Always love to hear and watch when two people I am fans of get together to chat and exchange ideas.  If you have read this blog you know about my man-crush on David Allen but I also very much enjoy the work Leo Laporte does on the TWIT network.  In February ’09 David and Leo connected on TWIT Live and exchanged some great ideas about how the mind works, why it is a horrible master and how to squeeze the most out of it.  Watch the video and read some of the main ideas below presented below:

• When you hold something in your mind it has no sense of past or future – it thinks you should be doing it all the time psychologically which is why it will wake you up at 3 in the morning and beat you bloody about something you cant do anything about while you are lying in bed.

• Its telling you that you need to go buy batteries when in fact you cant buy batteries from bed at 3 in the morning.

• Once you get it out the brain calms down and lets go.  The brain realizes it no longer needs to hang on to that and will allow you to renegotiate that agreement with yourself.

• You cant renegotiate agreements you cant remember you made so you have to get them out of your head and look at them and say, ‘no, not right now!’ (thus the importance of having a ubiquitous capture tool at hand at all times)

• You mind is for having ideas but not hanging on to them.

• Your mind needs to be free to express and expand… so the more you can trust that on the back end that you have an executive process that can handle things the more freedom it will have on the front end

So much to do, so little time! Time management and productivity guru, David Allen takes his bestselling book, Getting Things Done, to new heights with Making It All Work. In this video, he illustrates how to gain control of your to-do list and offers tips for finding focus and perspective.

In two previous entries I have written about the first 2 stages of mastering the flow of work.  I thought it would be interesting to post a recent video that showed David Allen the author of the book Getting Things Done going through what some of his own personal system looks like.

As noted before I think it is interesting to see how everything goes into the in-box from a piece of note paper to his audio recorder.  The setup as you can see is not that elaborate and does not require big bucks to start.  GTD at its most advanced level is all about simplicity.

I am a big fan of all things google.  Daily I use gmail, google docs, google calendar, google analytics, google finance, google reader, google maps and of course just the plain old google search feature.  As a company they truly impress me as I read about how they function as an organization, so it is no surprise to me that they invited David Allen to present and train their organization on the principles of GTD.  Although he doesn’t go deep into the process in full it is a very good glimpse into more of what “Getting Things Done”  is all about.