Yes! I fell off the wagon this summer—I just had too much going on in my head. The summer holidays swept me away—not just the flooding we had in the cellar or even the rain and spectacular heights of the Swiss Alps—I simply had a lot of things going on. A lot to get done with more than the usual interruptions.

The kids at home

Why and how did I get into GTD? “Getting Things Done” was such an interesting book title, that it was the title alone that grabbed my attention. And that in combination with a huge period of changes—just moved, settling into a new country and then separation and divorce. Alone and at home with the kids.

There was more, but I needed to focus on the essentials.I have a lot to do and GTD gives me the peace of mind just to get on with it. That is why I think falling off the wagon is such fun–I mean when else do you get to roll in the grass? Or take a hike up the mountains. To really experience what it is like at high altitude. Breath taking!

Forgetting and remembering

Summer holidays are a time to reflect and to forget. By falling off the wagon—by forgetting everything—I get the chance to review everything anew. The kids get to do this too. They fall off all the time. And climb back on. And sometimes just run allongside the wagon. In fact it is part of the expected rhythm of a the year. Intensive periods of learning and of rest. The summer holidays are a time to forget everything and do something altogether different.

Wow! what a time in your life! The school day and week is fully organized and structured and then there are 6 weeks of chaos. Nothing. Actually the weekend can be a bit like that too.We have been back at school for 3 weeks now. And what a refreshing way to take stock and a new look at everything.For example our weekly review takes on a new perspective. Also new importance as commitments and structure take hold again. New projects are appearing everyday! Class trips to London, plays, music lessons and choir and then of course The Circus! The twins joined the Circus last year…

In growing up we acquire responsibilities and independence. Charlotte is taking on a review all by herself. Organizing her week, homework and practicing her violin. With some help new steps can be taken to independence.That is why we need time to play! Next summer I will jump off the wagon and roll in the grass. I remember now how much fun it is to play and just forget about things for a while.Where are you making time for fun?

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Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you’re completely overwhelmed with all the work that surrounds you? At those times do you then you catch yourself complaining about the outside world “I wish my job wasn’t so demanding”, “I wish there wasn’t so much competition”, “I wish my team would just listen to me” etc. What can you do to get out of this mental trap?

Here’s the secret:  getting things working for you doesn’t start by changing the outside world at all, but by changing ourselves and how we perceive our work from within. To change the world or the people around us, we must change ourselves first and then the world around us will change too. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Nevertheless, if you have some faith you might be pleasantly surprised.

The next time you find yourself paralyzed by the amount of work on your plate and you catch yourself complaining about it, try out the GTD Mind Sweep exercise, followed by processing each item

Step 1: The Mind Sweep

The first step in the GTD Mastering Workflow cycle is Collect. Take 5 mins out, and capture everything that has your attention. Here are some guidelines:

* Go for quantity not quality

* Don’t analyze or organize

* Write everything

* Write fast

Step 2: Processing

Once you’ve an objective look of all the items in front of you. Process each item by asking:

1. What is the successful outcome?

2. What is the next physical action?

This is what the result might look like:

Taking these two steps will give you an immediate sense of relief & a feeling of lightness.

What changed?

Nothing from the outside changed, neither the boss, the competition or the clients. All that changed was the way we are now looking at our work and defining what we want and the next steps to take.

Before performing the 2 steps each item that had our attention was an agreement to complete something that  we made with ourselves. Since these agreements were not being managed it was a cause of stress to us.

By collecting what has our attention and defining what needs to be done with it, we begin the process of managing these agreements.  By identifying and clarifying each of the agreements that had our attention, we’ve taken them from being overwhelming and distracting  agreements in our head, and instead we’ve taken an objective look at them & decided  what  next action each required.

Change from within

One of the beautiful aspects of GTD is that it doesn’t look to solve the problem from the outside, but rather focuses on change from within and how we perceive our work.

We agree that there is just one world in which we live and die. Yet this one world is different for each one of us because of how we perceive it. Internally our pictures of the world are different even though externally it is just one world.  Thus if we change the way we perceive our work, the world outside changes for us.

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Don’t forget that tomorrow and Friday we’ve got the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  David Allen, the creator of GTD will be opening the conference in a joint keynote interview with conference founder and staunch GTD proponent Ismael Ghalimi.  In case you missed this, it is already available online via event sponsor Veodia.  Just check out the links below for resources that will allow you to see all the action at the Office 2.0 conference in real time.

The next GTD related event will be the GTD Applications Panel Discussion at 1:30 This afternoon.  I (Oliver) will be moderating the discussion.  Panelists include David Allen, Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten, Neil Mendelson of Mindjet and Kevin Merrit of blist .

To view David Allen and Ismael Ghalimi during the keynote please click here.  For the GTD Applications Panel this link will get you to the page with the Veodia video.

Online Attendees

Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:

• Tag: o208
• Google Apps Account:  http://www.google.com/a/office20.com/

• Office 2.0 Blog Feed:  feeds.feedburner.com/office20
• Clearspace Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/o208
• Twitter Feed: twitter.com/o208
• Video Broadcast: Veodia

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Editor’s Note:  This just came in from one of our contributors, Lynn O’Connor. When she sent it to me she suggested that this may sound too “commercial” for GTD times, but I felt like it was such a nice first-person account of what she experienced attending a RoadMap Seminar taught by David himself that I thought it would be of benefit to people who were curious about the experience and what someone who is very accomplished, incredibly articulate and already knowledgeable of GTD thought during the day.  Enjoy.

I just attended David Allen’s GTD RoadMap seminar –for the second time. The only other time I’ve taken a seminar twice was when I was preparing for the psychology licensing exam and I signed up for a preparatory statistics workshop twice. It probably wasn’t necessary but as a researcher I never regretted it, I think I learned more about running stats at that workshop than in any class I’d taken in college, on up, or more recently, in continuing education courses. So it goes with the RoadMap; I need a map of my work, of each of my projects, and lets face it, of my whole life, and the more often I get help with it, the better.

At some point during the afternoon Allen suggested that we were all
sitting there hypnotized, and that we would walk out thinking we were
going to do all these amazing organizational things in our lives, only to
have the ideas and inspiration disappear in a matter of hours. Maybe it
was hypnosis, but I got more work done in those eight hours than in the
whole week before. Here it is the next morning post-RoadMap, and its
still happening. I have my next action list, my “Emerging Task Planner”
where I can see it, and I’ve hit the ground running.

Allen is pure inspiration, a great teacher, and geez, he may not know me,
but he knows how to organize my time. At some point he asked us to
take two minutes and tackle anything we’d put on a list created earlier in
the day (we spent the whole day making lists, and since I love the process
of defining my work and making lists, it was permission to go play all
day. On one of those early morning lists I’d uncovered an area of anxiety,
something I should have been tending to but instead I’d been neglecting.
So when he said: “spend two minutes on one of the things” I jumped head
first into the thing I’d been neglecting, and wrote a plan for how to gain
“control” and maybe even “perspective” around it.

Most amazing, in only two minutes I wrote a concise, step by step plan
for tackling and running through this dreaded problem. It was easy. I am
sure I’ll find out more about why I’d been shelving it for over a month
now, as I begin to implement the 2-minute plan. But none of it is
monumental. In fact, when guided by Allen, we find out that nothing is
insurmountable. A day with David Allen is first and foremost fun, and its
almost a side benefit that each person attending -and there were many of
us-gets individualized, personalized, one-on-one coaching. Or that is
what it feels like. He’s a master entertainer, educator, coach, and all this
is wrapped around a remarkable brain.

David is humble; he can’t quite conceal his embarrassment at being
caught as creator of a life-changing program. Sometimes watching him I
think he doesn’t know what hit him, all this fabulous success, people like
me turning into groupies, while the largest funders in the world beg for
the chance to support him in whatever philanthropic things he might
want to do. He seems stunned by it all, and I suspect he has that sneaky
feeling that he doesn’t deserve it. But he does. Watching him perform for
eight hours is like witnessing a pure energy generator, wrapped up as a
normal person. Maybe he is, but then again maybe he isn’t. This guy is a
life-long learner, he is curious, inquisitive, and integrates everything into
his devotion to understanding how the mind works, and ultimately, how
we work whether its at play, in an office, or at home.

So what did I get out of yesterday? Exactly what I needed from the
smallest detail of my work-flow, to the big questions, like what am I
doing on the planet.

Allen started the day by illustrating three main Allen’esque principles of
how the mind works: The power of writing everything down, the power of
unconscious planning, and the power of two focused minutes. He asked
us take two minutes to write down -no editing-everything that had our
attention. This turned out to be one of many demonstrations of non-
conscious planning. It showed us that we knew exactly what we were
worrying about -what had our attention as he puts it-and that we could
do intensely focused tasks in exactly the amount of time we were given.

He demonstrated the power that comes with taking everything we’re
carrying around in our minds, and putting it on paper. When he asked us
to do something in one minute, or in 90 seconds, or two minutes, that’s
what we did. This illustrated how the human mind plans unconsciously,
and carries out these unconscious plans without knowing explicitly what
we are doing. It also demonstrates that we can do amazing things with
two minutes of focused attention. I had put off planning how to get
myself moving on this particular task all summer. It came into focus when
I wrote everything down.

If, early yesterday morning, on my way to the RoadMap, you had asked
me what had my attention, I wouldn’t have pointed out the particular
problem I was really worrying about. It was sitting in the background
worrying me outside of conscious awareness, distracting me, while I tried
to work on other projects. If you told me that in two focused minutes I
would be able to take the whole job and turn it into a step-by-step
project plan, a series of concrete “next actions” or tangible steps I needed
to take to get things rolling, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that is
exactly what happened. In the course of the day other unconscious
concerns came to the foreground, and were transformed into clear
project plans. I learned, once again, the power of writing an unedited list
of what has my attention, and the power of two minutes of focused
attention. Write a list, leave nothing out, and focus for two minutes may
be the essence of the GTD method.

We returned to our initial list of what had our attention, and were given
another minute (or 90 seconds, or even two minutes) to add to it, quite
appropriately because throughout the day, each exercise brought to mind
yet more things (problems) that had our attention, that we’d missed in
the first round. Allen calls this basic list construction a ‘mindsweep.” Now
as I have been following the GTD methodology for a year and a half, none
of this was entirely new. I do a mindsweep at least every few weeks if not
every week. But engaging in the Allen method of work with Allen himself
leading me through it, made the process itself more conscious. It was like
revisiting everything, to do this with Allen by my side. This is another
remarkable feature of a day with David Allen. It didn’t matter how many
people he was coaching all once, it felt like personalized instruction. He
was speaking to my work problems, he was teaching ME.

Always proceeding in an orderly manner, Allen illustrated the reliable
steps called for to move ahead in the process of organizing our work and
our lives, both mentally, and concretely. First is collection. The list of
everything that has our attention is, in essence, a process of mental
collection. In the office or at home, collection translates to gathering
absolutely everything into an inbox. When I first implemented GTD, right
after attending my first RoadMap seminar, I had so much stuff all over the
place that only my whole living room could provide the space needed for
everything, so my living room became my inbox.

The second step in the GTD method is to clarify everything collected,
whether the “stuff” is mental or physical. This means asking myself a few
simple questions: “What is this? Do I need to do something with this? How
do I label, define, categorize this?” Should I throw this away? Should I
pass this on to someone else to tend to it? Is this a piece of reference
material, I should know where to find easily?  Is this a next action in a
specific project or is this a project? If this is a next action that will take 2
minutes or less to carry out, I should carry it out immediately before I go
any further. Here we see the two-minute rule show up again.  A personal
note here -I think I may often fall apart at the level of clarification.

Instead of taking my time, I am rushing into the next phase of work, the
“organization” phase, where I figure out the specifics of what action I am
going to take, and sometimes this puts me into a state of panic.

Clarification, where I figure out what something is, is followed by
organization. Here, I determine exactly where to go with something, be it
physical or mental. I have a single item (derived from a collection of
“items” from a mindsweep, or derived from “stuff” put into my inbox, and
from taking a few minutes to clarify, I know what “it” is. Now I organize it
-it becomes a next action on my next action list, or it becomes a next
action related to a specific project on my project list. A project is
something that has more than one next action. If my “it” here is a
physical item, I decide if it goes into a project support file, or an archive
file (not easily accessible), or an immediate TO READ file, etc.

Organization sure makes things easy to think about, do, locate, review,
which is the step after organization. Reflect and review -before doing
something, I need to review it and reflect upon it. Here things are
presented in lists, so in essence, I am doubling back here to establish
that I made appropriate decisions earlier. Finally, my work having been
well defined, organized, and reviewed, I do. By the time I am “doing” I’ve
hopefully achieved a sense of “control and perspective.” And I really have.
To maintain a sense of peace, I have to review everything regularly. Its
recommended that we review our whole system every week. I don’t
exactly do that -instead I review my lists (including my calendar) every
few days, because they change daily. I have the hardest time routinely
collecting and clarifying. Meaning I am often in inbox trouble.

After taking us through the stages of work, applicable to any project or
series of next actions, Allen moved up the ladder, or what he calls the
vertical roadmap, from next actions to projects, to areas of focus, to
goals and objectives, to vision, to my ultimate purpose. This was a fast
incline, but it gave me just enough time to consider the larger life
purposes behind my work, including my work at implementing GTD. I
knew the first time I went to the Roadmap I ended up with some pretty
lofty ideas, but I couldn’t remember how, or what I ended up thinking. It
may be here that Allen had us hypnotized, because once again the clarity
I felt yesterday, has dimmed. So what did I decide was my ultimate
purpose?

Throughout all of these steps and stages of how we work, at almost every
point of closure or at the beginning, Allen discussed the use of the
concept of “outcome.” A next action has a “desired outcome,” a project
has a “desired outcome” likewise the process of collection, clarification,
organizing, reflecting and doing, and then, across the vertical levels of
functioning. Everything has a desired outcome, and this may be another
major principle of Allenesque (or GTD) working and living. To consciously
delineate the desired outcome at each step of the way, at any stage or
any level of operation, we have a desired outcome. Spelling this out,
making it clear and conscious, has, he tells us, a fantastic effect on the
outcome. He considers explanations for his observations found in
contemporary neuroscience.

It would be unlike me to report on a person, a movement, a meeting,
without any critical comments. Being true to nature, there is once aspect
to the GTD phenomenon that continues to bother me and that is the
commercialism that seems to be built around the David Allen message.
Several times during the RoadMap we were reminded by Allen himself, of
the sales pitch going on under and on top of the surface. The more
successful Davidco (the David Allen Company) gets, the more apparatus
they create and sell for a handsome profit. Everything from plastic file
folders to note taking wallets and Italian made file holders is for sale by
the David Allen whirlwind. We heard several embarrassed remarks about
how much he was selling his own products -and this mean tangible office
things (more stuff as he calls everything that clutters our desks), not at
all important to what Allen really has to sell, a method of overcoming
chaos in our lives, a method for how to get things done, laid out in
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, that only costs $
9:00 on Amazon .

Allen reminds us that getting organized, developing a sense of control
and perspective, happens through the process of learning. We aren’t born
masters of work organization. There may be some magic in Allen’s
teaching, but there is nothing magical about his method of working. I am
so glad I went to my second RoadMap seminar, and I will certainly go
again the next time he’s in town. Hearing Allen run through his method
was different, having implemented and used it for a year and a half. I was
familiar with all the pieces, but somehow, he pulls it all together, and I
wouldn’t miss the opportunity to get that one-on-one coaching for
anything.

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Every day it seems we spend more and more of our time in front of a computer screen.  Whether it’s a monitor on a desk or a tiny hand held display on our phones, computers are such an essential part of our day to day lives that for most of us they are almost as indispensable as oxygen.  Given that so much of our time is spent in front of these machines, it behooves us to learn as many ways as we can to do our computer aided tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Or, as David Allen said upon learning  that he’d been awarded the “Golden Slacker Award”, “the laziest people come up with the coolest ideas.”

With this in mind it occurred to me that we could create what could possibly be the ultimate list of online time-savers ever compiled.  Basically what I was thinking was that each of us has probably discovered at least a couple online resources that we now find indispensable to our daily routine and what I am hoping is that with all of your help we can catalog these into a truly exhaustive list that can then become its own page on this site and serve as a truly exceptional reference for GTD’ers and Lifehackers of all stripes.

To keep the list focused I thought I would establish a couple of criteria to narrow recommendations down a little bit.  Thus, for inclusion in this list, the application must result in an actual time-savings of some type- whether by virtue of reducing keystrokes, condensing multiple tasks into one task (or at least fewer tasks) ,  by eliminating the need to do extensive navigation with a mouse, by automating complex actions or by virtue of eliminating the need to navigate to a site to obtain a query result from said site.  Second, the time-saver in question must be free and generally available. (No closed betas allowed although open betas are fine).  Third (and this one should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway) these time-savers must work on a Mac or PC or Linux machine, a PDA, a mobile phone or a tablet computer.

Please provide your time saver in the comments and what I will do is regularly update the list by moving the time savers up to the body of the post.  If/when we get a number of time savers sufficient to justify creating a unique page for the list  I’ll create such a page and provide a list of credits to those individuals that have taken the time to help us expand this list.

I’ll start with a couple of my favorites.  Incidentally, contributing a time-saver is more than just saying “I like xyz”.  We need the application, the URL, what it does and why you like it. If if is a particularly complicated time saver an example would be helpful too.

Here we go:

1.     YubNub <http://yubnub.org>

This is my all time favorite time saver and one that I probably use a hundred times a day.  Primarily because it is incredibly versatile and is actually thousands of unique time savers rolled up into one slick Ruby on Rails application.  In essence YubNub is a command line for the web.  What it does is allow you to harness the power of thousands of different web servers to do specific tasks by using the URL bar of your browser (or a widget or a stand alone application) as a command line.

What can you do with YubNub?  Almost anything you can think of.  The limits are your memory and/or your imagination.  Some examples:  (after opening a new tab (or clearing the contents in the URL bar in an existing tab) I could enter: g David Allen GTD.  The results? This command would yield a Google search for the terms David Allen and GTD.  The savings?  Instead of first going to Google and waiting for the page to load and then typing these terms into Google I did this with one keystroke.  Okay, maybe that’s not that spectacular but what about this?  ebay Green Laser.  This would give you the results of an eBay query for green lasers; again, saving the navigation first to eBay.  Still not impressed?  How about this one?  gimyim Chewbacca. This little query would result in a split screen that contains image search results for Chewy in both Google Images and Yahoo Images (this one usually wows even the most jaded LifeHacking experts cause they’ve never seen split screen queries using two different search engines at the same time).

There are literally thousands of YubNub commands; everything from reverse number lookups to langauge translations to code checking, to site-specific searches.  Need to search TechCrunch for something?  Just type “TC” and your search string (leave out the quotes) and YubNub will find the terms assuming they actually appeared in the popular blog.  Plus if you want a command that you can’t find you can make your own.  The “create” command allows you to build your own YubNub command instantly.

I am constantly amazed by the power and versatility of this online time-saver, it never fails when I try something that simply seems intuitive and it does exactly what I thought it might.  What, for instance, do you suppose the “gmap” command plus a location would yield?  From my own experience at least, YubNub is hands down the most powerful, useful and utterly indispensable application I use.  I don’t think I could live without it.

2.      Fluid <http://fluidapp.com/>

Attention:  For Mac Users Only!  Are you a tabbed-browsing junkie?  Do you regularly use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs or WordPress?  Have you ever had your browser crash costing  you hours of work as a result?  Then Fluid is for you.  This application allows you to create site specific browsers.  In other words, Fluid allows you to create a browser that acts like a stand alone application.  Each one runs as a stand alone Cocoa app meaning that if your browser crashes it doesn’t touch what your doing in your SSB’s that you created with Fluid.

Fluid even lets you create a Dock icon to launch each specific SSB . Fluid can also be converted to a MenuExtra SSB (sits in the Title Bar at the top of the screen) and in spite of running in a separate instantiation of Cocoa each SSB still retains the full functionality of the parent browser (bookmarks, spell check, etc.)

I love fluid for using web applications like Gmail.  I don’t lose my work nearly so often and when I’ve got forty tabs open I don’t have to hunt for the ones I use most often.  If you’ve got a Mac I highly recommend you try Fluid  unless you’ve got nothing to lose! (get it?)

Okay, so that’s a start, now it’s your turn.  Please send in your favorite Time saving web applications and together we can compile a page that equals thousands of saved hours for everyone!

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At ‘that’ moment, you understand the power of getting it out of your head.

Some might think that means merely writing it down, but it actually requires one to implement Peter Drucker’s thinking from the Effective Executive treatise (1969) that one must:

1. decide a desired outcome
2. frame a next action and, if possible,
3. execute that next action as quickly as is  possible (in an attempt to achieve the desire of your  outcome).

When you are concerned about:

1. your soon-to-be-newborn’s heart  rate
2. the speed with which they are intending to  induce your wife and
3. the fact that you are still 45 minutes away  from the hospital,

you realize the power of being able to focus past your desired outcome toward next action execution.  At times like these, with as little unproductive stress as possible, you hope to conduct yourself such that you can eliminate all drag associated with achieving the desire of your outcome(s).

And thanks to Providence and the mechanics of GTD, I was able to arrive just in time to see them starting the inducement process and to be the support my wife needed (I still need personal growth in this area) to get through the initial steps in the process.

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Having seen the enormous success that Apple has had with the App Store and the way in which it appears to have single handedly altered the landscape of the mobile phone software market (at least in the US), Google has wasted no time in announcing their answer to Apple’s very successful offering, the Android App Market.

From a cursory view it looks like the guys and gals at the iPhone Dev Team not only did all the hard thinking for Apple when they created Installer.app and the infrastructure of the application environment that allowed users of jailbroken phones to find and load applications on their devices, but from what I can see it appears that they did most of the htinking for Google as well.  I hope they get credit for their hard and innovative work.

At least this partially answers one of the big questions that developers had about Android applications; how they are going to get paid - which was a question I asked in a piece I authored for the Register Developer several months ago.

Of course how successful this will be depends upon the execution of the market.  It will be difficult to top the ease of use that the Apple App Store delivers, if for no other reason than the standardized platform that the App Store services.  How Google will make it as streamlined and user-friendly as the Apple product while still providing a way to differentiate between different handsets is still an open question.  Another is whether the market will be as attractive to developers as Apple has become.  When developing for Apple, developers know up front the potential universe of customers and they only have to write an application once.  With Android the market is still fragmented which means, among other things, that the developer knows up front that either they are going to have to author many iterations of their applcation or be accessible to only a fraction of the possible market.  Neither choice is appealing and both come with obvious costs.

For the end user though this state of affairs isn’t all bad and as competition heats up between the iPhone and other devices it is likely that one way that the manufacturers will try to make each platform that much more appealing is by offering more and cheaper applications.  Clearly, the winner here is going to be the end user so long as the applications that are being developed are actually worth downloading.  At this point I have enough iPhone flashlights and versions of sudoku to last me into the next century.  What I don’t have is a decent graphing calculator, an alarm clock with a loud enough buzzer or a way to actually record a call on the iPhone from the iPhone.  When will the developers actually tackle these tougher problems and when, for god’s sake, will we finally get cut and paste?

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Corporate Travel =  Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking

If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel.  If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying.  Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.

One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel.  Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price.  Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next?  Charging for inflight air?  Or perhaps pay toilets?  One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive.  From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.

Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…

The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another.  Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead.  Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and  lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean).  That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.

[Read more →]

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

This fantastic image is from Joan M. Mas and

 her collection of amazing GTD Drawings

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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When you start climbing up the GTD implementation ladder you begin collecting, processing and organizing every cool idea that you come across.   Pretty soon you have a huge list of projects together with an even more colossal list of next actions. It’s tempting to try and accomplish all of them; but what if you are @computer, @office and @call all at the same time?  Do you feel like you should be doing many of the tasks in each of your multiple lists simultaneously?   Suddenly you realize that you’re overwhelmed. Instead of eliminating this feeling from your life which is what GTD is supposed to do, it seems to have multiplied it instead!

So what do you do about it?
In one of the Teleseminars hosted on GTD Connect, a caller asked David this  same question, i.e. “David my lists just keep getting longer and longer, what do I do about it?” David, admitted that, this is a difficult issue to handle.

David Says:  “the trick is to keep getting better at being Okay when Not Doing something.”

Here are some tips that can help you do that:

- Learn the Limiting Criteria, and implement it ruthlessly. Be clear on which context you are in and how much time and energy you have and make decisions accordingly. If you have only 30 minutes and are feeling like burnt toast, you’re not likely to be in the mood to do some highly engaging task and would probably be okay with doing some fun, relaxing item from your Next Action list.

- Identify your goals and passions in life. Revisit the higher horizons frequently and see which of your projects and next actions are more aligned to it.

- We all have the same amount of time in a day, it’s maturing to the fact that there will always be some things that you can handle and some things that you can’t.

Here’s a lovely passage from Page after Page by Heather Sellers, that also beautifully addresses how to feel okay not being so busy.

“Are you swamped?” My colleague Nat likes to ask me.
I always force myself to say no. No, I’m Not Busy, I’m Not Swamped. Why would I get Swamped? That is not my life.

For me, its too passive, too fake, too braggy to be always saying how busy I am. “I wish I had two more weeks before the semester starts, ” my boss says every summer in late August. I feel like we’re feeling really insecure and unimportant when we talk like this. “I’m so important. I have been entrusted with so much work that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me. Look at me! So much work!”

Get real, I want to say to my “busy” friends. Be accurate and tell the truth. You do have two weeks before school starts. You do have time . Get a grip. Time is not all that surprising. If you can’t do a whole lot more stuff, it’s okay to just know that, and to stop orienting yourself in kinky ways to time.

Notice time.
Notice your passion.
Follow where these two intersect.

I am used to people saying to me they want to “write” (edit-insert your passion here) if only they had time. I always look up to the sky, and check in with the gods when I hear this. “We all get the same amount of time, right? “Yup,” say the gods. “You mortals all get the same allotment. It’s the single fair thing in life.” “Thanks, “ I say. “Just checking.”

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