The master key to clarity is maintaining a complete and current inventory of all your commitments and agreements with yourself. You need to capture, clarify, and organize them, so you can constantly review and reflect on the totality of your engagements with the world, so you can trust your choices about what you’re doing, moment to moment. -David Allen

Grab the free article on the 5 phases of Mastering Workflow.

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Dear David Allen,

Today marks the four-year anniversary of the day that I watched a taping of your Mastering Workflow seminar.  It’s the day that I started a journey from chaos and overwhelm to order and sanity.  Some thought that my GTD journey was just a phase, that it would be my “flavor of the month”.  They were wrong, and now they are wishing that they had the same level of relaxed control in their lives as I do now.

My excitement for GTD has never tapered off; in fact it grows over time as I frequent the forums and the articles at GTD Times contributing to and learning from other people’s GTD journeys.  GTD has enriched my life like no self-improvement program has ever been able to do.  On this, my fourth anniversary of living the GTD lifestyle, I offer you my most heartfelt thanks and appreciation for everything that you’ve done for me and others around the world.

F. Luke Funfar
Vice President of Communications
Savannah Green Homeowners Association

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We wanted to share this amazing letter from Kevin, who recently attended a GTD Mastering Workflow class.  He describes what he did after the class, including a wonderful experience of connecting with his daughter.  For those of you feeling like you’re in “always on” mode in your work and personal life, Kevin’s story may be inspiring to you to see what’s possible…

[Read more →]

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In this 30-minute podcast, David and his team talk about the critical “thinking” stage of GTD.  They share practical tips, personal examples and suggestions for the processing stage of mastering your workflow.  Listen now.

If you missed the previous episode in our GTD best practices series on Collect, you can catch it here.

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David Allen is doing a webinar event next Wednesday, July 8th, hosted by Unbound Ideas.

In this 90-minute interactive webinar, David Allen will describe the strategies, tools and specific behaviors that dramatically upgrade individual and organizational productivity. In particular, he will focus on:

1. The 5 stages of control and the 6 horizons of focus necessary for personal self-management
2. How to get immediate control of “current reality”
3. How to keep track of the total inventory of your commitments
4. Why organizational issues are often personal process issues
5. Why it’s so challenging to change the simplest habits
6. How to continually self-consult to get back on your game

Register here.  David also does free events like this for GTD Connect members.  If you’re not a member, you can check out the two-week free trial, or join for by the month ($48) or year ($480).  If it’s not for you, canceling is easy. Really.

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Rachelle, director of public events for the David Allen Company, asked us to pass this along to the GTD Times readers:

The GTD: Mastering Workflow seminar is coming to Denver, Colorado on Thursday, May 28th. As a special offer for GTD Times readers, take 10% off the registration fee with the code Rocky10.

Whether you are new to GTD, or a veteran looking for a refresher on the best practices, we hope you can join us for this practical & tactical GTD seminar.

What a recent GTD seminar grad shared:

Since attending your seminar, my productivity has soared and I am no longer awaken at 2AM by things I forgot to do. I was and am an organized person. I had read David’s book a few years ago and had put into practice pieces of the GTD approach. But it wasn’t until I attended your seminar that I really got it. I especially appreciated the manner in which you conveyed the information – light-heartedly (no stern “gotta dos”) and with plenty examples to make the concepts easy to understand.

I am still learning and growing in my understanding of GTD, but the leap I made after attending your seminar was huge. Many thanks.

Be well, Nicole

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GTD’er Grant recently wrote to David Allen to share his “Drag Reduction Project” for improving his GTD workflow.

I realized my physical work area did not support my GTD systematic approach.

I cleared my desk and used my label maker to visually make areas of the desk to support how I work.  So far this has helped me primarily stop to Clarify during processing.  It helps me literally stop and determine Is it Actionable?  If so, applying the clarifying activities of What is the desired outcome? and THEN, What’s the Next Action?

I have been all over the GTD-Q in the last 6 months.  This really shoved me firmly back into Captain and Commander.

I certainly know everyone is different but setting my physical environment in a linear process flow to support the GTD systematic approach helped me get out of a stale tailspin.

Just wanted to share this little victory story with you.

Some photos from Grant:

If you have a GTD story you would like to share, please write to us!

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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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