Trust yourself to do what you really feel like doing, and what you feel like doing will change. Don’t, and it will plague you.—David Allen
David Allen shares tips for staying productive when you travel. He talks about preparing for travel, maximizing your productivity in those windows of weird time, keeping it together on the road, cool tools, and surviving reentry. This is a recording from a public event David did last year.
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In my experience, the greatest successes don’t come from grandiose scenarios of good intentions engendered by temporarily pumped-up motivation. Rather, the most lasting and significant positive effects result from small things, done consistently, in strategic places.
—David Allen, “Win the self-help game,” in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Epipheo.TV talked with David Allen about how to hack through your to-do list and free up your mind to focus on what’s most important to you. It’s a very short, very fun video.
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David Allen outlines the steps to get clear, current, and creative on a regular basis. Grab the free GTD Weekly Review® checklist. Now available as a PDF download.
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Comment from a new GTDer: I feel like I’ll spend all my time maintaining these lists recommended in the book!
David Allen’s reply: If by “maintaining” the lists you mean, “write action reminders down in a retrievable place that you’ll look at when you need to,” then it’s not going to take you nearly as much time, effort, and stress as filing it in your head, constantly feeling pressured about what’s in there, and having the thought occur again (and again, and again) in your mind because it doesn’t trust your system.
Question: What’s a Project?
Answer from David Allen: Any outcome that’s going to require more than one action item, in some sequence of events in order to be able to get to that outcome, that’s a project. And boy, there are a lot of people that just miss that. Invariably I see that most people’s “project lists” are very, very incomplete. One of the more subtle ones that comes to mind is: What issues are on your mind right now, or situations or circumstances? Not necessarily negative things, but oftentimes there’s kind of a health thing, there’s kind of a family thing, there’s a relationship thing, there’s a—who knows? There’s all kinds of subtle stuff that show up out there that are either problems or opportunities and they don’t march up to the door with a pretty pink bow and say, “Hi, I am now a project!” Get those clarified in a way that you know what done looks like (the project outcome), and what doing looks like (the next action).
Taken from the GTD Mastery: Closing the Gaps webinar David did for GTD Connect members, Dec. 2012.
What’s the common denominator among people who are doing GTD? Find out in this two-minute podcast. It’s available for download now on the David Allen Company podcast page.
Question: At what point did answering email become my job?
David Allen’s answer: Well, at what point did answering anything—your mail, having conversations in your hallway—become your job? It’s all your job. You just have to decide what your work is. As the late, great Peter Drucker said, that’s your biggest job, to define what your work is.
So how do you define what your work is, and therefore should you be doing that? The good news about this overwhelm is that it’s forcing people to make executive decisions that they never felt like they had to make before. “I need to do everything that comes my way.” No, you can’t anymore, sorry. You are going to have to do triage. That means you are going to have to have a conversation with your boss. You are going to have to show up with a list of everything he or she has given you and have a conversation. “Gee, thanks for these new things, can we talk? Because I am not going to be able to do them all.” It’s forcing those kinds of conversations.
That’s why people have this attraction/repulsion to GTD. It ain’t lightweight stuff. If you are really going to work this, that’s what’s going to start to show up.
Excerpted from David’s interview with Xconomy.com.
David Allen answers the question about when something belongs on the calendar vs. organizing it on a tasks list. This short podcast will help you use your calendar and task lists more effectively. Available for download now on the David Allen Company podcast page.
