Where is the majority of your Reference stored these days? In GTD terms, your Reference is your “non-actionable” materials. Do you keep them stored in digital or hard copy?
If you’re mostly digital these days, what works well for you about that over paper?
Or, if you’re mostly paper, what works well about that over digital?
What’s your level of GTD expertise? No matter what it is, these interactive and concise 90-minute webinars will deepen your mastery of the GTD best practices. David Allen Company offers these on an “a la carte” basis, giving you the flexibility and affordability to choose just the ones that work for you.
Keys to Getting Things Done®
This live Webinar will give a fast & fun overview on the keys for Getting Things Done, led by a Senior Coach. Learn about the best practices and tools for managing the five phases of your workflow: Collect, Process, Organize, Review & Do. Experience a “mind sweep” and walk through the decision making model for moving your input from “stuff” to clear outcomes and actions. Get tips for setting up a seamless system. A great overview if you’ve been wanting a better understanding of the “big picture” of managing your workflow with GTD.
GTD® & Outlook®
This live Webinar will give a detailed overview of the best practices for implementing GTD in Outlook. You’ll learn tips for setting up and managing Outlook Email, Calendar, Tasks, and Notes to support a seamless GTD system. See a demonstration of processing email (No, “inbox zero” isn’t an urban legend!) See examples of Task “contexts” and suggestions about how to structure your project and action lists.
Includes complimentary copy of our GTD & Outlook Setup Guide to assist you in your implementation of the recommended steps.
All webinars are held from 11am-12:30pm Pacific Time (California). Each webinar is $49. If you are planning on taking both, Keys to Getting Things Done is recommended before GTD & Outlook to build the foundation of best practices before the practical application.
Questions? Contact us at webinars@davidco.com.
People who are starting with GTD often ask how to handle delegation, especially when a “waiting for” from another person doesn’t get delivered as agreed. Here’s a question and answer with David Allen on this topic.
Question: I just finished the “Getting Things Done” book and I know the methods you have expressed will for sure help me! I was wondering if you can help answer one of my questions? For Actions, let’s say you have to delegate work to someone. If that person doesn’t do the work that they volunteer to, how do you act in a stress-free way which doesn’t decrease your productivity and efficiency as a person?
David’s answer: There’s no “system” that can answer your question. “Stress-free” emerges when you know you’ve made the decisions that you need to about something, and parked the results into a trusted system that will feed reminders and information back to you at the appropriate time and context. So you have to decide if there’s something that you need to do about the situation or not; and if so, what’s your next action? Then park that next action in the right place that you’ll deal with appropriately.
The main problem most people have with delegation is the lack of regular review, enough so that you will light a fire or check status early enough to be able to deal with the other person optimally. But you can’t make anyone do anything. You just have to deal with your own agreements with yourself about the situation.
Best,
David
David Allen has developed this set of questions for completing one year and beginning the next year. Enjoy!
What have you actually finished, completed, and accomplished? If you haven’t made a list in the last year, I would highly recommend that you give yourself a treat and review the year that just passed and look forward to the year ahead.
When I go through these kinds of questions I like to consider my answers in several areas:
Physical 
Emotional
Mental
Spiritual
Financial
Family
Community Service
Fun / creativity / recreation
Completing and remembering last year
Many people have found this tip we share in our GTD & Outlook 2010 Guide to be super helpful for corralling the myriad of emails that need to be tracked as a “Waiting For.” You simply need to create a rule in Outlook to copy delegated items to an @Waiting For Support folder (create that folder if you don’t already have one.) Here’s what to do:
1. Select Rules button from the ribbon
2. Click Manage Rules & Alerts
3. Click on New Rule
4. Select Apply rule on messages I receive
5. Click Next
6. Check off from people or specific group. Then click on where people or public group is underlined and select yourself as the From contact (if you are not listed as a contact in your address book, you will need to create that first with the exact email address used by Outlook when you send email for this to work). Click OK. Click Next. [Read more →]
A great way to kick off the New Year is with a review of GTD’s five phases of Mastering Workflow:
For each area, ask yourself:
What’s working well for me in this area now?
What would I like to improve upon in the coming year in each of these areas?
How I could support myself more in that?
Acknowledge yourself for how far you’ve come. Be realistic in your commitments about where you want to be. GTD is a journey…
Happy New Year!
Someone new to GTD asked David Allen for advice on making GTD simpler to adopt.
David answered this way . . .
It’s hard to get it any simpler than this:
Any one of those elements without the others won’t really produce that much value.
An easy way for me to explain the “Doing” phase of GTD is to simply say “trust your gut/butt/intuition/hunch/heart.” There is gold in that, and ultimately that’s what it will come down to. But how do you even get to the point of trusting whatever part of you makes a trusted decision? Here’s where the “ecosystem of GTD” starts to make more sense:
Capture everything that has your attention (Collect)
Make decisions about what it means and what you are going to do about it (Process)
Park those decisions in trusted places (Organize)
Step back to reflect on those choices from a clear, current, and creative place (Review)
So that you can make the best action choice (Do)
So how will that help narrow down a To Do list the length of your driveway? You’ll want to pull in the Criteria for Choosing model: [Read more →]
Sometimes Christmas feels like an all-consuming project that sends us racing through malls, jumping from party to party, and being busy-busy-busy as we fill our time with lots of Christmas fluff.
I want something more than that, though.
I don’t want to have to “recover” from Christmas. I don’t want to start the new year eight pounds heavier. I don’t want my children focused only on the electronic gadgets they hope Santa brings. But everything I don’t want will probably become my reality–unless I take the initiative to implement what I do want.
David Allen’s Natural Planning Model seriously saves my sanity on everything from birthday party planning to creating new programs for my website, so this year, I decided to use the five steps of the Natural Planning Model to create a Christmas experience that is both magical and meaningful.
Step One: Defining Purpose and Principles
For this part, I sat down with my children and gave them the following prompts:
David Allen calls the Weekly Review the “critical success factor” to GTD. Why? It’s the glue that keeps it all together. It’s also one of the steps people tend to resist the most. Here are some keys for getting the most out of the Review phase to keep your GTD system humming along.
WHAT TO REVIEW:
There are 11 steps in the GTD Weekly Review. David Allen recommends leading yourself through this every 7-10 days to get clear, current, and creative.
Get clear – ensure all your “stuff” is processed
Collect Loose Papers and Materials
Get “IN” to Zero
Empty Your Head
[Read more →]
