“Is it even possible to implement GTD across the Company?” That was the question that was plaguing me and Ali.  Even if we get tools for everyone and teach them all the basics, it’s still very likely that most employees will stick to their old ways. Change is hard from within an organization.  In spite of our efforts it is possible and maybe even likely that our people won’t crank widgets as we expect them to.

Considering these facts the question “should we then go ahead and invest so much time and energy into the training?” is one to consider seriously.  On the other hand if we don’t pursue a company wide GTD implementation what are our alternatives?  Not to teach GTD and accept the current standard of performance & accountability hardly seemed like a viable choice so we decided that we might as well give it our best shot and keep our expectations low.

Here’s what we did:

First we got  everybody their GTD Gear (covered in earlier posts of Rolling out GTD @ Vakil Housing series).  Then we kick started the Training.  The key to our methodology  has been the regularity and persistence with which we’ve gone about “the Vakil Housing Weekly GTD Training Meet”.  This is  the secret-sauce we found for implementing GTD at our office.

Logistics:
Day: We had set upon a Day for our weekly meeting, say every Friday
Time: 9:00 Am. We wanted to get started first thing every morning.
Duration: 1 hr. Many times it would stretch to an Hour and a Half.
We’ve been dong this for almost two years so to date we have conducted more than 100 hours of Weekly GTD Training at our office.

The General structure of the meeting is:
- Recap of what was learned last week.
- Take Any David Allen Podcast Interview, Article or Audio session from GTD Connect.
- Watch, Listen to or Read out loud the material while I would simultaneously draw a mind map of what is being read on the whiteboard, while explaining further what David covered.
- Pausing the presentation occasionally and going over any heavy concept that David touched upon.
- Once the interview/podcast is over, we would run through the mind map recapping what was covered. Typically I’d share my personal implementation examples, with my “aha” moments during the presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -Asking if anybody had “aha” moments of their own to share.
- Possibly give everybody an exercise to work upon and get back with feedback next week.

The topics that we covered:
- Obviously, the first course was an intro to GTD. We covered the concept that we are most effective when we are relaxed, but that we can’t be relaxed when we have a million other things pulling and pushing us. In this session we played the David Allen Video on the home page of the David Allen Company.

- In the second session we distributed the various tools (covered in earlier posts) and assisted everybody in setting those up.

- We did sessions where we told everybody to grab whatever papers are lying at their desks or in their drawers and get them all to the conference room where we proceeded to do a live joint processing session with the actual stuff that they have to deal with.

- We had a session on clearing emails from people’s inboxes. The session included sitting with one volunteer and taking 30 minutes or so to clear his email inbox while others watched to see how it was done.

- We had sessions on the Three Fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria, for which we used the relevant articles on the website.

- We once did a GTD-Quiz. Where we made teams to whom I asked questions on the podcast that was just played and we distributed sleek leather bound little pocket calendar diaries as prizes.

- After we felt our employees had truly ingrained the core concepts we did individual sessions on the Natural Planning Model and Horizons of Focus.

- In addition to the very specific GTD sessions we had many other sessions that were just general, just as many of David Allen’s interviews are. We just listen to them and we each pick out the nuggets that mean the most to us.

If you are a senior Manager within your organization and you’ve strictly implemented GTD for yourself but are having difficulty convincing others to adopt it, I would highly recommend trying out the weekly meeting the way we’ve done it as explained above. Keep your expectations low. Having your whole organization/department implement GTD is a big change and as every experienced manager knows most change only happens in small doses.

After more than 100 hours of GTD Training are we all following GTD 100% today? No, we’re not. But we’re certainly more GTD-compliant than before.  We are still working on it too. That alone made the whole process worth it. Persistence always pays. Remember, A big shot was once a little shot, who kept shooting.

This is the fourth post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing. Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.
Second Post: Cool GTD Gear to motivate all in your Organization to Collect & have a mind like water.
Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions.

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Even if I had everyone in my organization trained in GTD I couldn’t picture people at my office implementing it. Mainly because they didn’t have the tools ready and handy in front of them to actually collect and crank their personal widgets. So before I began the training process I went on a several months search to find the perfect set of tools to distribute to all the Senior Management of Vakil Housing.

What tools did everybody need?
Intray/In Basket: We needed An intray/in basket for collection. This was pretty simple to get.

A Personal Collection Pocket Collection tool:We designed a pretty neat one for ourselves. More details here.

Filing Cabinet: I was quite particular that the Filing Cabinet we purchase for everybody would be swivel distance away. We used the Mercury filing cabinet with regular Hanging Folders.

A Calendar or Diary:  Some used their mobile phones to store appointments but for most we got them a regular 2007 or 2008 Diary.

List-Management Tool: Finally we needed a system/tool for everybody to manage their Project & Action Lists. This is where I got stuck.

The List Management Tool we needed had to fit the following criteria:
- It had to be portable. Since most of the attendees would be from our Engineering Division or Marketing, they are required to go out of office for work. Hence a Desktop based system (such as Outlook) or Web Based system (such as Remember The Milk) would not work.

- Cost-effective. Yes, it had to be cheap. We were rolling this out throughout the organization. So that knocked out most Digital systems such as Blackberrys, Palms and Windows Based PDAs. (However, subsequently we did hand over Blackberry devices to certain Senior staff members).

- Flexible enough to add/remove Categories: Unlike a Digital System (Blackberrys, Outlook etc.) there’s no really neat & tidy way to adjust categories/sections/contexts in paper based systems. Most notebooks with dividers like so many of these don’t have tabs. If they do, like this one, they are fixed. So, the problem is that if for a particular Context Say @Calls you may not have too many entries, but you are stuck with the 50 or 100 pages that are below that particular Divider because you can’t adjust it.

Finally once again after months of hunting, one of our own employees presented me what seemed like the perfect GTD Tool for us. The Solo 5 subject Notebook:

What made this perfect is:
It’s quite portable, Not as big as a Box File

The Dividers are removable! This is such a boon because if you run out of space in one section, you can replace the divider in another place of the notebook and start another section. Or if you know you won’t make too much use of a particular section, you can adjust it so that there are not too many pages beneath it.

They’re very well microperforated, so the pages tear out quite neatly.

The 5 Dividers Cover most of the Categories required by GTD:

We can add additional sections/categories for additional lists with the help of these 3M Post-it Flags

After discovering this Brilliant GTD Tool, we bought one for all those undergoing GTD Training at our office and we could finally begin our GTD training sessions. How did we go about the training so that almost all Senior Managers at Vakil Housing understand Project & Next Action thoroughly as well as Bring their Inboxes to zero almost everyday?  Stay Tuned for the next post in this Series.

This is the third post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing.
Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.

Second Post:A Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization to Collect & Have a Mind Like Water.

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One of our challenges in implementing GTD across our organization was to change our people’s habit of keeping stuff in their heads and get them to start actually using an external tool for collection. As you might imagine, if there were leaks in “Collect” process we simply couldn’t go ahead with the other stages of Gaining Control. Of course change always happens slowly. So we continuously stressed the benefits of collecting in an external system at our Weekly GTD Training meetings and I would occasionally send motivational reminder emails, like the one below:

Hi everybody,

A reminder to all to collect 100%. Currently as I’m sitting at my
desk, I see John on the phone, Ram on the phone and & Steve
having a discussion with Omer, but NOBODY’s
collecting. Even if you feel, “oh C’mon, have we got to collect this too,
but this is nothing important”, please do so. Only if we over-collect, for the
sake of collecting only, shall it become a habit. Once it becomes a
habit then we’ll start collecting the really useful stuff.

Take care everybody & All the best,
Arif

I admit I was going through quite an over-enthusiastic GTD Phase and was highly motivated to have a team around me that was GTD ready. But I was confident that it was a change for the better that would appreciated by all once we get there.
Well, of all the measures we have taken to fire up everybody to collect, the one that was most appreciated was when we designed a personalized pocket-note-taking pad for ourselves. After all David Allen does say that one of the best way to charge yourself to implement GTD is to get some cool gear. If you really have to collect always, you’ve got to have the tools around you to do so. I had experimented with several note-taking pads, including the David Allen Official Note pad that comes with his Note-taker Wallet, but none of them seemed just right. For some either the size was too small, or it was not too easy to tear off a page once you had completed jotting down what you needed to, none of them had a cool snazzy design.
Our criteria of a good note-taker wallet was:

1. It had to look good. So good that it mad a style statement. The user’s gotta feel like keeping it with him always and whipping it out when it came time to collect something.

2. The size had to be small enough to carry in your pocket, yet large enough to fit a mind map in there if you needed to.

3. One should be able to rip the paper out really easily once he’s captured something. Most of the note-pads I had seen were either spiral bound or micro-perforated. I’ve experienced that the spiral bound notepads, don’t tear off really easily when there are too few pages left in the pad. And the micro-perforated ones need you to hold the upper section of the notepad in one hand so that you can left the bottom portion of the page and tear it off.

4. The pages should not be ruled. So if anybody wants to draw something e.g. a route-map, mind map or an engineering drawing (we are a Construction Company), it would be really simple to do so

So after very intensive R&D we arrived at our first prototype. Ta-da:

The Design is something that everyone appreciated, even Leslie Boyer Harradine (Official David Allen Trainer) complemented us on it when she was down here.

Well there you have it. We first thought we’d put these notepads up for sale to the GTD community, but then since that was not really priority, we said, let’s just have it for in-house use. Anyway, Feel free to copy any of these to make your own personalized Capture Tool. Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And if you do implement these, please do post what sort of reactions you have from the people using them. I eventually see this being like a trademark, that all Vakil Housing employees carry this particular brand and style of notepad with them.

This is the Second Installment in the series of Posts for Rolling out GTD at Vakil Housing. You can see, the first post in the series here.

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Editor’s Note:  This is the first in what I expect will be a series of posts from  Arif and Ali of Vakil Housing - which to our knowledge is the first company in India to implement GTD across their entire workforce.

Story by Arif Vakil

How I first came across GTD

It was more than two years ago that I learned about GTD.  I was taking care of the HR department of Vakil Housing (our Company) then.  I was buried with applications that were flowing in for the various positions open in our growing company.  The applications were coming in through mail, through post, some were personally delivered.  To organize myself I started making stacks of these applications all around me for the different positions we had to offer and eventually ran out of space on my desk.  I badly needed a system to file all these applications in such a way so that I could retrieve an application within 30 seconds the moment I needed it.  There began my internet searching for a good filing system.  Little did I know that the system I would come across would become one of the most significant changes in my life and at our company, Vakil Housing.

I really could go on and on how every so much GTD has benefited us.  Each time I go through my actions when I’m in a particular context and “knock a few suckers” out from my list or when I come up with a truly Brilliant, Wild Success solution by using the Natural Planning Model, I always tell myself that it’s not because of me, but it’s thanks to G-O-D that I learned G-T-D which have led to such wonderful results.

How far we’ve reached in GTD implementation as a Company
As all GTD implementers would earnestly agree, GTD certainly sky-rockets ones productivity levels.  Because of GTD, I have been:

• - Arriving at Next Actions instantly, therefore moving forward
• - Taking much faster decisions
• - Visioning wild success
• - Delegating
• - Tracking each and every decision that I have given to execution.

All of the above led to two realizations.  Firstly, we have truly a brilliant team within our organization.  The staff at Vakil Housing were able to take-on much more tasks than I was handing out to them prior to GTD.  Secondly, nonetheless since I had become so much more super-productive, I needed others to keep up with me.  When a task was handed out to someone, I needed the peace of mind that the task would be handled.  But when I don’t see people writing down tasks assigned to them, a siren plays in my head screaming, “Red Alert, Red Alert, Warning, Warning”.  That’s what triggered almost a year long company wide training and implementation of GTD the pinnacle of which was an “Official David Allen Trainer coming down to our company here in India” .

For almost the last year or so we’ve been consistently having some sort of weekly GTD Training session in-house.  Our staff don’t have too much of a background of working in a “corporate” environment, where all have voice mail, in boxes or pigeonholes.  In fact some have felt & used a computer or responded to an email only after joining our company.  So we started from there and over the last many months, we have now reached a place where almost all the Department Heads and Senior Managers of our 120 staff company:

• - Clear the email in box to “zero” every 2nd or 3rd day.
• - Carry a paper based GTD Notebook with them everywhere
• - Have their personal “only-swivel-distance-away” Reference Filing system.
• - Have a clear understanding of Projects and Next Actions,
• - The always have a current list of Projects with them handy.
• - Use the Natural Planning Model to do Project Planning (I’ve only trained them on this last week so that will take a while).

As Kevin Wilde (Chief Learning Officer, General Mills) experienced it with his staff, some are deep-divers and some surface-skimmers.  But all have implemented it to some degree and we now can comfortably speak the same language.

When I look back, it seems quite incredible that we’ve reached so far, but we have.  However, we still have some way to go, till this manner of thinking becomes a solid irreplaceable culture within our organization.

What are the specific steps we took to implement GTD at Vakil Housing:
There are various initiatives that we had taken, which I shall try to expand on over a series of blog posts, most of which were:

• - Conducting Weekly GTD Training Meetings for Department Heads
• - Finding a working paper based GTD system and handing that out to everybody
• - Conducting one-to-one GTD Training at the desks of various individuals
• - Pairing people up as GTD Buddies to help each other do their daily process
• - Making a personalized pocket notepad, to encourage all to capture commitments
• - Putting up various GTD posters up in our conference room
• - Personalized Jott system within the office to encourage capturing when one is not able to write.
• - Finally being trained and creating trainers within the organization to make this an on-going process.

So stay tuned on this series of Blog post on GTDTimes, by tracking the Vakil Housing tag.  In future posts I shall describe the above steps in detail, as to how we successfully implemented GTD across our company.

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Jim Rider, the VP of Brand Communications over at the David Allen Company just forwarded this interesting news to my attention. It seems that Vakil Housing is the first company in India to go through a company wide GTD training program. Not only that but several key individuals went a step further and obtained additional training to become trainers themselves, enabling them to support their company’s effort to instill a GTD oriented culture.

Let me be one of the first to offer my congratulations to everyone at Vakil Housing. This is an awesome first step and I’m certain that the company as a whole will reap huge benefits from your efforts in this regard. I’d also like to invite anyone from Vakil Housing that has the desire to write about your company’s experiences adopting a GTD culture and submit the reports to GTDtimes. I am sure that I’m not alone in having an interest in hearing how your GTD efforts progress, what benefits you realize, what obstacles you encounter and how you overcome them.

From Vakil Housing:

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been eagerly awaiting this training to take place and last week it finally happened. Dream Com True! Leslie Boyer Harradine an associate with the David Allen Company, was down here for a whole week for an intensive training session, exclusively for Vakil Housing. Other than Training our staff in this methodology, Leslie, also trained a couple of us to be Trainers ourselves. So that this would not just be a one-time thing, but the practice and training will continue inhouse so that eventually a GTD culture sets-in.

If someone from Vakil Housing would like to contribute in this regard, please send me a note at: editor@gtdtimes.com and I’ll send you some details on how contributing to GTDtimes.com works.

One last thought about this; has anyone else seen companies in other countries taking steps like Vakil Housing has taken to implement GTD across an entire organization? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Again, send the information to editor@gtdtimes.com and we’ll be sure to share the news with the GTD Community.

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