James Fallows of The Atlantic has posted highlights from his conversation with David Allen, about coping with the modern nightmare of email and all-hours connectedness.

David Allen on How to Fix Your Life

By James Fallows, Oct 24 2012, 10:40 PM ET

I know that you’ve laid out your message in your books and in seminars and recordings. Still, I’ll ask you: What is the single main point you’d like people to remember again, gaining a feeling of control in their lives?

All the stuff that is coming in needs to be externalized. I don’t know that I could get it any simpler than that. You need to capture the stuff that’s potentially meaningful, you need to clarify what those things mean to you, and you need to keep a series of maps of the results of all of that so you can step back and see it from a larger perspective. That’s the only choice: you’re ultimately going to have a lot more to do than you can do, so the question is, do you want a half-empty or half-full life?

You can read the full post—highly recommended—here.

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For those of you who use OmniFocus, there’s a brand-new setup guide that describes how best to configure OmniFocus for GTD. The David Allen Company online store has letter and A4 sizes of the guide for sale as PDF downloads. You’ll find information here about the GTD & OmniFocus Setup Guide, as well as other guides. A free sample is also available for download.

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Have you ever wished that you could focus more, to achieve the goals that you’ve defined at your higher levels in the GTD Horizons of Focus? According to neuroscience research, your best leverage may be stress-reduction. Stress hormones tend to shut down the parts of your brain that handle goal-directed behavior.

Help your brain to focus on goals by stressing less. How? Get stuff out of your head into your GTD system. And review your commitments often enough that you can trust your choices in the moment.

Please feel free to post a comment about your experience with stress-reduction and achieving goals.

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The Financial Underground recently interviewed David Allen about how to use the Natural Planning Model for personal finance.  You can read the blog post here, or listen to the podcast.

Interview with David Allen. The Natural Planning Model for Personal Finance.

By Matt James / September 24, 2012

“If I asked you to stop planning, you’d plan how to do it.”—David Allen

Have you mastered the art of stress-free productivity?

How about stress-free cash flow planning?

Many of us would answer “no” to both. Part of the problem is that we go about solving the “problem” of personal finance and cash flow management in a manner that is neither intuitive nor productive.

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Hi Folks,

If all you get from the GTD methodology is to retire your mind from the job of being your list manager, you’d be light years ahead of most people on the planet. It’s one of the easiest principles to implement, and probably one of the most common to disregard in terms of how powerful it can be. Do yourself a favor—get smarter than your mind. It would love to let go of this stuff; it’s simply afraid you don’t have a better servant.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

GET SMARTER THAN YOUR MIND

Your mind doesn’t have one. A mind, that is. If your mind were smart, it would only remind you of something when you could do something about it.

Your mind is an incredible servant but a terrible master. Most people I meet, though, are still letting their mind run the show. You have to get smarter than your mind if you want to reach stress-free productivity.

QUOTABLE

Rule your mind, or it will rule you.—Horace

This excerpt is from a recent issue of David’s “Productive Living” newsletter. It’s free and sent about every 4 weeks. You’ll find essays from David Allen, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.

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Did you catch last night’s episode of The Office? Darryl was carrying around a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and talking about productivity improvements. Here’s the episode, with the first appearance of GTD about 2 minutes in.

(This video is streaming from Hulu, so it may take a few seconds to load. There is a commercial for about 30 seconds before the episode begins.)

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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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How much interruption do you allow? How much choice do you have in that? Is your answer different after you read this quote?

“There are no interruptions. There are only mismanaged inputs.”
—David Allen

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In the Job Market section of the New York Times, you’ll find an interesting article on the value of working with paper. David Allen weighs in on how he uses paper, in addition to doing his writing on a computer.

In Defense of the Power of Paper

By PHYLLIS KORKKI
Published: September 8, 2012

Paper, says the productivity expert David Allen, is “in your face.” Its physical presence can be a goad to completing tasks, whereas computer files can easily be hidden and thus forgotten, he said. Some of his clients are returning to paper planners for this very reason, he added.

Mr. Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, does much of his writing on a computer, but there are still times when writing with a fountain pen on a notepad “allows me to get my head in the right place,” he said.

Read the complete article here.

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