Ever feel like your email processing would be better if your coworkers just sent better emails? David Allen Company is offering a 30-minute Express webinar on this very topic. You’ll hear advice from one of their senior GTD coaches about the best practices for email communications with others—including when to use email, using To vs: Cc, writing effective subject lines, creating agreements about response times, and more.   Get tips you can bring back to your teams for more productive email communication.

Tuesday, November 27th from 10am-10:30am. Open to all GTD Connect members. Not a member? Try a free, two-week guest pass, which makes you eligible to sign up for this webinar. Look for the registration link on the home page after after logging in.

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There are five phases of your GTD workflow: Collect, Process, Organize, Review & Do. For each phase, there are keys that help you get the right things done with less effort.

If you’re new to GTD, try a live webinar on the Keys to Getting Things Done. And if your GTD implementation is already well established, you can refine your system even more.

The overview is here, or you can get details and register by clicking on the date below that works for you.

Thursday, November 15, 10am Pacific Time

Friday, December 7, 10am Pacific Time

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One of our GTD fans on Facebook recently posted about dramatically reducing her email backlog. Good job! How much email backlog do you still have? How would you tackle that as a project? Post a comment about how you would phrase the successful outcome (what does done look like with backlog?), and what your next action is.

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The GTD Natural Planning Model is a great way to plan any project.  A key step in the model, after deciding on the purpose and sucessful outcome, is to do some brainstorming. Here’s a key for successful brainstorming: Have lots of ideas! How? By encouraging everyone to present their ideas without censoring. Sometimes the apparently bad ideas need to get expressed to clear the way for the obviously good ideas. In the brainstorming phase, do your best to encourage complete expression, be open, non-judgmental, and resist critical analysis. Don’t worry—an idea that really doesn’t fit will get sorted out in the organizing and next action phases. And who knows? The idea that doesn’t fit for this project may be just what is needed for another project.

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You can get practical, targeted GTD training with webinars scheduled in September and October. Choose from these topics: Keys to Getting Things Done®, GTD® & Outlook®, and Guided GTD Weekly Review®.

Whether you are setting up your GTD system for the first time, or want to get better at working what you already have, these webinars are the way to go. You’ll get tips for improving your productivity right away in these lively, interactive, bite-sized chunks of GTD learning.

The overview is here, or you can learn more by clicking on the date below that works for you.

Keys to Getting Things Done
Friday, September 14, from 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time
Thursday, October 18, from 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time

GTD & Outlook
Friday, October 26, from 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time

Guided GTD Weekly Review
Friday, September 28, from 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time

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Here’s concise advice from David Allen, on asking yourself two questions that can calm the waters of your mind.

Everything that is outstanding in your world and mind, that hasn’t been somehow put onto “cruise control,” will be holding some part of your psyche hostage.

So, simply ask yourself, “What has my attention now?” And then ask, “What do I need to decide, do, handle, and organize, to be able to have my mind let that go?”

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Hi Folks,

Why did calendars show up and become ubiquitous tools for most people in the last few decades? Pretty simple: Life’s commitments got more complex than our heads could effectively manage. Yet people resist managing everything else in the same trusted way. I’ll expand, below.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE ONE LIST PEOPLE TRUST

If you’re like me, with quite a number of lists of many next actions, projects, someday/maybe’s, etc., you’re likely to encounter people who question your efficiency if not your sanity. “You’ve got so many lists! That’s just too much work!” (Sound familiar?) If you ever feel like you need to defend your lists, ask your skeptical friend if they are sitting around trying to remember what appointments they have on their calendar for next month. They’re probably not biting their nails about where they need to be a week from next Thursday at 4pm. They’re probably not even thinking about it. Why? Because they have their appointments tracked in a system they trust—a calendar they trust they’ll review at the appropriate time and place.

So, why not have the same lack of distraction about all the things that you need to be reminded of?

A calendar is nothing more than [Read more →]

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One of our younger fans describes how he uses GTD to make amazing things happen.

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

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Check out this free podcast from David Allen. In just over two minutes, he gives practical tips for getting started with GTD. It’s available for download now on the David Allen Company podcast page.

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Peter Drucker said that “most of the tasks of the executive require, for minimum effectiveness, a fairly large quantum of time.” That’s from the Know Thy Time chaper in The Effective Executive, published almost half a century ago.

Sure, every knowledge worker could benefit from having large blocks of time for doing pre-defined work. But the practical reality is that most workers have schedules that are more fragmented than what Drucker might have imagined.  When he wrote that book, the workers he was addressing didn’t have cell phones and laptops. They didn’t use air travel for mass transit they way workers do today. They didn’t have Skype meetings with overseas clients outside the 9-5 workday.

GTD to the rescue! If you’ve organized your next actions into contexts that work for you, you’ll find that you can take advantage of small chunks of time to plow through lots of tasks. By organizing with your busy schedule in mind, you’ll be able to use those few minutes here and there to get things done that you would need to get done anyway, at some time. This is not to say you can neglect to schedule those large blocks of time for doing executive tasks. Just be smart by planning for how you’ll use the small windows of time as well.

What can you do with 15 minutes, before your meeting at 11:30?

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