Great new podcast from the David Allen company on how to get going with GTD. Give it a listen:

http://www.gtdtimes.com/2009/11/09/getting-started-with-gtd/

In todays online edition of Business Week David Allen writes a guest column entitled: “Time Management in the Age of Social Media.”  As a person who frequents both twitter and facebook I ask myself if these social networking sites are productive or black holes of time.  David Allen writes:

“The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.”

Read the full article at businessweek.com here

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.

My first stab at a video blog.

If you want to see more about the Flip Note check out www.flipnotefan.com

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.

GTD five stages of mastering workflow: collect, PROCESS, organize, review and do.

Process

I think this is the phase that really sold me on GTD.  There is obviously more to it, but this is the beginning of really getting clarity and de-cluttering your life.  In the Process stage, the bucket or in-box is emptied.  It is important in this phase that you start at the top of your in-box and work your way down.  For the magic to work it has to be arbitrary – you cant go digging down into your in-box to find what you think is most important to start with first.  You have to win the battle to trust the system over the worries in your head.  Simply start at the top and follow the flow chart.

This flowchart can also be downloaded for free at the official David Allen GTD website at this link: http://www.davidco.com/pdfs/tt_workflow_chart.pdf

As discussed in the previous post the first time you do this I can take hours and hours.  If I am being really good I empty my in-box daily and if not at a bear minimum once per week.  This phase also introduces the need for some additional tools.  Just as the in-box is critical in the collection phase a fresh stack of plain paper sized folders is critical in the processing stage.  Of course folders can take on the electronic form as well but since we are not yet a completely paperless society the suggestion is to always have and start with the “low-tech” folder and file system.  Below I have attached a video from a guy by the name of James Marwood who walks you through his office as well both paper and electronic forms of his GTD system.  It is a great example of what the finished product looks like.  The great thing about GTD is that everyone’s system looks a little different.

James’ GTD Description from James Marwood on Vimeo.

other resources:

gtd cheatsheet: processing your stuff (lifedev.com)

gtd desktop wallpaper

how to make a GTD system for about $20 (crankingwidgets blog)

GTD five stages of mastering workflow: COLLECT, process, organize, review and do.

Collection

In order to get things done, first of all things need to be collected into a place that is both accessible and trusted.  One of the most recognizable tools in the GTD system is a common, every day in-basket such as one shown below

It is amazing how the simple idea of one place for everything really helps alleviate the stress of “what did I do with the (fill-in the blank)” problem we have all encountered.    You really come to appreciate the freedom of a “dump and forget” mentality you are allowed to take on when you walk in the door with a full briefcase and a stack of mail after you have created the habit of dropping it all into your in-box to process later.

The end objective in this phase is to gather all the items that need your attention into a physical in-box.  When you do this for the first time I can almost guarantee that one small in-box alone is not going to do the trick.  You are probably going to need a large table or in my case (and to my wife’s great joy) a wing of the house.   Don’t forget as you are doing this that you also have an email account (or two … or three) with an electronic in-box that is waiting for you as well.  Managing an email in-box is a topic of another conversation that I promise to get to but for now the suggestion is to print out any email that requires action on your part and place the piece of paper into the in-box as well.   Of course it is easy to create piles of physical and now electronic things into the middle of a room or desk but the process does not stop there.  Possibly the most important clutter is the stuff in your head.  As we have established before – the mind is a great place to have ideas but a horrible place to store them.  Although there are some great high-tech gadgets that I really like in the mind purging process, the first time you go through this it is better to stick with low-tech.  What I would suggest is a stack of 3 X 5 cards.  One by one go through the various roles and responsibilities you have in life and on a separate 3 X 5 card write down such things as, “call insurance companies to get quotes on life insurance” or “pick up a loaf of bread, container of milk and a stick of butter” and throw them into the in-box along with everything else.

Take note that the collection phase is not the time to make judgments about what to do with the stuff or to get overly sentimental about the birthday card from 12 years ago in your top drawer that you cant seem to part with.  What to do with the stuff comes next in part 2 – process.

I think one of the first things that attracted me to GTD was my memory of how funny and true I thought George Carlins’ stand up routine about “stuff” was when I heard it many years ago.  If you haven’t seen it I have embedded the ‘clean’ version below:

It is true that we have way to much stuff.  We have stuff coming at us from every angle all day long.  We have unrecognizable scribbles on Post-It notes on the fridge, bills that come in the mail, loose notes that we need to file away, messages that need to be returned, emails to be read and our kids latest art projects that we cant dream of parting with.

One of the main ideas of GTD is that in order to really get things done you need to have a repeatable process in place of dealing with all the information (and stuff) you receive on a daily basis.  Unless you have a system in place to capture, plan and do these things you mind will be in constant worry about all the open-loops and commitments you have outstanding.  David Allen uses the analogy of RAM on a personal computer, with the idea that too much “stuff” stored in a person’s short-term memory can blow a fuse. His idea is that the conscious mind is a focusing tool, not a storage place. He teaches five stages of mastering workflow.  The idea behind it all can be applied in any setting: home or office.  Like most things in GTD they are very simple:

1) Collect

2) Process

3) Organize

4) Review

5) Do

In my upcoming posts I will deal with each individually

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.