I replied: I would say that I am similar. It’s natural actually to want to get In to zero before feeling free and confident in the Doing.  You won’t intuitively trust that the choice you are making is the best one if there are things lurking in the inbox that might be a better choice. However, as you get better and better at GTD and collecting/processing/organizing, a trust factor comes in to know you WILL get back to it when you can. David Allen often says that the more you trust you have a process, you will be more comfortable letting it get out of control.

Take the free GTD-Q assessment at GTDIQ.com to see how you’re doing with control & perspective.

As GTDers, the goal for many of us is to increase Control and improve Perspective.  That will bring you to the place that David Allen calls ” Captain and Commander.”  But what what happens when you are suffering from the opposite– you are losing Control and lacking in Perspective?

We all lose control and perspective.  What a true GTD “Black Belt” (in my case a Brown Belt with Black Stains) can do, is to identify that stage and do what we know to do to get back in control and perspective. The challenge of course is to notice that you are losing control and lacking perspective in a moment, and make the correction.  Often we notice in the chaos stage, not at the beginning.

It took me a really long time to give myself permission to handle my personal life in the same way I handled my professional one.  Over the years it had been easier for me to notice when I am lacking perspective and control in my professional life than my personal one.

Click to see larger image

Last night when I arrived at home, and all the lights were off, for a second I noticed that I had again lost control and was lacking perspective in my personal life and my personal projects.  This morning, beginning with coffee, and this entry as a reflective journal piece, I realized that I am not the only one that loses control and lacks perspective once in a while. Here’s what I did to get it back:

I must say, that my tools are mature from years of using GTD.  So I knew that my was not a problem in the flow of the tools. The first thing I did was collect.   I spent some time collecting everything.  I did a “RAM” dump based on pages 114 to 117 of the paperback book.  I gave special emphasis on pages 116 and 117–the personal aspects.

After I collected everything, I made a great effort not to run out– the pile was huge!

I knew that after this collection process the next step was to work through the GTD workflow process: What it is? It is Actionable? In other words, process every piece of paper on that pile.  I followed by a collection of projects and next actions in OmniFocus.

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This whole process took me a good 3 hours. At the end, my desk was clean, my inbox was in zero, and I had some time to get some control and a little bit more perspective.

One of the most challenging things to do, when we are busy and feeling that we are losing control and lacking perspective, is to stop, regroup, and move forward.  I wish I could stop more often, specially when need it, but I don’t often notice until I am in the chaos stage.

If you feel you are losing control and lacking perspective, stop, collect–spend all the time you need to collect–then process and organize into your trusting system.

Things may be hectic as before, the control may not be absolute, the perspective will be just a little more, but trust me, you will feel great, and will believe again that you have a chance to conquer and command that place of Control and Perspective.

This is a Community Contribution from Augusto Pinaud. If you have a personal GTD story you’d like to contribute to GTD Times, send it along!

Although they’ve been recorded for our GTD Connect online learning center, we have been posting the GTD Best Practices series to our free public podcast as well, for all to benefit from.  These informal podcasts are a great way to learn the essentials of GTD.  Here is the series:

Best Practices of Collect

Best Practices of Processing

Best Practices of Organize

Best Practices of Review

Best Practices of Doing

If you like these podcasts, GTD Connect has over 110 recordings like these, with more added every week, that you can play on the Connect site or  sync to iTunes.  It’s a great way to learn coaching tips from David and the staff, listen to interesting interviews with GTD’ers (Evan Taubenfeld being one of the recent ones), watch the “Slice of GTD Life” videos and more.  Good stuff.  Check out the free trial of GTD Connect.

The master key to clarity is maintaining a complete and current inventory of all your commitments and agreements with yourself. You need to capture, clarify, and organize them, so you can constantly review and reflect on the totality of your engagements with the world, so you can trust your choices about what you’re doing, moment to moment. -David Allen

Grab the free article on the 5 phases of Mastering Workflow.

If you setup Outlook like our GTD & Outlook Setup Guide describes, you should be able to have that carry over to Tasks on the BlackBerry.  The trick for seeing your Task categories is to “Filter” them.

Several of our staff use BlackBerry devices, including presenter + coach Wayne Pepper.  Listen to Wayne’s podcast on how he uses a BlackBerry for GTD (16 min). He also wrote about an app he uses on his BlackBerry for quick capture.

If by “getting organized” you mean getting relaxed and in control, it actually involves five steps, only one of which is actually the specific “organizing” component.  1) Collect the work. Corral everything that has potential meaning for you. 2) Process the collected work and associated notes. What specifically do they mean in terms of your commitments about them? What can you toss? What are the actions required on what you keep? 3) Organize the results of what you’ve collected and processed into retrievable lists and groupings. For instance, when you’re at a phone you should be able to see all the calls you need to make. 4) Keep things current—which involves a weekly review. What are your outstanding commitments and agreements? What new ones have emerged? 5) Decide what you want to do. Make a choice about how to allocate your resources, and feel comfortable about that decision.

Grab the free article or buy the laminated card set that summarizes these phases as well.

Curious if anyone has any tips/symbols or shortcuts for notetaking. I tend to write circles next to actionable items when I’m taking meeting notes and starring important items, but always looking for a better system.

Here is the tip I shared:

One tip I find useful is to create a separate page at the start of the meeting called “mindsweep” where I collect open items and next actions I create during the meeting.  I often have things on that too that have nothing to do with the meeting. Then, when I leave the meeting, processing the meeting notes is a separate item to handle from the mindsweep page.

Got a tip to share? We’d love to hear what works for you.  Leave a comment or email us at editor@gtdtimes.com.

I had a funny and rewarding GTD experience that I thought was worth sharing.

Today I found a piece of paper crumpled up inside of my vest pocket.  A pocket I use only for my voice-recorder and not for hand written notes.  The note was labeled as follows…

08-14-09
Patty
<her phone number>
BCV Phone
Exchange Access

I stared at that piece of paper during a freak lull in traffic, wondering what in Crom’s name it meant.  Back at the office I called Patty and confessed “I dropped the ball on something but I can’t even recall what it was.  Can you help me interpret this note?”  It turns out that I had actually handled the issue some time ago.  She was very happy that I called to make certain it had been handled, though.  We both had a good laugh about it.

This experienced proved to me how absolutely essential it is that I train myself to use the correct collection buckets, otherwise information will not get into the GTD process flow to begin with.  If capture is not working then all the rest is useless.  Luckily I had trained myself well enough to put down the date, the person and the
phone number.  Otherwise I would have been lost and had no where to turn.

Cheers.

-JMC

If you have a GTD story, we’d love to hear from you. Send it along to editor@gtdtimes.com.

In this 35 minute podcast they talk about:

• Some of their favorite tools for capturing anywhere, anytime
• The essential tools for work and home spaces
• What makes or breaks a good collection tool?
• The essential “red folder“
• Collect versus organize and why most people don’t get the difference
• Why an empty inbox reduces interruptions
• What’s it like to work in a GTD culture?

Listen now>>>

Subscribe now>>> to all of the free podcasts

Perhaps it’s a way to do on-the-fly mindsweep captures?  Assist with the collection phase? Wrangle your open loops?  If any GTD’ers out there are using it, we’d love to hear how you’ve made it a part of your GTD system.

“Making it All Work:  Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life” is that something. And I’m not just talking about the book, either.  David has worked for years to clarify, refine, broaden, deepen and in some ways complete the work he began with his original program of GTD.

For most people I suspect that the abbreviated Making it All Work presentation that David delivered today felt both familiar yet new at the same time.  That’s because it was.

I think that David retained much of the best of his original program but has fleshed out and added more material to those areas that people have occasionally said were not clear enough in the original.

Here are some basic outline notes from David’s slides for the presentation.  They are pretty much self explanatory.  The goal is to help you see more clearly what David means by each of the subcategories that he uses to define the various aspects of GTD.

They are as follows:

“If my brain had a brain I wouldn’t need a system.” – David Allen

Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect

This leads to having control and perspective

Control is simply cooperating with reality with conscious intent
Capturing
Clarifying
Organizing
Reflecting
Engaging

Perspective
Capture: write it down
Clarifying: what does this mean to me?
Organizing: put it where it goes
Reflecting: look through the whole
Engage: Do

Purpose/ Principles – 50,000  How: how do I want to operate as a human being?
Vision – 40,000 Feet  How do I see my self and my life
Goals – 30,000 Feet  What do I want to accomplish both long term and in the next two years?
Responsibilities – 20,000 Feet  What do I have to do
Projects – 10,000 Feet
Actions – Runway

System: build, fill, use

“You are here for a purpose.  You are either on purpose or you’re not.” David Allen

“Focus on what has your attention and you’ll find out what really has your attention.” – David Allen