Question: How can we apply the GTD principles in our lives, where we are often burdened by stress and other pressures of a hyper-competitive world?

David Allen’s answer: The opportunities to apply the key principles of GTD are both immediate and infinite. We live in a continual flow of making and renegotiating our agreements with ourselves and others — whatever it is that we think we might want to do or experience that we haven’t yet. This can range from a poem we feel like writing, to a company we want to start, to a walk we want to take, to the feeling we should clean up our old emails. The point is not to finish everything, but to be constructively engaged with our process of creating and completing.

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Watch this informal and insightful interview with David Allen, inventor of the Getting Things Done methodology. It was recorded at the SANG Conference in 2012. Hear David candidly talk about why people need GTD, simple steps to get started, why we procrastinate, and more.

(This video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a few seconds to load.)

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Earned Attention, by Klaas Weima, is an interactive handbook for social communication in the digital age. David Allen contributed his thoughts on how to make this “digital cocktail party” work for you.

There you are. Staring at your screen. Your smartphone in your hand, laptop in front of you and a pile of papers on your desk. All ‘to do’. As quickly and as accurately as possible. David Allen can help.

David Allen is well known for his simplicity. With a few simple rules you can change your behaviour and get a grip on your overloaded inbox. Allen prevents you from drowning in the flood of messages.

This interview covers the following topics:
1. How do you keep more than one million Twitter followers happy?
2. The simplicity and logic of the GTD methodology.
3. Besides practical also spiritual tips.
4. Why you should see your smartphone as a bucket.
5. In five steps from unrest to overview.

The interview is available here. (May take a couple of minutes to download.) And click the Play button below for an overview of Earned Attention.

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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.

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Tony Schwartz has some excellent advice about the value of relaxation for increasing productivity.  Here’s an excerpt from his recent New York Times opinion piece.

Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

By TONY SCHWARTZ
Published: February 9, 2013

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

Golden Cosmos

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

Read the full article here.

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USA Today has an article in their Money Quick Tips section, on how to Make Telecommuting Work for You.

The article points out that ten percent of workers work at home for some or all of their time on the job, so it’s important to make that home office a productive environment.  Expect to be distracted, by things like these:

1. Children and family wanting attention.

2. Children, family, pets disturbing work telephone calls.

3. Difficulties accessing office equipment.

You can make your telecommuting more productive by having clear agreements with family members about whether it’s okay to interrupt you when you’re working at home. Ask for as much IT support as your employer will provide, including remote access to files. And be sure to set boundaries on how much time you’ll spend working, if you find you tend to work more hours just because the line between home and work has been blurred.

How has telecommuting affected your productivity?

And if you’re not telecommuting, how much of your job could you do remotely, if your employer supported that option?

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Question: At what point did answering email become my job?

David Allen’s answer: Well, at what point did answering anything—your mail, having conversations in your hallway—become your job? It’s all your job. You just have to decide what your work is. As the late, great Peter Drucker said, that’s your biggest job, to define what your work is.

So how do you define what your work is, and therefore should you be doing that? The good news about this overwhelm is that it’s forcing people to make executive decisions that they never felt like they had to make before. “I need to do everything that comes my way.” No, you can’t anymore, sorry. You are going to have to do triage. That means you are going to have to have a conversation with your boss. You are going to have to show up with a list of everything he or she has given you and have a conversation. “Gee, thanks for these new things, can we talk? Because I am not going to be able to do them all.” It’s forcing those kinds of conversations.

That’s why people have this attraction/repulsion to GTD. It ain’t lightweight stuff. If you are really going to work this, that’s what’s going to start to show up.

Excerpted from David’s interview with Xconomy.com.

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“Priorities are determined from the top down—i.e., your purpose and values will drive your vision of the purpose being fulfilled, which will create goals and objectives, which will frame areas of focus and responsibility. All of those will generate projects, which will require actions to get them done.”

—David Allen, Making It All Work, Appendix vii, Horizons of Focus

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You may have read that the latest innovation from Silicon Valley is that the employee perk is moving from the office to the home.  That article referred to work-life balance as a nonsense term, based on an archaic segmentation of work and life.

How is your GTD system set up to handle work life and home life? Is there a distinction, or have they blended?

To stimulate your thinking, you can open the larger (more readable) version of this infographic, courtesy of Compliance and Safety, that illustrates the @Work state of mind.

Featured By: C&S Blog

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David Allen’s recent TEDx Talk has generated quite a buzz.

“The art of stress-free productivity is a martial art.”

(This video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a few seconds to load.)

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