We have three terrific public GTD webinars coming up in April. These webinars are 60-75 minutes long, and are held via GoToWebinar. Tuition is $49 per registration.
Click here to learn more about GTD webinars.
This excerpt is from an interview that Mike Williams, President and CEO of David Allen Company, did with Inc.
OWNER’S MANUAL | Jeff Haden Mar 5, 2013
Best Way to Start, Well, Anything
The road to success starts with asking–and answering–one simple question.
To be more productive and truly engage other people, always start with that one question: What does a wildly successful outcome for this meeting, this project, this sales call, etc. look like?
Don’t start anything until you know the answer.
Read the full article here.
Learn the keys to mind like water in our next “Keys to Getting Things Done” webinar. It’s coming up this Thursday, March 7th from 10am-11am Pacific Time.
We have about 20 seats still available. Register now.
You have three categories of daily work. When you understand these, you can better clarify, manage, and renegotiate your total inventory of projects and actions.
1. Doing work as it appears:
When you turn your attention to something unexpected that turns up (your boss asks you to stop by her office, for example), you’re deciding by default that this is more important than anything else you have to do.
2. Doing predefined work:
When you’re doing predefined work, you’re working off your Next Actions lists, completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done.
3. Defining your work:
Defining your work entails clearing up your in-tray, your email, your voicemail, your meeting notes, etc., and processing new projects into into action steps. Once you’ve defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete.
This week, challenge yourself to spend more time doing predefined work and defining your work. Most people spend too much of their time doing work as it shows up.
Download a free article on the Threefold Nature of Work from our Free Articles Library.
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.
http://www.davidco.com/free_articles
Cue released data, and The Atlantic commented on it, showing that most of us wrote a novel’s worth of email last year.
What’s more surprising is that we received more than six times as much email as we sent. Even if you deleted some of that email without needing to read it, you probably read several novel’s worth of email last year.
If you’re still not handling email as efficiently as you can be, try a 60-minute webinar on email management. The focus will include structuring your email system to support action management, and dealing with backlog email.
Do you have any pointers for perfectionists?
Just focus on doing the next action perfectly, which is a lot easier than trying to be perfect about how you approach something bigger. Be as retentive as you want. The only problem is when it stops action. Be a perfectionist about the process, which will require, of course, making decisions on the front end that might not be perfect. Think about what might go wrong if you avoid decisions and action! (If you need a negative motivator.)
—David Allen
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.
If you’re being asked to do more work than before, with less time for your personal life, you’ll relate to this excerpt from Todd Brown’s blog post for Next Action Associates.
Want your people to be more productive in the office? Help them get more of their personal things done.
Published on January 22, 2013 by Todd Brown
Why do people have so many personal things on their minds? In my experience it’s because they are better set up to handle things at the office, because that’s where “work” happens, and productivity is expected. Personal things are allowed to take a back seat. But here’s the rub: If the personal open loops aren’t handled appropriately, they are just as likely to generate stress, relationship problems, and mental distraction, both at home and at the office.
The problem is exacerbated by the current economic reality. One of my clients, the head of HR for a firm here in London, told me last week that while staffing levels are down on last year, work levels definitely aren’t. We’re hearing similar thing from many of our clients these days.
With even more to do at the office, the pressure on home life is becoming even more intense. There are just as many open loops at home, and they’re probably getting less attention.
So if your goal is to enable your people to deal with increased demands at work, with a clear head and without distraction, support them in developing a “whole life” approach to managing their open loops that helps them get their personal life under better control.
This doesn’t mean they’ll spend a lot of time at the office doing personal things. It does mean that when open loops present themselves in their personal lives, that they’ll have the confidence that they can handle them appropriately. And at work they’ll be able to focus better, undistracted by the open loops at home.
That’s what I call a “win-win.”
You can read other blog posts and find out more about Next Action Associates, the only Certified International Partner for GTD in the UK, here.
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.
