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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The GTD Community seems to be buzzing quite a bit about the GTD Global Summit.  I can relate - I’ve been excited about the forthcoming event from back when my dear friend Marc Orchant first started talking about it last fall.  While it’s a little bit bittersweet to see it coming to fruition without having Marc be a part of things, it is nevertheless exciting and from my perspective contributing to the success of the event is one way I can pay homage to my departed friend.

Since I’ve been involved in various aspects of the Summit for a while now I wanted to mention a few things and also ask some questions of GTDtimes readers.  Here goes:

For the Media:

First, if you are accredited press and you want to attend the GTD Global Summit as a member of the media I strongly suggest that you get your ducks lined up and get an early start on applying for a credential.  Free slots for members of the media are going to be fairly limited due to the pretty restricted number of conference particpants and also due to the size of the venue.  If you are not a legitimate media professional - and by that I mean someone that earns all or most of their living producing written materials for regularly published and highly regarded publications or whom produces video or audio material that is widely circulated via the Internet or network television then please refrain from applying for a press credential.

As a member of the working press myself I can tell you that it is becoming more and more competitive to get press credentials to the major events each year and it is a real injustice when people that write recreationally but don’t earn their living writing manage to get press passes for high demand events at the expense of someone that really needs to be at the event in order to fulfill his or her own publication’s need to cover the event.

It adds insult to injury when people attending an event on a media credential don’t even provide legitmate coverage of the event.  Not only are you taking the opportunity to attend away from someone that really needed to be there, but you are also taking advantage of the event promoter.  Keep in mind that the reason promoters give out media credentials is for the exposure that this nets. It’s this trade-off that makes the system work so as a favor to all the journalists out there that work through the night so that you’ve got interesting content to read in the morning, only apply if you’re a pro and only then if you’re really going to cover the event as a working journalist.

That said, the best way to get a media credential for the GTD Global Summit will be to monitor the site as well as to continue checking here.  As soon as the page goes up that has a questionnaire for folks that want a press pass I’ll be making an announcement here.  Filling out this questionnaire completely and doing so sooner rather than later is your surest way to get yourself in the door as press.

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Most of the time having anxiety is a bad thing or so we’re told.    From what the doctors say (and research seems to support them on this) anxiety can lead to a whole host of problems from high blood pressure and heart disease to troubled sleep, sexual performance issues, and even accelerated aging.

Luckily for me, the Anxiety I’m referring to actually starts with a capital “A” and is designed to reduce rather than increase the stresses of trying to remember too many things which need to be out of my head and into a trusted system - so long as you use a Mac.  Sadly, only Mac users can get this particular form of Anxiety.  PC owners will have to settle for the original version.

Anxiety is a cool little application that does one thing but seems to do it very well.  It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar or your on your dock (or both), waiting patiently for you to enter something that you need to remember.

When you invoke it you are presented with an interface that is so simple that I don’t think it could be any simpler and still be functional.  It lets you select the calendar where you want to save the task, provides room to enter the task and shows you how many tasks are open in that particular calendar.

The only other things that you can click from the interface is an icon that opens the preferences interface and a corner that allows you to horizontally resize the GUI. That’s it.

Entering a task is fast and simple and for basic “get it out of your head and somewhere fast” sort of work this is ideal.  Invoking it using ActiveWords or Quicksilver would be even slicker.

My only complaint is that in order to provide further detail about something you’ve entered into Anxiety you have to open the item in iCal which adds an extra step and a second application to the chore of entering certain tasks.

The good news is that Anxiety is donationware so you can try it and use the full featured version absolutely free for as long as you like to figure out if it’s an application that wll work for you.  With zero risk it’s probably worth a few minutes to see if adding a little Anxiety to your work day might be just what the doctor ordered after all…

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GTDtimes is pleased to be the first site anywhere in the world to announce news of a major event in the world of GTD…

For the first time anywhere  five hundred of the most intelligent, inspired and productive people on the planet will gather in San Francisco, California to learn, share, explore, inspire and most importantly to Get Things Done…

The Getting Things Done Global Summit!

Headlined by the inimitable David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress Free Productivity” this first GTD Global Summit, taking place on March 11th to the 13th, 2009,  promises to be a truly once-in-a-lifetime event.

Not only will attendees get the chance to  learn the latest on GTD by the man that created the strategy, David will also be sharing new material from his forthcoming book “Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Business and Business of Life“.

Complimenting David will be a cadre of some of the most accomplished and effective people in the world:

• CEOs that have have had the insight and vision to implement a GTD culture throughout their organizations yielding extraordinary results

• Coaches who will share how implementing a GTD strategy has had profound benefits for their clients from world class athletes to struggling students

• David’s Senior GTD Facilitators who will lead hands on sessions to share their real-world techniques to help you implement GTD for yourself and your organization and maximize the success you will achieve as a result.

• Surprise guests that will inspire, awe and excite you with their stories of how they managed to achieve success, in some cases against unimagineable adversity and odds that would have been dramatically improved had they only been one in a million.

If  other conferences are about ideas and inspiration, the GTD Global Summit is about action and implementation.  No other event will have this level of practical, how to information to help you further refine your personal GTD strategy, troubleshoot your own implementation, or introduce you to new tools and techniques to take even the most advanced GTD Blackbelt to a whole new level.

In addition, demonstration areas will be reserved for attendees to check out the latest in high tech gadgetry- a veritable “geek’s paradise” of software, hardware, and accessories will be available for you to discover, test, and compare; from tried and true products you may have seen to the latest whiz-bang prototypes that you may not have even heard of, let alone seen or touched.

Of course one of the greatest benefits to attending the GTD Global Summit will be the opportunity to meet and network with five-hundred other GTD practitioners all in one place.  If you’re a GTD’er you already know that people that use GTD to help them stay on top of things are consistently among the most intelligent, informed and productive people on the planet.  Here’s your chance to make new friends, develop new professional relationships and capitalize on the energy and collective intelligence that only a group such as this can generate.   If you’ve attended special events in the past, you know that half the value lies in the people you meet and the friendships you establish.  Now take that prior experience and multiply it by 500 and imagine the possibilities.

The GTD Global Summit is scheduled to take place from the 11th to the 13th of March, 2009 at the unparalleled new Hotel Intercontinental in San Francisco, California.  Only five-hundred fortunate individuals will have the chance to attend this life-changing event.  Reservations can be made at the official GTD Global Summit Website.

Further news about the GTD Global Summit will be made available here as soon as we receive it.  The link to the conference website above is now live so be sure to make your reservation before it’s too late!

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Earlier today I got the chance to get a personal tour of a new application called Presdo that makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings with one or more people. My tour guide was Presdo founder Eric Ly who also happens to be one of the co-founders of another little application called Linkedin. Eric and his very small team - which he calls one and a half people - has been laboring over Presdo for the better part of the last two years and it shows.

Presdo, unlike one of its principal competitors, Tungle, (previously profiled on GTDtimes here) is a completely web-based application which means there’s no client to download, no limit to the type of operating system it will work on and no need to integrate the software into any other product such as Outlook or Exchange.

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Editor’s Note: We’ve had an incredible response to my request for contributor’s with a cognitive sciences background. Several notable individuals have very kinds offered to author posts that deal with questions of the brain that I believe are of great importance with respect to helping us understand why we do what we do, why GTD works where other systems fail, and how to get the most out of our own curious intellectual circuitry.

One such contributor, Jennifer George has authored the post below and will begin her contributions to GTDtimes with a series of posts based upon the ground-breaking book, Kluge, authored by Gary Marcus.

Jennifer George is a productivity geek and Web addict who writes the blog Lifemuncher. In the real world, she is a fundraiser for UCLA and
a graduate student in clinical psychology at Capella University.
by Jennifer George

Gary Marcus’s book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, examines the strange collection of more or less ancient systems that makes up the modern human brain. As he explains in chapter one:

“Measured nucleotide by nucleotide, the human genome is 98.5 percent identical to that of the chimpanzee. This suggests that the vast majority of our genetic material evolved in the context of creatures who didn’t have language, didn’t have culture, and didn’t reason deliberately. This means that the characteristics we hold most dear, the features that most distinctly define us as human beings — language, culture, explicit thought, must have been built on a genetic bedrock originally adapted from very different purposes.”

The word Kluge is an engineering term, and means an inelegant solution that works, but not in the best way possible because of historical and/or environmental constraints. Since our brains evolved over millions of years, building on existing systems rather than scrapping them and starting fresh, we find ourselves with a brain that’s like a marvelous Rube Goldberg device, held together with duct tape and chewing gum. It’s great at things that helped us survive and reproduce on the African savannah, and not quite as good at things related to language and abstract thought, which evolved much more recently.

According to Marcus, the human brain is primarily interested in helping you survive - noticing predators and food sources and finding potential mates. Figuring out the next step on that computer program you’re writing? Evaluating whom to vote for for president? Not so much.

The book is a fascinating and humbling overview of the evolutionary forces that built the modern brain and the resulting strengths and weaknesses that constrain and influence the way we live. Much of what Marcus describes is directly relevant to GTD and productivity, and could give us insights on better ways to do things. In a series of posts, I will be examining his findings on and trying to apply them to the life of a modern office drone. Look for the first one, on memory, later this week.

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Fokke Kooistra, one of the contributors to GTDtimes also blogs at his own blog, Productivity 101. In a post yesterday, Fokke observes that while there are now a large number of sites with GTD information, not all of these sites provide the most accurate content based upon a strict definition of GTD. To help people find answers that are accurate, Fokke has used Google Coop to start a GTD specific search tool that only contains links to sites that have information explicitly based upon David Allen’s concepts or accepted best practices derived therefrom. Do you know of a site that should be included? Visit Fokke’s post and suggest it in the comments.

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Gizmodo says it’s so…

Say what you will, the iPhone has changed more about the mobile space inside of a year than the Nokia N-Series, All Samsung devices, and the Motorola Razr combined have in the last five.

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If you’ve needed another reason to go out and splurge on that big new monitor you’ve had your eye on at your local gadget-candy store now you’ve got a new reason; increased productivity.

According to a study (reported first by WebWorkerDaily) that has just come out individuals at the University of Utah were tested performing tasks on an 18″ and then a 24″ monitor. With the larger monitors subjects averaged a 52% reduction in the time it took them to complete most tasks.

The study draws a further conclusion that this could result in a reduction in time spent on tasks equal to around 2.5 hours per day…

Since I know none of you hardworking people would clock out early that means you know have a choice…hang around on FaceBook and do some online shopping or put those hours to some more efficient use that will make the boss happy…

One small caveat, while the study was conducted at a University, it was sponsored by NEC, a company that makes monitors…

Bonus Tip: Want even more screen real estate at a better price? Instead of buying one 24 inch monitor buy two identical 19 inchers at a higher resolution. Pick up two nice WUXGA monitors and you’ll have 1920 x 3200 worth of screen real estate; blowing away just about anything you could buy at any price.

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