These guys, lurking at the back of the room aren’t playing video games, at least I hope not. They are two of the newest team members at The David Allen Company, John Ward and Chris McIntyre. Both seasoned presenters, they are here to audit Kelly class and sharpen their GTD presentation skills. We enjoyed a nice lunch together, I look forward to seeing them in action, soon.

Kelly just gave us a tour on how to setup Notes and Outlook as GTD implementation tools. Even though I think I know this stuff, I still learn new things and I got to share some tips of my own. Listening to some of the questions from the audience that inspired some ideas for features I can build into eProductivity for Lotus Notes to make getting things done with Lotus Notes easier. I’ve got those items on my agenda list to discuss with my team.

The seminar is going well, Kelly’s in peak form, people are learning and laughing at the stories she’s sharing from her work in the GTD trenches. (Example: Most full e-mail box? 87,000 emails. True story from Kelly.)

Well, time to get back to the seminar. I’ll try to post another highlight, soon.

Update: Chris is ahead by 45,000 points.

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Kelly just gave an interesting illustration of thinking about projects from a…z.

Here’s how this works:
Z represents the successful outcome - what your project will look like when done.

A represents the next single physical action to take to move forward.

b…y represents any additional action steps (but not the next action) along the way.

Now, here’s the secret: Z (the project) goes on your project list. A (the next action) goes on the appropriate action list. Everything else (b…y) needs to be parked somewhere, but if they are not next actions they do not belong on your current working list. [Read more →]

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TIME 9:37 AM

Kelly started the discussion with a great question:

On a 1-10 scale, how would you rate your productivity over the last two weeks?1= I should have stayed in bed.
10=Master of Control & Perspective

What supports you/gets in the way of you being at 10 more often?

Great question. Some surprising answers. I look forward to hearing what your experiences are.

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TIME: 8:45 AM

I’m in Newport Beach today, attending the GTD Mastering Workflow Seminar. Although I’ve been to about a dozen GTD and MAP* seminars over the past 15 years, I continue to learn something new each and every time I attend.

Kelly Forrister is our presenter today, so I’m certain it will be a great day of learning and fun with a group of people committed to getting things done at work and play. I’ve had the good fortune to work with Kelly at four different organizations over the past 15 years. She’s as passionate as I am about productivity and she’s also a geek and we share a mutual interest for high-tech gear to support our productive lifestyle. (If you haven’t done so, check out Kelly’s blog .)

The GTD Mastering Workflow seminar is a relatively new format for this material. Instead of the traditional 2-day seminar, David Allen presents a one day seminar, called GTD RoadMap, which covers the high-level perspective of GTD, including theory and application. [Read more →]

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By Kelly Forrister

I know there are lots of great shared calendar solutions on the Web, but I still favor Palm Desktop over anything else. It’s free and easy to use. I recommend it to people all the time who are looking for a good, bullet-proof list manager for GTD, whether they use a Palm handheld or not. You can download a Mac or Windows version from http://www.palm.com/us/support/palmdesktop.html

An easy way my husband and I have found to share my Palm Desktop calendar (Windows version) is for me to send him the datebook files about once a week. Then, he has access to my full calendar on his laptop.

Here’s how to do this: [Read more →]

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One of the perplexing things I run across in presenting GTD classes is people who want to defend their lack of system as taking less time and effort than the “work” it would take to maintain a system (GTD or otherwise). There are books out now about how organizing is a waste of time because it takes too much time. I do agree, to a point, that spending too much time organizing can be ineffective, but ANY system–and even lack of one–takes work and time. Why not go for the path of least resistance?

Leaving things undecided and stacked in amorphous blobs of stuff–because it would take too much time to decide a next action and put it in a trusted place–is a guarantee to have to reassess, reprocess and redecide what that thing means. I don’t get it. With so many people complaining that they are too busy to maintain things like action lists, how can they afford to NOT have one? If it’s coming in to you, you’re going to handle it at some point. Why not handle it with as little effort as possible when it first shows up?

Believe me, if I could get away with not managing lists and be as effective, I would do it in a heartbeat. Over the years I’ve tried to cut corners in whatever way I can so that the maintenance of all this doesn’t outweigh the benefit of doing. I’m inherently lazy. I don’t maintain lists because I love spending the time doing that. I maintain the lists because it’s faster and easier for me than not having any system at all.

If I can decide my action on an email when it first shows up, organize it in a place other than In, and put that action reminder in a place I know I’ll see, that’s about 10 times faster for me than leaving it undecided, and having it snap at my ankles every time I look at my Inbox–clamoring for my attention with the 200 other actions I also need to handle.

Why do people resist having a system? I’m curious to hear from the GTD community on this one.

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