Listen to David’s Latest In Conversation
David interviews a corporate VP at Siemens about leadership, decision-making, and GTD.

Take the 14-Day GTD Challenge
Lead yourself through a 14-day GTD Challenge to optimize your GTD skills and systems.

Take a 30-minute Express Webinar
Our next Express Webinar focuses on the 3-fold nature of your work.

Take a Guided Hike Webinar
Take a tour of the forums–a lively community for learning & sharing with others doing GTD.

Watch a Coaches’ Connection video
Hear Coach Chris McIntyre give a simple explanation of the 5 phases of mastering your workflow.

Take a GTD Core Skills Challenge
Join our core skills challenges around the Weekly Review, procrastination, or priorities.

Listen to a Podcast
Meg Edwards & Mike Williams kick off a series for bringing GTD to the younger generation.

Set up your GTD Connect Intention Journal
Engage your creative side with your GTD Connect Intention Journal.

Before you spend another minute creating yet another list with ABC, 123, or high-medium-low codes as a way to define your priorities, read my essay this month. You may discover there’s a more natural path for getting you what you need to get the right things done.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

WHY ABC PRIORITY CODES DON’T WORK

“How do I set priorities?” Because I hear that so frequently, I assume most people think they could and should be doing it better.

The “ABC” priority codes don’t work. Listing your top 10 things you think have to get done, in order, doesn’t work. You’ll have a different priority set at 8:00 tonight than you will at 10:30 this morning. And sometimes the most strategic thing for you to do will be to water your plants. Like, when you’ve been in six meetings, felt beat up in five of them, and by 4:30 your brain is scrambled eggs, and you barely have the attention span of a gnat. That’s the time to water your plants and fill your stapler. Why? Because you can’t do anything else, and you’re going to have to water your plants sometime anyway.

On a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, there is no algorithm or formula that will last very long, or is really worth trying to nail down in some written or coded system. The four criteria that you will use to decide what to do are (in order of precedence):

Context (what can I do where I am?)
Time (when do I have to do something else?)
Energy (how wasted/fresh am I?)
Priority (what has the highest payoff for me if I do it?)

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.

• Achieving an “on” state of mind
• Getting back on the GTD wagon
• Summary of the five phases of mastering workflow

Listen now or download from iTunes.

Your time is valuable. The time you put into a weekly review is a guaranteed investment in yourself.

—David Allen

“Thanks again for your excellent GTD seminar.  I have just been reviewing the notes – very refreshing and envigorating, bringing some new perspectives to light for me.”
—David Orr, GreenMarch Services Limited

You can learn more by clicking on the date that works for you:

Thursday, May 10, from 10am-11:30am Pacific Time

Thursday, May 17, from 10am-11:30am Pacific Time

Wednesday, June 13, from 10am-11:30am Pacific Time

Will you be an early adopter of the new BlackBerry?  How do you decide among BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, or … a Windows Phone?

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

—from David Allen’s article, “Time Management: What’s the Real Issue?”

Q: Do you think that we’ve seen technology move our workforce in an unproductive direction?

A: The whole planet is unproductive; it’s just that technology is making it more obvious. What’s important is knowing where are you and how do you allocate your resources to get where you want to go. That’s been true forever. It’s true all this tech is totally distracting all kinds of people, but then again, they are letting themselves be distracted. How come? Because they’re not clear about what they’re doing.

Q: So being distracted by tech is the symptom of a problem, rather than the core of the problem?

A: Yeah. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do. If you don’t know where you’re going, any tech is fine. It’s like: Why not? Why not surf the Web? There are worse ways to waste time. But it comes down to the situation: Who’s doing it, why are you doing it, and what are you avoiding by doing it?

Read the full interview here.

Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?

2:09 PM Friday April 6, 2012
by Ndubuisi Ekekwe

Mobile devices have exacerbated an always-on work culture where employees work anytime, anywhere. They’ve contributed to the blurred distinction between when you’re “on the clock” and when you’re not. Service industry professionals are especially tethered to these devices. There’s an assumption that using smart devices boosts productivity, since they allow us to work constantly. But, we’re also jeopardizing long-term productivity by eliminating predictable time off that ensures balance in our lives. Is the obsession of regularly checking email really helping anyone’s bottom line? Are the unrealistic expectations these devices facilitate not setting staff up for burnout?

You can read the full post here.

Moms Rely on Facebook More Than Other Women

by Leslie Meredith, Senior Writer, TechNewsDaily
12 April 2012 07:30 PM ET

Forget the weekly playgroup to compare notes with other moms — many now head straight to Facebook. Moms use the social media site more frequently than women without kids, and with far more finesse.

Marketing firm Performics yesterday (April 12) released its study of 3,000 active U.S. social networkers, and found moms were more proficient than other women at getting information from Facebook. Fifty-six percent of moms considered themselves to be “experts” at using social networks compared with 36 percent of other women.

You can click here to read the complete article.

—from the article “The Need for a Total Life To-Do List,” by David Allen

How have you organized your lists by contexts that support your productivity, even when you aren’t in a physical or mental place to work on job one?

“The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer’s ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention.”

That’s from “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” posted three three years ago, and still applicable in 2012.  Even if you downloaded your iPhone and Android productivity apps today, they will waste your time tomorrow unless you take control of them now.

Has your software improved your productivity as the world has become more distracting? Or is your software programmed to grab your attention in alarming ways that make your time-management job harder?

Meet the iBrain. According to the developer, NeuroVigil, “The iBrain™ is a miniature electronics box attached to a light and flexible elastic head harness and electrodes that can effortlessly be applied to the head during sleep.” So far it’s just for tracking brain activity at night. But who knows? Maybe soon a miniaturized version will be the hardware that signals your leading-edge GTD software to help you make trusted choices throughout the day.

(The video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a moment to load.)

Can a cloud-based productivity system work for you?  Or are there times when you have to have your calendar, projects, and actions at hand because the cloud is out of range? 

Getting Things Done

We rely far too much on our imperfect memories to help us organize tasks and get work done. Trying to keep track of multiple projects leads to human error as we forget important tasks and waste time worrying over which project we should be working on at any given moment.

The solution: As soon as you remember a task, write it down so that your fallible, distractable brain isn’t the only place where you’re storing a record of it. This is the core principle of Getting Things Done. If you use it while working online, identifying your next task is a simple matter of consulting your to-do list.

The real power in GTD is not really in the hand writing or typing we do onto lists—it’s in the executive and creative thinking triggered as we engage with them. This month I explore the one list that can easily be the most powerful in terms of maintaining ongoing control and focus in work and life—the Projects list. Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they can get along without it.

All the best,

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

IS A PROJECTS LIST NECESSARY?

People started keeping calendars a century ago. Why? Because life’s time-based commitments got more complex than they could trust their mind to manage. If you think that a Projects list is unnecessary, then throw away your calendar and trust life will just let you know what you should be doing, in the moment. Good luck. If you decide you need a calendar, then keep a list of your projects you’re committed to completing, as well as appointments to keep. Otherwise you’re intellectually dishonest.

If you’re still trying to get your arms around the concept of Projects, a Projects list, and GTD, you’re not alone. “Projects” does seem to be one of the toughest inventories or concepts for people to grasp with GTD—even very sophisticated folks. I think the word “project” is laden with so many heavyweight events in their companies, they don’t acknowledge that something in their own life and work deserves that kind of rigorous thinking and tracking, if it’s not of the nature of “construct building” or “design car.”

So, call these things whatever you want. If you can’t put “Get new babysitter” or “Create my ideal retirement scenario” on a Projects list, put it on the “Outcomes I need and want to have happen” list! And they don’t have to go into a computer, each with a formal project plan. You could just write them as a list on the whiteboard in your kitchen or keep a file folder with separate pieces of paper for each item, labeled “Things to finish.” But for heaven’s sake, capture all of them, clarify what it is you’re committed to complete, and keep them in an easily reviewed index.

The last and necessary key to graduate to a next level of control and focus in your life will be to ensure that you’ve not only captured and clarified all of your projects, but that you also revisit each of those entries often enough, deciding each one’s next action, and keeping the list current. Weekly is the most common interval for this kind of executive oversight.

Stop! Reflect for a second: What’s occurred in your life and work in the last seven days, about which you know that you’ve got something you need to handle, finish, resolve, or clarify, but you haven’t taken the few moments yet required to define the project that signifies or the next step required? Tricky business, to stay on top of all this…but absolutely necessary if you’re going to win at the game of work and business of life.

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.

Are there meeting tips that you have found helpful that others could benefit from? Share them here. Other GTD Times readers like to hear what works for you.

Along a similar line, David Allen recently asked in a tweet, “With nothing left to do, what would you do?”  Some people have leveraged that question to consider what they would still choose to put on their to do lists, even if all the items that they have to do because of money were no longer there.  Of course winning the lottery could mean you’d have a whole new set of financial projects and actions.  But for the moment, set aside financial management on the runway to 20,000 levels.  Assume your new fortune is on cruise control, and you can put your attention anywhere else you choose.

How would winning a jackpot change the way your to do list represents your goals and purposes in the higher levels of the horizons of focus model?  And is there any of that you can start moving forward on, even before you win the lottery?

• Keep general reference files at arms’ reach.
• Have lots of fresh folders at hand.
• Avoid the unnecessary complication of color-coding your files.
• Label your files with an automatic labeler. This is faster for one-off labels than printing from your computer.
• Get comfortable filing even a single piece of paper that you might want to refer to later.

“The microcosm of how people deal with their in-baskets, e-mail, and conversations with others will be reflected in the macro-reality of their culture and organization. If balls are dropped, if decisions about what to do are resisted on the front end, if not all the open loops are managed responsibly, that will be magnified in the group, and the culture will sustain a stressful fire-and-crisis siege mentality. If, in contrast, individuals are implementing the principles of Getting Things Done, the culture will expect and experience a new standard of high performance.”

—David Allen, Getting Things Done

• Make it up.
• Make it happen.

A recent article entitled Your Brain on Fiction summarizes new research to support this idea. “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.” Reading fiction is like having your brain run a computer simulation program.

You might have heard David say in his seminars that the human nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a well-imagined thought and reality. Once you have identified an outcome, your brain’s reticular activating system will start organizing incoming information in ways that help you get the outcome you’ve defined. So go ahead and let your imagination savor the experience while you read your lists of successful outcomes—your projects and goals—as your brain helps you convert what you read into your reality.

Reticular formation of the brain, from Gray's Anatomy

When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized

By DAVID ALLEN
Published: March 17, 2012

HOW do you think most workers would respond if you asked them, “Do you feel more productive now than you did several years ago?” I doubt that the answer would be a resounding yes. In fact, even as workplace technology and processes steadily improve, many professionals feel less productive than ever.

It may seem a paradox, but these very tools are undermining our ability to get work done. They are causing us to become paralyzed by the dizzying number of options that they spawn.

Is there a way out of this quandary? Yes, but it’s not going to come from the usual quarters. To be successful in the new world of work, we need to create a structure for capturing, clarifying and organizing all the forces that assail us; and to ensure time and space for thinking, reflecting and decision making.

Read the complete article here, or on page 1 of the March 18 print edition’s Business Day section.

You may have heard the buzz about urban hipsters getting back to a simpler time by relaxing mentally in an idyllic, low-tech cabin.

But it’s not just urbanites who feel the pressure. People who commute from the suburbs, or work at home, or already live in a rural cabin are also looking for ways to get a break from the volume of work and personal input—email, voicemail, calls, meetings, and more. Anyone who lives on the grid needs an up-to-date method for productively managing life’s input, so there’s still time for reflection. Sound familiar?

It’s natural that people who are interested in being more productive look to GTD for solutions. GTD’s systematic approach relieves the stress, and makes the busy-ness of our modern lives sustainable. Like a cabin on a mind-like-water lake.

(Please note that the cabin site may load slowly. It has lots of pictures, and—ironically—lots of traffic.)

“What compounds the challenges of the self-management game is that often the most effective thing to do feels like the last thing you’re capable of doing. When you most need to plan is when you least think you have the time. When you most need to relax is when you feel most pressured to push hard. And when you most need to deal with cleaning up the minutiae of your life is when you feel most compelled to try to stay focused on something ‘more strategic.’”

—David Allen, Making It All Work

DAVID’S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

ARE YOU FREE TO FEEL FREE?

If you want to have the feeling of freedom regularly, you’ve got to get used to it. Literally.

What’s the greatest obstacle to living in the relaxed state of mind that is possible with the methods I coach? People simply aren’t used to it. And anything your nervous system experiences as unique or unusual will likely be “rejected” unconsciously in short order, because it is not in the comfort zone.

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.

David Allen: What I Read

How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can’t they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers. This is drawn from a conversation with David Allen, author of the New York Times bestseller Getting Things Done and founder of David Allen Co.

I have one of the more non-traditional schedules so the only thing I do regularly is wake up. And even that’s questionable. But the first thing I typically do is open my iPad to The New York Times, read an article or two on the front page and then check out the Dining & Wine or Business Day section. 

For magazines, I just love The Atlantic, and I’m not just saying that. I get the print edition and the digital version on my iPad and I often read each issue cover to cover. I also love The Week in print because of its expansive and in-depth take on the week’s events. Every so often I’ll get through The Economist but that’s usually only when I’m in travel mode.

Click here to read the full article.