worked with some truly excellent coaches and as a result I know a few things about being coached that are very important if you wish to derive the maximum benefit from the coaching you receive.  Before I talk about my GTD coaching experience let me briefly share what it is that I’ve learned is essential if you want your coaching experience to really make a difference:

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