Community Contribution from Mike Vardy

I’m about to state the obvious.

We’re all human.

Ergo, we make mistakes. Like creating words like “ergo.”

Beyond “The Royal We,” we’re individuals. I’m sure you didn’t create the word “ergo” but I am pretty certain you’ve made other mistakes. I know I’ve made my share. For example, starting off this article as I have. That’d be one.

Another I make is getting off track rather than Getting Things Done. Hey, it happens to the best of us, right? [Read more →]

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A Community Contribution from Chip Joyce

After retiring from being the most successful professional cyclist in history, Lance returned to the sport in his late 30s to compete, for the eighth time, in one of the most challenging athletic competitions: the Tour de France. During training, however, he crashed and broke his collarbone, was in a lot of pain, and faced surgery and physical therapy. It was the first major crash of his career.

In an article on VeloNews.com, Lance recounted, “Sitting on the side of the road in Spain, headed to an anonymous hospital… I wanted to never come back,” to the sport. His long-time team manager and mentor, Johan Bruyneel, said, “I could feel he was really down. I had a feeling he was ready to walk away.” [Read more →]

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Let’s talk about the Horizons of Focus.  In my experience, this is one of the parts of the GTD approach that can take a little time for people to get their arms around. This is where priorities and perspective live. Whereas traditional time management approaches attempted to give people an ABC type coding system for defining their priorities, David Allen’s GTD approach has always been that priority codes are too simple for the complexity of most people’s changing lives, as the only measure of what to do. For example, assigning an “A” priority to something (or flagging is the popular method in email programs these days) could change with the next new piece of input you get. Plus, in my experience, people tend to get lazy with that code or flag without really deciding the next action. A flag, or #1, or lighting the email on fire still doesn’t tell you what your next action is. So is David saying to never use those? Of course not.  Just be sure that what you are marking as high priority has a a clearly defined next action and be willing to change that priority the moment your world changes–which it will. [Read more →]

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The latest Productive Living newsletter included a great set of questions from David Allen on year end completions.  It’s a great exercise to go through for completing 2009 and setting your intentions and directions for creating 2010.  Here’s a sample of some of those questions:

Completing and remembering 2009

What was your biggest triumph in 2009?
What was the smartest decision you made in 2009?
What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience?
What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009?
What was the most loving service you performed in 2009?

Creating the new year

What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010?
What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010?
What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010?
What would you be most happy about completing in 2010?
What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010?
What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010?

Get more questions…

What do you do to complete the year?

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During a recent marathon of Aaron Sorkin’s great short-lived series “Sports Night” (a marathon that I started by watching both seasons on DVD, which further proves my self-starting skills) I came upon an episode entitled “Moving Day.”  As the whip-smart Sorkinian dialogue washed over me throughout the rest of the marathon, it got me thinking about the meaning of the term on a variety of levels.  The deduction: every day can and should be a Moving Day.

In the context of the episode the goal was for Sports Night (the fictional show) to move up in the ratings, something they’d strived to do since their first day on the air.  In our own lives we should be doing the same, elevating our game as often as we can – every day. [Read more →]

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GTD Secrets: True Confessions of a GTD Coach – Episode 3

Have you ever been stumped by the difference between a Project and an Area of Focus?

In this great 5 minute podcast, David Allen Company senior coach Meg Edwards talks about the GTD best practices for creating a Projects list. She gives tips on:

• understanding the difference between a project vs. an area of focus
• getting to a complete projects list vs. one that is “semi-complete”
• why most people have a projects list that doesn’t really work
• when to “bump up” or “bump down” in looking at your Horizons of Focus

In the podcast, she references her own Areas of Focus, which she captured in a mindmap:

Add yourself to the David Allen Company podcast feed.

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A GTD Times community contribution by Arif and Ali Vakil

What made Einstein an Einstein or Newton a Newton? It was their amazing capability to look at what everybody was looking at, but see something different. The world sees an apple falling from a tree, but Newton notices there’s something greater at work here–it’s gravity. The world sees sunrise, sunset and umpteen other relationships with time and light throughout the day. Einstein looks and realizes that it’s not time that’s a constant, but it’s the speed of light. Similarly the whole world is involved getting stuff done, but David Allen sees through the clutter and comes up with best-practices, called “GTD”.

We’ve made a list of some amazing observations we feel give GTD its ‘chutzpah’. The brilliant thing about all these observations is that every one of us is coming across these at least several times every single day of our lives and any one of us could have figured it out. Be it psychologists with PhD degrees or masters in other fields, nobody captured it like David Allen. Gosh how life changing these practices have been.

The Next Action:
What a remarkable observation. That to move forward on any item, all you need is a Next Action. That’s it. One can only do a Next Action. We make calls (@Calls), complete errands (@Errands), speak to people (@Agenda) and do stuff on our computer (@Computer). All through our lives we’ve always been doing Next Actions, but perhaps never figured out to think in terms of Next Actions.

David takes his observation further. The fact that Next Actions can most be categorized in approximately 5 categories or so, is an amazing piece of insight. And, top it all off to notice also that there are so many Next Actions that don’t take longer 2 minutes, is pure genius.

(Note: David has often given the credit of the Next Action thinking to Dean Acheson.)

There is potential stress as soon as we receive something:
You can’t see it–it’s so very subtle–but it’s there. As soon as an email, voicemail or a piece of paper (even if it’s a cute little greeting card) enters my life, so does potential stress. And I never consciously noticed it. Ever. It’s when I began practicing GTD and began either completing or renegotiating my commitments that I realized oh the burden I was under. I always had it. Hey, c’mon, we all always had it. But we never noticed it. But thank God David did, and man life has been rosier since.

Writing down stuff, gives instant relief:
So how do you get rid of stress in life by the various commitments? Is it by doing them? Not necessarily. Why take all that trouble? Just write it down. That’s it. Imagine that. Just by writing down you begin to feel so much better. Once again throughout lives we have at some point or the other have written stuff down and immediately felt that instant relief, but never questioned why that happened. David did, and realized that stress comes because of our agreements we break with ourselves (another brilliant observation) and the simple act of writing it down we’re actually clarifying the agreement with ourselves and that’s the key to eliminating stress from our lives.

Priorities are at six different levels, Three-fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria:
Since we were born we have been prioritizing.  We all had to choose whether it’s sleep we want now or milk.  Of course, our needs got more complex, but unfortunately our prioritizing system may never have been upgraded to keep pace. We simply gave one task more priority over another in a simple list kind of way. But that’s not the way the world works, that’s not how we are. Sometimes we’ve got a client screaming their head off on the phone, automatically that becomes a priority, that’s where David’s “Three-Fold nature of Work“  comes in place. Other times, although it’s priority to finish a report, you just had 3 conference calls back to back and just don’t have the energy to do so. That’s when you can use David’s Limiting Criteria model and make ‘having a Latte at a Cafe’ a priority and not feel lousy about it. But all that’s fine only when you are moving towards your long term goals while fulfilling your vision and your purpose as human spirit on the planet, i.e. you’d be using David Allen’s “Horizons of Focus model” here.

Now, anyone of us could have figured that out. Hey, it’s really not rocket science. That’s exactly how we’ve been making priority decisions anyway. But we didn’t, yet David did so, and now it’s really so much easier to decide what’s important to do right now and what’s not.

There are probably more gems in GTD that we’ve missed. Have you noticed something in GTD that is so simple and obvious that anyone could have figured out, but hasn’t yet David Allen has. Do mention it in comments below.

Arif and Mohammed Ali Vakil are brothers and Directors at Vakil Housing, large real-estate development company based in Bangalore, India.  Both Arif and Ali have been studying GTD for the past several years and have implemented GTD as a standard within their company–the first company in India to do so.  Both are qualified chartered certified accountants and passionate bloggers.  They are also certified graduates of the GTD Train-the-Trainer program.

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For many people this is the session they came to see.  After years of reading, re-reading, listening to, watching and discussing “Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity” people, especially the majority of the people at the Summit who are serious about practicing GTD – are ready for something new from David.

“Making it All Work:  Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life” is that something. And I’m not just talking about the book, either.  David has worked for years to clarify, refine, broaden, deepen and in some ways complete the work he began with his original program of GTD.

For most people I suspect that the abbreviated Making it All Work presentation that David delivered today felt both familiar yet new at the same time.  That’s because it was.

I think that David retained much of the best of his original program but has fleshed out and added more material to those areas that people have occasionally said were not clear enough in the original.

Here are some basic outline notes from David’s slides for the presentation.  They are pretty much self explanatory.  The goal is to help you see more clearly what David means by each of the subcategories that he uses to define the various aspects of GTD.

They are as follows:

“If my brain had a brain I wouldn’t need a system.” – David Allen

Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect

This leads to having control and perspective

Control is simply cooperating with reality with conscious intent
Capturing
Clarifying
Organizing
Reflecting
Engaging

Perspective
Capture: write it down
Clarifying: what does this mean to me?
Organizing: put it where it goes
Reflecting: look through the whole
Engage: Do

Purpose/ Principles – 50,000  How: how do I want to operate as a human being?
Vision – 40,000 Feet  How do I see my self and my life
Goals – 30,000 Feet  What do I want to accomplish both long term and in the next two years?
Responsibilities – 20,000 Feet  What do I have to do
Projects – 10,000 Feet
Actions – Runway

System: build, fill, use

“You are here for a purpose.  You are either on purpose or you’re not.” David Allen

“Focus on what has your attention and you’ll find out what really has your attention.” – David Allen

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This is another installment in the ongoing series “Oliver’s GTD Experience”.  The goal with this series is to share some of the thoughts, experiences, and personal as well as professional discoveries that have come about as a result of my effort to employ GTD in my life.

I’m in Ojai today and at the moment I should be over at the Ojai Valley Inn participating in the David Allen Company’s annual retreat.  I really should be over there, but last night I had a discussion with a GTD coach that resulted in a major shift in my understanding of GTD.

I’ve been thinking about this all night and this morning while I was getting ready to head over to the conference my thoughts clarified into a post.  I’ve been writing long enough to know that when that happens I should just sit down and pound on the keyboard or I risk losing my best thoughts as other things in my world start to interfere with my focus and ultimately kludge up what I want to write.

Originally I had planned on writing an introductory post about a new contributor to GTDtimes, Meg Edwards.  Meg is a long time GTD practitioner and one of the most experienced GTD coaches working with DAC.  For a variety of reasons that I will get into when I do her formal introduction, Meg typically ends up coaching the problem cases.  Or as she puts it “the people who are stuck”.

According to Meg, what often happens is that people who get stuck have some issue or other that interfers with their ability to focus correctly on some part of the GTD process.  For example, people with ADHD or those that have difficulty dealing with sequential processing.

David Allen, Meg says, basically assumes that people reading “Getting Things Done” (or “MIAW”), have pretty much normal executive function.  However if they don’t…well, they end up getting some help from Meg if they’re lucky.

Now I don’t have too much trouble with executive function- usually.  Those of you that have read my other posts may recall that I tend to be late so I can “self-medicate” with adrenaline by driving like a bat out of hell – I don’t do this intentionally, but the brain is a tricky and manipulative creature – sometimes I wonder who’s running the show in my case – me or my brain.  Does that make sense?

Anyway, I was talking to Meg about the fact that I have started feeling sort of numb to my lists lately.  I’ve been using Things for almost a year now and I realized that I am starting to develop an aversion to even clicking on the icon to check what needs to be done each day.  Then, after several days go by I open Things and have to tick off a dozen or more items that I’ve completed (or realize in horror that I missed something important).

Obviously this is not a terribly GTD way to go about things and worse, for me it means that I have fallen back into my old habit of remembering everything (or almost everything since I’m still pretending like my trusted system is capturing everything which of course it can’t possibly be since I’m not opening it every day, right?)

Mark would be kicking my butt if he were around.  This is not the black belt approach to GTD he followed.  It isn’t even a brown belt approach.  In fact, it’s more like a grey belt approach – you know, the sort of gray color that comes when you wash something white with a new pair of blue jeans??  This is hardly the color belt that the editor of GTDtimes ought to be wearing, is it? But I digress…

At any rate, I was explaining this to Meg and she was asking me some questions about what is going on in my world and in particular she asked me what I do when I have a task that I don’t particularly care for.  Needless to say she wasn’t surprised to hear me explain that there are certain things that I detest doing so much that it practically takes an act of God (or one very pissed off female) to get me to get on with the getting done.

Shortly thereafter we started talking about another topic and didn’t really close the loop on this discussion.  When we were walking out to the parking lot however I showed her one of my lasers (I’m the biggest nerd).  This lead to my showing her video that I’ve taken of something that I believe may actually represent a somewhat significant scientific discovery that I may have made (this is a long story in and of itself, but if you want to see the footage you can find it here.
).

Meg was intrigued and after talking about this for a few minutes she asked me what my next action was.  I explained that I was waiting to hear back from one of several microbiologists that I had written to in an effort to get confirmation.

Meg then asked me what my ultimate goal was with this project.  “It’s not really a project I said; I’ve been playing around with this for years before I did GTD.”

“Do you know what your desired outcome looks like?” Meg asked me.

I told her I did and explained what my goals were.  she asked me why I didn’t have a project for this and why it wasn’t anywhere within my lists including my long-term horizons of focus.

I tried to explain again that this was just a hobby and that…

You can see where this is going right?  Of course this should be listed.  It should have concrete next actions, it should have an ultimate final step to allow me to close the loop and if I am not really working on it seriously then I should park it in “Someday, Maybe”.  What I shouldn’t do is spend thousands of hours a year on this “hobby” without stating my objective and having a systematic approach to  getting to that point.

I tried once more to tell Meg that I didn’t have this as part of my trusted system because I just worked on this stuff for fun.

This was the “ah ha!” moment.  “Fun?” she said.  “Yes”, I explained. ” I do this for fun so I don’t need to put it in my system.”

Meg said to me “is everything in your trusted system something that you don’t want to do but know you have to do?”

“Of course” I said.  That’s how I stay on top of that stuff and make sure that I can keep myself on track.  There are some things I hate doing so much that in order to make myself do them I have to promise myself little rewards in order to get them completed.

“No wonder you are going numb to your trusted system”, Meg explained.  “Anyone would if everything in there was a hateful task that you have to force yourself to do it.  Why don’t you put things you like to do in your system?

I didn’t have an answer to this last question.  I should have one.  I would have liked to have had one.  I told Meg that I needed to go back to my hotel and digest.

End result?  After digesting all night – <burp> – I have come to a conclusion.  Mind you I still  don’t have an answer to the confounding question of the night prior but I have a solution just the same.  I can avoid having to answer that particular question by making one simple change.

I need some new lists.  Lists that include things I actually want to do not only things that I have to do.  You know, I’m supposed to be pretty intelligent but sometimes I wonder what gave me (or anyone) that idea.  Has anyone else failed to incorporate things that they like doing into their GTD lists?  Or am I uniquely incompetent in this particular regard.  Well, someone has to be the “dumbest wolf”*, I guess today it’s me – but I’ll bet you didn’t have an epiphany today, did you?  You’ve got to take the bad with the good.  It’s just the way of the world.

*the “Dumbest Wolf” is a reference to a story I used to tell about contextually relevant intelligence.  Basically what it means is that if any one of us were suddenly turned into a wolf (a-la- King Arthur), in spite of the fact that our human intelligence is far greater than that of a wolf in our own domain- even this huge intellectual advantage isn’t sufficient to overcome the handicap of lacking the domain specific knowledge and expertise required to be a functional wolf.  Thus, in spite of all our brain power, in the context of being a wolf, every sing one of us would be the dumbest wolf – and most likely the first one shot, trapped, hurt, or killed by the pack for being so stupid that we were too much of a liability.

Whenever I start to think I’m so smart I take a deep breath and remind myself that but for the grace of whatever divine power exists in the cosmos I could be the dumbest wolf or something even worse.

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A Community Contribution by Arif and Ali Vakil

Photo: I recently heard Steve Pavlina’s podcast “What is your Purpose”, in which he presented an excellent framework for arriving at your specific purpose. This ties in very well with GTD’s 40,000 ft horizon of focus and also a continuation of my previous post “GTD @ 50,000: How to find and fulfill your life’s purpose“.

At 50,000 ft you’re clarifying ‘what’ your set of values are and clarifying the ultimate purpose of why you exist.

At 40,000 ft you have to take your values and use them as a basis to   craft a vision. Your vision manifests your purpose into real life goals of ‘how’ you want your life to be.

In this post I’ll be showing you how you can craft a comprehensive vision that covers all major aspects of your life (Body, Mind, Heart & Spirit) to make yourself a complete a human being.

The Four Questions

* Body: What are my material needs?
The answer to this question should cover the details of what kind of lifestyle you would like to live. This would include the money you like to earn per month. What sort of house would you like to live in? etc

* Mind: What am I capable of doing?
Address your core skills. Every human being is endowed with certain skills, or interests that help to develop those skills. List out the things you are best at doing.

* Heart: What do I want do do?
Where are your dreams? Where does your passion lie?

* Spirit: What should I be doing?
Based on your beliefs & values, what is your conscience telling you that you should be doing?

Score Card

The answers you get to the above questions will be ‘areas of activities’. Jot these down under the activities column and score each of them from 1 to 10, as to how much they address the needs of your Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit.

Matrix

Once you’ve totaled the value each activity is giving you, you’ll intuitively be able to see which activity will give you most balance in your life. This will help you to see very clearly what your 40,000 ft vision needs to be, and based on this you can derive specific measurable goals for the 30,000ft horizon.

Advantages of having a Vision

* Clear direction of where you’re heading
* Clarity whether your next actions align with your Vision
* Feel Motivated
* High Energy
* Feel inspired
* Ability to Focus

Have you crafted your vision @ the 40,000ft Horizon of Focus? Please share any tips below for GTDtimes readers.

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