Have you ever had the feeling of being lost & left wondering “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”, “Why am I in this Job?”, “What does all this mean?”, “Who am I, and what is my purpose?”.  In spite of all the achievements there is a feeling of emptiness.  This feeling usually comes when our actions are not aligned with our Life’s purpose.

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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Okay, if that headline leaves you scratching your head you are probably not alone.  After all, doing nothing hardly seems like a way to get anything done, however, it is my aim to convince you that at times, doing nothing is the most appropriate next action.

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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We all feel shy at times.  Some of us find groups intimidating, others feel self conscious one on one, still others can’t stand to be the focus of attention for fear that people will see something wrong with them.  The truth is that everyone has insecurities and everyone has faults.  While we’re busy worrying that everyone else is secretly noticing how badly we suck at something, chances are they are really worrying about everyone noticing how badly they suck at exactly the same thing.  For all but the truly exceptionally self-assurred among us a few tips on how to feel less shy would probably come in very handy.

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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Editor’s Note:  This is the first in what I expect will be a series of posts from  Arif and Ali of Vakil Housing - which to our knowledge is the first company in India to implement GTD across their entire workforce.

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’m one of those unfortunate people who loves trying out new software for my GTD system. So far, I’ve always gone back to the online, tried and true, Vitalist (www.vitalist.com  ) for contexts/next action lists (projects too if needed).  But that hasn’t stopped me from doing that experimenting or “tweaking” as some optimists call the time I waste fooling around with new organization/GTD programs. I’ve made this lame excuse: “Every time I enter my next action data into a new program it allows me to review everything in greater detail than I do in a weekly review.” That was as far as I got in explaining my sneaky kind of procrastination behavior. It began to feel even shameful to wile away a whole afternoon exploring some new program.

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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Michael Sliwinski from Nozbe has another one of his quick, two-minute productivity videos up for us to enjoy.  Michael has kindly notified us first so GTDTimes is once again the first site to be airing this video.  Are you ready to learn about In-boxes?

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Thanks to the DidIGetThingsDone Blog I just discovered FreeLine Reports and their most recent video which does an amazing job of describing several helpful and free GTD applications.  You may have heard of some of these, you may have even used them, but the refresher is quick and I can almost guarantee that at least one of the applications they mention is new to almost everyone.  Check it out.  Hat-tip to DigIGetThingsDone for the discovery…

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Editor’s Note:  This article which originally appeared in New Scientist was forwarded to my attention by Dr. Lynn O’Connor, one of our contributor’s.  I felt that it would be of interest to GTD times readers - after all, who doesn’t benefit when you can get someone else to get things done - for you…

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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