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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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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Hi Folks,

Why did calendars show up and become ubiquitous tools for most people in the last few decades? Pretty simple: Life’s commitments got more complex than our heads could effectively manage. Yet people resist managing everything else in the same trusted way. I’ll expand, below.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE ONE LIST PEOPLE TRUST

If you’re like me, with quite a number of lists of many next actions, projects, someday/maybe’s, etc., you’re likely to encounter people who question your efficiency if not your sanity. “You’ve got so many lists! That’s just too much work!” (Sound familiar?) If you ever feel like you need to defend your lists, ask your skeptical friend if they are sitting around trying to remember what appointments they have on their calendar for next month. They’re probably not biting their nails about where they need to be a week from next Thursday at 4pm. They’re probably not even thinking about it. Why? Because they have their appointments tracked in a system they trust—a calendar they trust they’ll review at the appropriate time and place.

So, why not have the same lack of distraction about all the things that you need to be reminded of?

A calendar is nothing more than [Read more →]

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Check out this free podcast from David Allen. In just over two minutes, he gives practical tips for getting started with GTD. It’s available for download now on the David Allen Company podcast page.

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Question: Once you’re aware of the possibilities of being “indestructible” by having the intention to do the best thing in a given moment (Chapter 19 of Ready for Anything), how do you manage the newfound fear that, if you’re not intending the best thing in a given moment, you’re missing out on potential gain? Which makes you feel like you “have to” do the best thing all the time?

David Allen’s answer: Why would that question be on your mind? Simple answer: because some part of you thinks or assumes that there are other things you would/could/should be aware of, have done, or be doing, that you’re not. How do you clean that up? Get the complete list of the “other things” and take a look. If you’ve truly captured, clarified, and organized all of that, and stepped back from an appropriate horizon and taken a look, and still feel bad about not knowing what to do, then you’re probably familiar with that kind of feeling, and you’ll tend to slip into that familiar territory, no matter what your situation. Once you can no longer blame some unknown thing—OMG, what am I not doing?—you’ll get the opportunity to address some more subtle stuff, if you care to. Lightening up, with a sense of humor, is the hallmark of productivity maturity!

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Hi Folks,

Want to know one of the easiest ways to act on your creative ideas? Stop trying to hold them in your mind. Your mind is a great place to have ideas, but a terrible place to manage them.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

ARE YOU STILL USING YOUR HEAD TO TRACK YOUR AGREEMENTS?

There is a light year of difference between a system that has merely a lot of our commitments objectified and one that has 100% of the total. And few people have ever gotten to a totally empty head, with absolutely every project, action item, and potential agreement we have made with ourselves and others out and available in an easily reviewable format.

My hat’s off to you if you’re trying to keep mental lists as reminders of things to do—but I’ll bet those lists are not anywhere close to complete. Consequently they are putting enormous and unnecessary work on your psyche. If you don’t have everything in a system that the system ought to have, there is still no full trust in that system, and minimum motivation to keep it up and keep it current.

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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More than half of workers surveyed by Talent Management say they will work during their summer vacation.  Maybe that’s why USA Today wonders why we don’t feel rested when the “vacation” is over.

How much do you work on vacation? Take the poll below, and your additional comments are welcome. 

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Too many next actions? DA weighs in…

Question: I have done a good job of getting all my commitments in Outlook tasks and out of my head, but here is my dilemma: I have written down every work and personal task I need to do, including converting emails to action items and now I have 580 work tasks, 346 personal tasks, 266 tasks for my assistant and 117 honey-dos for my husband! I have them organized by project and date, but am feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all! Any advice? Thanks so much for your work.

David Allen: Well, you have as many commitments as you have, and unless you want eternal subliminal stress, you need to get them objectively out of your head and reviewable. As you’ve discovered, your next task to get more stress-free is to determine which ones are really “someday” vs. which ones need to be on the front shelf. Essentially, everything that you’re not doing at any moment is “someday,” but the psyche feels much better when you have made some distinctions between the active ones that you really want/need to get done within a reasonable time vs. those that can wait. Ultimately you’ll have to decide what kind of overview/map you need and want to see, to feel OK about what you’re doing. So there’s no right or wrong answer about any of this—only what’s most workable for you.

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Question: You claim that in most of the situations we are guilty for being stressed and frustrated. What can we do to avoid these frustrations?

Answer from David Allen: Clarify what your desired outcome is, what the next action required to move it forward is (and who’s going to do it); and evaluate those commitments consistently within your total context of commitments about work and life.

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This is an excerpt from Todd Brown’s blog post for Next Action Associates, the only Certified International Partner for GTD in the UK.

We’ve learned enough about the brain in the last 60 or so years to know that it is powerful and dependable at some things, and limited and unreliable when it comes to others. Thinking creatively, drawing connections, brainstorming, focused thinking—all great uses for our grey matter. But counting on it to remind me of the fact that I need to buy olive oil? Allowing it to have the thought over and over “I need to email the proposal to the client”? Only half-deciding what to do with several (hundred?) emails and leaving them in the inbox to fester?

That’s brain abuse. Of course if you’re guilty of it, you are also the only one who can put an end to it. A first step would be to consider a spotter’s guide to the forms the abuse might take:

• Re-thinking things
• Leaving thinking half-finished
• Trying to fill your brain beyond capacity
• Counting on your brain to remind you when you want to be reminded

Identify your brain’s strengths and weaknesses, and stop giving it things to do that it doesn’t do very well. Remember, only you can prevent brain abuse.

You can read other blog posts and find out more about Next Action Associates here.

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